Murder at the Inn

by James Moore

  Officers now had a probable identity for the woman they had found. They arrived at the hotel to find Chung comfortably tucked up in bed, which they thought suspicious given that his wife seemed to have gone missing. They told him that Wai Sheung was dead and took him to the police station for questioning. Meanwhile the couple’s room was searched. Police found a locked jewel case – the key to it was discovered in Chung’s bag, which police also found suspicious. Opening the box they found £3,500 of jewels belonging to his wife. Two of Wai Sheung’s diamond rings – which she had been seen wearing earlier that day by a guest at the hotel – were found hidden, wrapped in two rolls of undeveloped camera film. Chung told police that his wife had placed them there for safety. The cord which had been found around Wai Sheung’s neck was found to be similar to that used for the blinds in the hotel.

  During questioning Chung behaved strangely. He seemed particularly keen to know from police officers whether his wife had knickers on when she was found. He also blurted out something like, ‘It’s terrible, my wife, assaulted, robbed, murdered.’ Yet the police had yet to inform him of the exact circumstances in which they had found Wai Sheung’s body or even the possibility that she had been robbed or assaulted.

  Chung was charged with murder, appearing at Carlisle Assizes on 22 October for a three-day trial where he pleaded not guilty. The evidence was actually pretty circumstantial – there was no forensic evidence to link him to the body and no one had seen the crime take place. The defence claimed that Wai Sheung had, in fact, been attacked by a gang of Chinese jewel thieves. This was based on Chung’s claim that the couple had been followed by two shady-looking characters during their honeymoon. The scenario seemed far-fetched, yet several witnesses did end up testifying to seeing two other Chinese men in the area (a somewhat rare sight in the 1920s) at the same time. One claimed to have seen them leaving by train the morning after the murder. Chung’s defence counsel also said that the apparently incriminating phrases he had uttered to police had simply been misunderstood. Chung’s command of English was not nearly as good as his wife’s. None of this was believed by the jury. After ninety minutes they declared him guilty.

  In November, Chung launched an appeal but it was promptly dismissed. The presiding judge said, ‘It is impossible to say that there is not ample evidence to find that this appellant committed this crime.’ Chung was dragged away still maintaining his innocence.

  He was hanged by Thomas Pierrepoint at Strangeways prison in Manchester on 6 December 1928.

  On the face of the matter it seems clear that Chung was the murderer. But what seems puzzling about the case is what motive he could have had for killing his wife. The prosecution case was that he had done it for money. There is evidence that he wasn’t as well off as he immediately appeared but it seems unlikely that he should murder his own wife simply to get his hands on her £4,000. He could have easily lived off her savings.

  Other theories were put forward. One suggested that he had done it because he had discovered that his wife couldn’t have children and that if he didn’t have an issue he would be cursed. Chung was supposed to have admitted as much in his cell before going to the gallows. Another possibility was that Chung had sexually assaulted his wife because she had refused him sex. Wai Sheung had recently undergone a gynaecological operation. Yet there was no actual evidence of rape. There was even talk that Chung had another wife back in China and that he killed Wai Sheung because his bigamy was about to be discovered. If Chung was guilty it was certainly a badly botched crime given his level of education. Perhaps he merely regretted marrying his wife after discovering that she couldn’t gratify him sexually and was desperately trying to find a way out of the union.

  In a sad postscript to the sorry affair, Chung’s personal effects were auctioned in Keswick in February 1929. Madame Tussauds, the waxwork museum, was among the bidders. Today, at the Borrowdale Gates Hotel one of the bedrooms has been decorated with a Chinese theme in memory of the victim, Wai Sheung Siu.

  LOCATIONS: Borrowdale Gates Hotel, Grange-in-Borrowdale, Keswick, Cumbria, CA12 5UQ, 0845 833 2524, www.borrowdale-gates.com

  SHOT IN THE BACK BY A HOMEMADE BULLET, 1934

  The Edisford Bridge Hotel & Red Pump Inn, near Clitheroe, Lancashire

  Ordering a glass of gin, farmer Jim Dawson sat down to relax in the Edisford Bridge Hotel, near Clitheroe, a haven from the howling wind and rain which lashed down outside. It was 7.15 p.m. on Sunday, 18 March 1934 and Jim had left his home at Bashall Hall Farm around fifteen minutes earlier, taking a short cut across a field to get to his favourite pub. Inside it was business as usual. Jim, who was described as a ‘quiet, inoffensive, sober man’, chatted to the pub’s landlord, Jack Barnes, and struck up a friendly conversation about farming and football with an acquaintance called Matthew Hughes. He also bought another man in the pub, James Parkinson, a drink. Jim had a couple of pints of beer, and at 9 p.m., after a relaxed, cordial evening, he put on his bowler hat and overcoat. He bought a box of matches and left the Edisford Bridge to make his way home along the dark country roads. What happened next must be considered one of Britain’s strangest crimes.

  As Jim was walking along the road two cars passed him. In the headlights he saw the figure of a mysterious man silhouetted by a gateway but couldn’t make out who it was. By the time he got to the gate the man had gone. Jim carried on and turned into the lonely lane that led to Bashall Hall farm. He walked along this for about 25yds when he heard a faint click. A moment later he felt a sharp pain in his back, which quickly went off, possibly thanks to the effects of the alcohol he had imbibed. Jim assumed that someone had thrown a stone at him as a joke. Shrugging off the incident he carried on home. Arriving at 9.20 p.m., he sat down to a hearty late supper of roast pork and apple sauce prepared by his sister Polly Pickles. Jim then took himself to bed.

  The 46-year-old had a restless night but it was only the next morning that he realised something was badly wrong when he woke up in a pool of blood. There was a hole in his right shoulder blade. A veteran of the First World War, Jim was both tough and proud. He was reluctant to make a fuss and it was some time before he was persuaded that a doctor had to be called. The local GP sent Jim for an X-ray which revealed that there was an object buried deep in his body, just below the liver – about the shape of a small bird’s egg. A surgeon extracted the object and it turned out to be a short piece of steel rod, around half an inch in diameter, which had been filed at each end. Jim, it was clear, had been shot, but with a homemade bullet which had been fired from no ordinary gun. Sadly, four days later, on Thursday 22 March, Jim died of blood poisoning in a Blackburn nursing home.

  The police now had a murder enquiry on their hands. But in the days and months that followed Jim’s death detectives were left baffled as they failed to identify any motive for the crime. Despite conducting scores of interviews locally, the police were hampered by a community apparently reluctant to always tell everything they knew. Superintendent Wilf Blacker, who was in charge of the investigation, complained, ‘It was like talking to a brick wall.’ Hedgerows, woods and fields were thoroughly searched and guns from across the district were called in, but no obvious murder weapon could be found. At the inquest into Jim’s death it was suggested that the bullet could have been fired from a catapult, possibly by a youth as a misguided joke, but there was no suggestion as to who might have fired it or where it might now be. It seemed a woolly theory. However, as witnesses testified, no one appeared to have a particular grudge against Dawson and a policeman who had known him for three years testified that he hadn’t a single enemy. An open verdict was recorded by the coroner.

  The Edisford Bridge Hotel as it is today. Jim Dawson was shot on his way home from the pub. (Courtesy of the Edisford Bridge Hotel)

  Some say that Jim actually knew who had shot him and was keeping quiet, perhaps because it related to a relationship he may have been having with a woman in Clitheroe. The fact that he talked of someone having a ‘joke’ at
his expense smacks of someone who knew that he had riled somebody local. Did Jim really not have any enemies? In such a close knit, but often tight-lipped community there may have been issues lurking in the background that the undemonstrative farmer kept to himself. Jim’s reluctance to have medical help also seems strange – was he afraid that an embarrassing story would come out? Did he plan to take his own revenge on the person responsible? Did the person who fired the shot really intend to kill him, or was it just a warning? They must have been aware that, using such a crude weapon, Jim was actually quite likely to survive. And only one shot seems to have been fired.

  Intriguingly, a neighbouring farmer, Tommy Simpson, killed himself ten days after Jim died. It’s possible that, in the darkness, the bullet had not been meant for Jim at all and that one of his farmhands, Tommy Kenyon, was the intended target. He had been inside one of the cars that passed Jim on the night of the murder, heading into Clitheroe for a drink after supping at The Red Pump in Bashall Eaves, a pub that, intriguingly, Dawson avoided after an altercation three years previously. Simpson, it was said, suspected Kenyon of making his 17-year-old daughter Nancy pregnant. Others said that Simpson had committed suicide for more personal reasons and that, however coincidental, there was no link.

  The death of Jim Dawson remains unsolved and a frustrating mystery to this day. No murder weapon was ever found. A recent book by Jim’s great niece, Jennifer Lee Cobban, turned up a tale about an unusual gun found years later in a barn next to the Edisford Bridge Hotel. Some have suggested that Jim was shot with a type of airgun used by poachers or even an adapted walking stick. There has also been talk of possible deathbed confessions among the local farming community. However, to this date, no definite culprit has been identified, leading to wild talk that supernatural forces may even have been at work.

  LOCATIONS: The Edisford Bridge Hotel, Edisford Bridge, Clitheroe, Lancashire, BB7 3LJ, 01200 422 637; The Red Pump Inn, Clitheroe Road, Bashall Eaves, Clitheroe, Lancashire, BB7 3DA, 01254 826227, www.theredpumpinn.co.uk

  A CHILD MURDERER, DUBBED THE ‘MAD PARSON’, 1937

  The Lamb Inn, Burford, Oxfordshire

  The beautiful town of Burford in Oxfordshire is built of mellow Cotswold stone, and The Lamb, tucked away on Sheep Street, is the quintessential English inn. It is a place where everything seems right with the world. Yet in the summer of 1937, the mind of John Edward Allen, an assistant chef at The Lamb, was seriously troubled. On Saturday 19 June, 25-year-old Allen had gone to the home of a fellow employee, waiter Frederick Woodward, with whom he was friendly. Allen had been to the house at Fulbrook, just to the north of the town, a number of times before. On this occasion he arrived at around 4.30 p.m., telling Mrs Kathleen Anne Woodward that her husband had asked him to take their 17-month-old baby out for ‘an airing’. Taking the child in his arms, Allen rode off with her on his bicycle, promising to have her back for teatime. When they didn’t return after two hours Mrs Woodward raised the alarm.

  At around 10 p.m. that evening, the body of little Kathleen Diana Lucy Woodward was found by two boys lying in grass by the roadside about 50yds from her home. She had been strangled with a piece of clothes line taken from The Lamb which had been tied twice round her neck. Diana, as she was known, was still clutching the two pennies her mother had given her. There was no sign of any indecent assault. Allen had disappeared and a nationwide manhunt for him was launched. He was described as being 5ft 10in, of a fair complexion, with brown eyes and dark brown hair as well as ‘noticeably white teeth’.

  Two days after the crime, on 21 June, Allen turned up in London’s Elephant and Castle. He calmly walked up to a traffic policeman, telling the surprised officer that he was the man who was wanted ‘for the job in Oxford’ and was soon charged with murder.

  At his trial that October at the Oxford Assizes, Allen admitted that he had been in a mental institution twice in the past. But he maintained that it was Mrs Woodward, not he, who had killed the girl. Allen claimed that he and the mother were in love and that when he had arrived at the house the toddler was already dead, with a rope around its neck. He declared that Mrs Woodward had said to him, ‘I did it for you’ and that she wanted to run away with him. Allen then said he offered to take the blame for the killing, pointing out that since he had experienced mental problems he would probably get away with it. An outraged Mrs Woodward – her grief now compounded by allegations that she was both an adulterer and a murderess – strenuously denied the allegations.

  The Lamb Inn, Burford, where child murderer John Edward Allen worked. (Courtesy of The Lamb Inn)

  Fortunately, the jury was not persuaded by Allen’s story. And, on 21 October, they found him guilty. However, they recommended that enquiries be made into Allen’s mental state. The judge, Mr Justice Finlay, pronounced the death sentence on Allen but said that he would write to the Home Secretary recommending that a psychiatric assessment be undertaken. That November, Allen was duly committed to Broadmoor, a high security criminal asylum in Berkshire.

  Nothing more was heard of Allen publicly for another ten years and staff at Broadmoor found him a model prisoner. Then, on the night of Sunday, 20 July 1947, Allen sensationally escaped from Broadmoor by scaling a 16ft security wall. Police searching for him said that he was disguised as a clergyman and had taken with him a bible and money from the asylum canteen. It turned out that Allen had assembled his outfit by playing a vicar in a theatrical performance inside the asylum. In the following days, as he remained at large, newspapers soon dubbed Allen the ‘mad parson’.

  Few inmates ever escaped from Broadmoor and those who did were usually caught quickly. However, despite many sightings, Allen remained on the loose for the next two years, using a variety of aliases – including George Radcliffe and Michael James – a remarkable feat for a man who had been decreed mentally unstable. His staring eyes were said to be striking but Allen, originally from County Durham, repeatedly gave police searching for him the slip.

  In August 1947 he was spotted working as a waiter at the Nansidwell Hotel near Falmouth in Cornwall, but when police arrived to arrest him he had disappeared. In early 1948 Scotland Yard received a letter from Allen saying, ‘Ah, catch me if you can.’ They didn’t. Later that year he wrote another letter in which he claimed to have left notes in the waxwork model of serial killer Neville Heath at London’s Madame Tussaud’s. Police who searched all the models at the attraction failed to turn up anything.

  It was only in May 1949 that police made a breakthrough when they found a man calling himself Kenneth Wallace living in London, just 200yds from a police station. He had been working at a bakery in the capital but his employer had become suspicious that he might be Allen. Using fingerprint records, detectives confirmed that Wallace was indeed Allen and he was taken back to Broadmoor. Yet Allen only remained there for another two years. He said that he had originally escaped and stayed on the run for so long in order to prove he was, in fact, sane. His skill at managing to outwit the police while holding down responsible jobs, not to mention securing ration books and other identity papers, could not be doubted. In 1951 the authorities decided that the 39-year-old was indeed cured. He was released that September amid some controversy.

  Allen went on to write a cogent book, Inside Broadmoor, about his time in the asylum, which was published in 1952. But was he really cured? In October 1953 police were again hunting Allen who had gone missing from his lodgings in Newcastle where he’d been working in a bakery. This time he was soon caught. In November that year he was tried at the Old Bailey and found guilty of obtaining money by forging Post Office saving books. Allen was sentenced to thirty months behind bars in an ordinary prison.

  LOCATIONS: The Lamb Inn, Sheep Street, Burford, Oxon, OX18 4LR, 01993 823 155, www.cotswold-inns-hotels.co.uk

  THE ‘PERFECT CRIME’ ON THE EVE OF WAR, 1939

  White Hart, Flitton, Bedfordshire

  In the spring of 1939, just as Britons were about to have their world turned upside down
by the outbreak of the Second World War, the peace of a small village in Bedfordshire had already been shattered by the bloody murder of a much-loved farmworker. Flitton was, at the time, a sleepy village near Luton and home to just 500 people. The gabled White Hart was at its centre and the softly spoken George Stapleton had often enjoyed a quiet pint and a game of dominoes at the pub. It was at the White Hart that two Scotland Yard detectives set up their headquarters when Bedfordshire Police found themselves at a loss to explain why 66-year-old George had been viciously beaten around the head and left for dead whilst walking along a quiet country footpath.

  At 12.30 p.m. on the afternoon of Saturday 22 April, grey-haired George, a man described as having no enemies, had left work at Ruxox Farm with his 34s in wages, taking the path across the fields back to Flitton and the cottage where he lived. It was a route he had trodden pretty much every day for two years. At about 12.55 p.m., walking close to the hedgerows, he got to a place called Cuckoo Corner when he was attacked from behind. George was almost completely deaf and would not have heard his attacker coming.

  The man George shared his cottage with, another bachelor called George Stanley, knew his namesake would be home soon and had a meal waiting for him. By 5 p.m. when his friend had failed to return, George raised the alarm at the White Hart, and the landlord, Harold Kingham, went with him to conduct a search.

  They set off down the path via which they knew George would be making his way home. After crossing three fields they came across George’s pipe. Then, a couple of yards away they found his brown cloth cap. In a ditch 6yds from the path they found George. He was lying in in a foot of water, groaning. Sadly, by the time a doctor made it to the scene, he was dead.