Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  The midwife who had paid Mrs. Manton prenatal visits had been told, like the neighbors, that she had gone to Grantham. The Luton Food Office had been told the same story.

  As for the dead woman’s mother, she had no more suspicions than her grandchildren, for “letters” arrived regularly from her daughter, posted in London—apparently the absent woman had gone from Grantham to Hampstead. The old lady had to have her daughter’s “letters” read aloud to her, for she was almost blind…

  The English are a great race for detective fiction, and they enjoy murder on the radio, television, the films. Nearly all the people interviewed by the detectives must have had at least one murder thriller tucked away on a bookshelf, they must have switched on the wireless at night to listen to a murder play, or trotted around to the cinema to see a film with corpses, cops, killer, and witnesses complete. But when a policeman arrived on their doorstep, showing a photo of a murdered woman, “Do you by any chance recognize this photograph? Here is her description,” the crime-fiction addicts found it impossible to grasp the situation in all its reality. Murder is something you read about, listen to on the wireless, see at the pictures, discover in print every Sunday morning when you open your newspaper, but you never come across it in your own everyday life. It happens to other people, maybe, in other districts, but it doesn’t happen in your family, or among your neighbors, or down your street. Now this description says a woman between thirty and thirty-five, height five feet three inches, hair dark brown, bobbed, eyes brown, heavy dark eyebrows, no teeth of her own, five and a half months advanced in pregnancy. Well, that’s the very description of Mrs. Manton who lives a few doors up and who’s away from home, but you never even think of this because Mrs. Manton’s a neighbor, and things like murder don’t happen to neighbors, only to strangers you read about in the newspapers. Even if you do think, “Well, that sounds rather like Mrs. Manton,” you know you’re being silly, because Mrs. Manton has gone to her brother’s at Grantham, Mr. Manton told you so. And besides, that photograph the policeman’s showing you, you’ve never seen that face in all your life. So you tell him, “No-o-o. It isn’t a face that’s known to me at all.” And he says he’s sorry he’s had to trouble you and you say no trouble at all and good afternoon and go inside and shut the door, and you hear him knocking at the next house. Well, and what’s the use of him going there? They won’t know any more about it than you do. And you finish your housework and have a cup of tea, and the evening draws on, and your hubby comes home, and after supper there’s that murder play on the wireless…Such is life.

  Such was life in Luton. “No, I’ve never seen that face.” “Sorry, I’ve no idea who it is.” Hundreds of doorsteps, hundreds of questions and answers, hundreds of interviews. Hundreds of phone conversations, chits and reports and statements, hunches followed up, dead ends arrived at, hopes dashed. The days become weeks, the weeks months…one, two, three months.

  It begins to look as if it can go on forever, POLICE ARE STILL ANXIOUS TO ESTABLISH IDENTITY OF THIS UNFORTUNATE WOMAN…

  At last, on February 21, an extremely detailed reexamination was made of all clothing and property that had come into the hands of the police during the inquiries; a kind of “stock-taking,” as it were. Among the items of clothing was a piece of a black coat, and as this was being meticulously reinspected there was found, in the padding, a dyer’s tag which had not been noticed before. So the dyer was immediately traced and interviewed. His record book showed that the coat came from a Mr. Manton, of Regent Street, Luton, in March 1943.

  The detectives had already been up and down the length of Regent Street—so near, and yet so very far! And now back they were again, this time making some very discreet inquiries, which revealed that Mrs. Manton had not been seen since November 18, which was, of course, the date of the suspected murder.

  Chief Inspector Chapman now called at Manton’s house. The door was opened by a girl, and immediately Mr. Chapman knew the search was ended, for, to use his own words, “The girl was the image of the dead woman.” She was, in fact, the deceased’s daughter.

  Manton was interviewed that same day at a local National Fire Service station where he worked. He admitted to Mr. Chapman that he hadn’t got on very well with his wife; they had quarreled over her friendships with soldiers and his with a local barmaid. On November 25 they had had a big quarrel and she had “slung her hook”—that is, she left. She had gone first to her brother’s at Grantham and then to London.

  Manton was shown the identity photograph of the dead woman and he said, “No, that’s nothing like my wife.” He added, “I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Besides, she’s alive, we have letters from her.” To prove this point he identified four letters the deceased’s mother had received from North London, between the end of December and the beginning of February, purporting to be written in Mrs. Manton’s hand and signed “Rene,” which was the name she used. The letters described how she was getting on in London.

  Mr. Chapman noticed that in these letters the name Hampstead was spelled without the “p.” Manton was accordingly asked to write, “Hampstead.” He did so, and left out the “p.” There was no doubt he had written the letters himself, traveled to Hampstead and posted them to his near-blind old mother-in-law, who was unable to examine the handwriting herself. The postage dates of these letters coincided with the dates of his leaves from the NFS.

  Manton said he remembered that his wife left him on November 25 because that was the last day of four days’ leave he had had, and it was on that last day of leave that they had quarreled.

  Asked to describe his wife, Manton said she was dark-eyed, dark hair, five to six months pregnant, had an appendix scar, and no teeth. She had worn false teeth, he added, and he gave Mr. Chapman the name of his wife’s dental surgeon.

  This dental surgeon—who had already once been interviewed by the police without result—recognized a photograph of Mrs. Manton in life. He produced records of Mrs. Manton’s teeth which showed that roots remained in her jaws, but no teeth. X-ray photographs already taken of the dead woman’s jaws corresponded exactly with these dental records. So did the plaster casts Mr. Chapman had had made of the jaws.

  There could therefore be no argument about the identity of the dead woman. She was Mrs. Manton all right.

  Mr. Chapman made some more inquiries about Manton. He found that his leave in November had ended on the eighteenth, not the twenty-fifth. The neighbors and relatives insisted they had not seen Mrs. Manton after the eighteenth.

  Mr. Cherrill was called to Luton, and he found a pickle jar in the Mantons’ house with a beautiful thumbprint on it which matched the thumbprint taken at the time of the postmortem.

  There was ample evidence now on which to arrest Manton and charge him with the murder of his wife. On being charged he broke down and made a fresh statement:

  “I am sorry I have told you lies about my wife…I killed her, but it was only because I lost my temper. I didn’t intend to.”

  They had quarreled frequently, he said, and in 1942 she had left him but had returned. However, the quarreling had continued as badly as ever. At last, on November 18, when they were having tea alone together, they started quarreling again and she flung a cup of hot tea in his face. He lost his temper, picked up a very heavy wooden stool which was near his feet under the table and hit her about the head and face with it, several times. She fell backward onto the floor.

  “When I came to and got my sense again I see what I’d done. I saw she was dead and decided I had to do something to keep her away from the children. I undressed her and got four sacks from the cellar, cut them open and tied her up in them. I then carried her down to the cellar and left her there. I had washed up the blood before the children came home to tea. I hid the bloodstained clothing in a corner near the copper.”

  After dark, continued Manton, he brought the body up from the cellar, got out his bike, laid the body across the handlebars and wheeled his gruesome load down to the river.
Here he laid it on the edge of the bank and then watched it roll down into the water.

  Next day he burned the clothes and the false teeth.

  After this statement detectives made a detailed search of Manton’s house and found old blood splashes on the living room walls, the ceiling, and the doorjamb. A bloodstained envelope was found on the cellar stairs. All these stains belonged to group O—the dead woman’s blood group.

  In the front room was a dismantled bike—Manton’s.

  The stool, Manton said, had been broken up for firewood and burned, not long after the murder.

  Mrs. Manton’s sister recognized the portion of black coat, the vital clue, as part of a coat Mrs. Manton had had dyed black for a funeral.

  How the coat had been torn up and thrown on a rubbish dump—for it was on a rubbish dump a detective had first found it—was never fully explained. Manton had most likely destroyed all his wife’s clothes and disposed of the fragments here, there, and everywhere. He hadn’t reckoned with detectives who even search rubbish dumps.

  So this fragment of a torn dyed coat, in which was sewn a dyer’s tag, provided, after three months’ hard and fruitless investigation, the vital clue in the Luton Sack Murder. This clue turned up only just in the nick of time, too, because Mr. Chapman was on the point of giving up the case as hopeless.

  Manton was tried at Bedford Assizes and found guilty. It was considered, however, that there were extenuating circumstances and so he was not hanged. But he died, not long after, in prison.

  And that is the story of the Luton Sack Murder. A story of tenacity and incredible patience. A story, I think, of how our police are really rather wonderful.

  CHAPTER 18

  War Work

  By this time, of course, the authorities had made a spirited attempt to call me up. I had, however, been able to persuade them that I was doing more useful work as Dr. Keith Simpson’s secretary than I would do if I were called into the Women’s Services, or even put in a munitions factory. But at the start of 1944 another attempt was made to get me into uniform. Again I put forward the reasons why I considered I was more useful to the State in my present job than I would be as an ATS, a Wren, or a Waaf, or a factory hand wielding a spanner, and my eloquence this time persuaded the female official at the Labor Exchange that I had really best remain a civilian for the duration.

  “After all,” she observed kindly as she closed the interview, “we can’t all expect to have a close-up view of the war. Some of us have to stay put in our ordinary jobs.”

  I thought of the stay-at-home view I had already obtained of the war, and it seemed to me to have been quite comprehensive. The Big Blitz in East London, the bodies of scores and scores of air-raid casualties, including some of the victims of the Bethnal Green shelter disaster, several postmortems on spies hanged at Wandsworth prison, and the gradual accumulation during the course of my daily round of innumerable war anecdotes: soldiers returning to shoot unfaithful wives, deserters holding up and killing unfortunates in order to get money from them, timid youths taking cyanide to avoid their call-up, and a hundred and one other stories, combining to give me a broad and vivid picture of life in wartime England.

  So when I heard I was to continue in my ordinary job I didn’t feel I was being cheated of any wartime experience. It wasn’t the more orthodox experience I would have obtained in the Services, but it was experience of the war for all that.

  And indeed in the first month of the new year a case came along which was peculiarly a “war crime,” one of the first of the cases of that era of wartime crime which was to prove such a tricky period for the police, posing them innumerable new problems and straining their resources to the utmost; the era of a war-swollen, mobile population, troops on the move, deserters on the run, refugees drifting hither and thither, an era of black markets, new rackets, new racketeers, of smuggling and all manner of unlawful “larks,” the whole of that wartime crime wave leading to the postwar wave of spivery and violence, the gunnings and the coshings, and the dismal dark-night exploits of the juvenile gangsters…

  It was a cold, gray day in mid-January when we were called to a comfortable, middle-class Surrey suburb. Our destination there was a half-timbered, pseudo-Tudor homestead standing in a tidy, privet-hedged garden. There, in the heavily oak-paneled lounge hall, we found a large party of CID officers, headed by Area Supt. William Rawlings and DDI George Somerset. The burly figure of Mr. Cherrill bustled in all directions searching for fingerprints, while Percy Law, the famous Yard photographer, was shooting off flashlights.

  The focal point of this activity was the body of a middle-aged, gray-headed woman who lay, gagged and bound, on the hall floor.

  DDI Somerset told Dr. Simpson the little that was already known of the case. The Tudor residence was the home of a Greek shipowner, who was at present away on business. The dead woman was his housekeeper, a forty-seven-year-old refugee named Klara Steindl. She had been living all alone in the house during her employer’s absence.

  The Greek was reputedly a man of some financial substance, and in the house were several impressive-looking safes. Somehow the knowledge of these safes had leaked out. The house was visited by burglars who set to work to crack one of the safes. Miss Steindl, it seemed, had heard them and gone to investigate. She had been struck one or two—not very serious—blows and had been gagged and bound and left lying, helpless and dumb, in the hall while the burglars finished rifling the safes. They had then beaten a retreat, leaving Miss Steindl still lying, trussed and gagged, in the hall.

  At first she had been unconscious, but Dr. Simpson’s examination of her showed that she had recovered consciousness and had struggled frantically to release herself. She was already in breathing difficulties from her head injuries and the gag, and her struggles precipitated asphyxiation. The dead woman was blue in the face and had clearly struggled wildly for some time to loosen her bonds, but had succeeded only in choking herself.

  Thus a burglary became a murder case.

  At first the detectives all seemed very hopeful. Mr. Cherrill had obtained some good fingerprints and before long had definite suspects “all taped for the job,” as Mr. Somerset said. But then something went wrong. The suspected men vanished. Apparently they had left England in order to fight for King and Country, and that was that. Opposite the Steindl case had to be written the most unpopular word in any detective’s vocabulary: UNSOLVED.

  Quite a number of suspected murderers were to escape retribution during the following months by being drafted for overseas service just in the nick of time. The Steindl case was one of the first.

  It was also our first murder case of the year, and one way and another 1944 was quite a year.

  Dr. Simpson and I often drove past St. Paul’s School on our way to Hammersmith. The boys, of course, had all been evacuated at the beginning of the war, but the school buildings seemed to be used as some kind of military headquarters. Especially in the first months of 1944 unusual activity could be noticed there; military guards appeared at the gates, large and very impressive staff cars were drawn up outside, and various gentlemen sporting scarlet braid and decorations were glimpsed entering the driveway. “Some sort of staff conference seems to be going on,” observed CKS. “Now, if we were German spies…”

  One afternoon we saw Gen. Bernard Montgomery leaving the place in a large limousine; our car drew up beside his at the traffic lights, and we had an excellent view of the keen, penetrating, rather foxy face, which was so much more witty than one had expected.

  We discussed these local excitements with MacKay of Hammersmith, who was gloomy about it all. “Let’s hope Jerry [the Germans] hasn’t noticed the goings-on,” he said.

  Jerry had, and St. Paul’s School and neighborhood received several nights of intense bombing.

  The school wasn’t too badly damaged, but the streets around suffered.

  The morning of February 24, when we turned into the road which took us past St. Paul’s we saw sights which,
though by now familiar, never failed to sicken. Gaps torn between the rows of houses, deep craters in front gardens, brimming with high piles of earth, rubble, plaster, laths, bricks, tiles, fragments of furniture. Houses with their sides or fronts torn away, exposing rooms where ceilings sagged, wallpaper flapped in tattered strips, pictures dangled crookedly, a tossed bed lurched, tables and chairs poised drunkenly. Everywhere was broken glass; not a window in the district seemed left intact. The car crunched over broken glass as we drove slowly along the road. The houses that still stood stared blindly and darkly at nothing; but how many holes had been torn in their ranks! “Poor old houses,” I thought, “poor London houses.”

  When we had crunched slowly through the glass-sprinkled streets and had made a big detour because of a large yellow notice, “DANGER—UNEXPLODED BOMB,” we finally arrived at the mortuary. That precise, white-tiled domain over which MacKay ruled so efficiently had become a place of chaos, and MacKay charged around it like a furious rhinoceros.

  So many fatal casualties had been taken that previous night into the Civil Defense mortuary that there had been an overflow into MacKay’s mortuary—which was, of course, intended for coroner’s cases only. All over the floor of the Hammersmith mortuary now lay bodies, the bodies of bomb casualties, which are unlike the bodies of any other casualties, for they are so dusty, and raggled and crumpled, so tattered and degraded. Old people, young people, little children, lying there battered and begrimed, some shattered and crushed by falling debris, some with their insides blown out, some burned and blasted, blackened and charred, some literally blue in the face from violent asphyxia, and one or two, astonishingly, apparently unblemished, wax-pallid and tranquil, like novelette corpses.

  MacKay and his assistants hustled around, tying identity discs to the bodies, putting any belongings found on them into little bags which were then tied to the bodies, too.