by James Moore
When police arrived they recovered a bloodied fence post from the scene as well as samples of wool from a cheap jacket that was found on barbed wire nearby. There was also a mysterious pile of old clothes. The ground was hard from a lack of rain and there were no footprints, though marks on the grass indicated George had been dragged to the ditch. While George’s pay packet was gone, his watch chain was still about his person and 10s and 3d remained in his pockets. A post-mortem found that George had been hit over the back of the head six times and that one of these blows had fractured his skull.
County police quickly called in the experienced Scotland Yard to investigate the murder. Chief Inspector William Salisbury and Sergeant C. MacDougall began working on the basis that the culprit must have been local – and with good reason. George had been murdered on a quiet country path. His killer had surely lain in wait for him there in the bushes, knowing that he was likely to pass by at that time and that he wouldn’t be seen. Salisbury also discovered that there was a rumour in the village that George didn’t trust banks and was thought to carry a large amount of cash on his person. A local person would have known this and also that George was profoundly deaf and so wouldn’t hear them coming if they attacked from behind at the secluded spot.
But there were some puzzling questions. If the motive was robbery, then why had the killer not taken everything? At one point the focus fell on local youths, with one quizzed for three hours by police. The idea was even put forward that George might have come across some boys bird-nesting who turned on him. This didn’t really account for the frenzied nature of the attack, which police themselves described as ‘maniacal’. With the focus still on a local killer, clergy in the district made appeals from the pulpit urging people to come forward if they knew anything. However, despite taking 250 statements, interviewing 600 people and dredging the local stream, police were left without a suspect. A man working on the other side of a hedge nearby at the time of the murder had heard nothing. Before long, the newspapers of the time were calling George’s murder ‘the perfect crime’.
On Wednesday 20 June 1939, with no further leads, an inquest at Ampthill recorded a verdict of murder by some person or persons unknown. In the ensuing months, the whirlwind of war seems to have seen George’s case placed on the back-burner. It has never been solved. In the end it was assumed that the murder was the work of a tramp who had somehow come to know that poor George, a man who locals said wouldn’t hurt a mouse, had money on him. However, it was also an intriguing fact that on the same day as he was killed there was a fair taking place at Greenfields, a neighbouring village, meaning that there may well have been strangers in the vicinity after all.
LOCATIONS: The White Hart, Brook Lane, Flitton, Beds, MK45 5EJ, 01525 862022, www.whitehartflitton.co.uk
A SUICIDE AT THE ADELPHI AND THE WHITE MISCHIEF MYSTERY, 1942
The Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool
There was a chill in the air as Sir ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton checked into the grand Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool on Wednesday 2 December 1942. He gave staff strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed and retired to his room. Some forty-eight hours later, the hotel’s housekeeper found him in a coma, bleeding from the nose and ears. Delves Broughton had injected himself fourteen times with morphine and died in hospital shortly afterwards. His suicide was a sorry chapter in an unsolved murder mystery which continues to be the subject of heated debate to this day. The case was the inspiration for a 1987 film, White Mischief, starring Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance.
The scene of the murder couldn’t have been more different from the spot where Delves Broughton took his own life in a Blitz-ravaged city. It occurred in 1941, thousands of miles away in sun-drenched Kenya, and saw the philandering Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, shockingly shot to death.
Delves Broughton had married his second – and much younger – wife, Diana, in 1940. Then, at the height of the Second World War, the pair had moved to Kenya where they became part of the so-called Happy Valley colonial expatriate set, a hotbed of adultery and excess. Delves Broughton appeared not to mind greatly when the beautiful 26-year-old Diana openly began an affair with Erroll within months of arriving in Africa.
Then, at 3 a.m. on 24 January 1941, the 39-year-old earl was found dead in his Buick car at a deserted crossroads near Nairobi in the middle of the night. He had been shot at close range, the single bullet which killed him entering behind his left ear. Suicide was discounted as there was no gun at the scene. Erroll’s body had been stuffed into the footwell of the car and there were some mysterious white marks on the back seat of the vehicle.
By that March, Delves Broughton had been arrested for the murder. Although he appeared to have every motive for wanting Erroll dead, Delves Broughton and Diana had actually dined with the earl on the evening of 23 January at the Muthaiga Country Club. When Erroll and Diana decided to go on to a nightclub, Broughton had apparently wished them ‘every happiness’ and simply told Erroll to have his wife back by 3 a.m. Erroll duly dropped Diana off at home at 2.30 a.m.
The ensuing trial, which began in May, became a sensation, temporarily elbowing aside war headlines in the papers back in Britain. But the evidence submitted against Delves Broughton at his trial was weak, despite the fact that he had no concrete alibi for where he had been at the time of the murder. Erroll had been shot with a .32 Colt revolver. Delves Broughton was known to have owned a similar gun but claimed that it had been stolen a few days before the murder. Police believed he had faked the theft in order to cover his tracks. But when it came to the forensic evidence, it transpired that Delves Broughton’s pistol was apparently a six groove Colt while Erroll had been killed by a bullet with five grooves.
On 1 July, in the absence of the murder weapon itself, Delves Broughton was acquitted. Despite this he was shunned by the upper crust set that had once welcomed him with open arms, and a year later Delves Broughton snuck back into Britain a broken man. Diana, meanwhile, chose to stay in Kenya, having already taken up with another man.
By late 1942 Delves Broughton was suffering with depression. He was also being investigated by the police again, this time over insurance fraud. And when he took the decision to kill himself at the Adelphi – once described as Britain’s most luxurious hotel outside London – he almost certainly took the secrets of what really happened in Kenya to the grave.
While the hotel has hosted figures such as Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland during its illustrious history, Delves Broughton was not a guest to boast about. Yet some said that the hapless aristocrat was indeed innocent. He was said to have been blind drunk on the night of the murder and had to be helped to bed. The prosecution’s contention that the 57-year-old, who suffered from a bad leg and night blindness, had climbed down a drainpipe from his bedroom and walked 2 miles to the murder scene to kill Erroll was also branded implausible.
One theory had it that Diana herself had killed Erroll when he had actually tried to end their relationship. Another view was that he had been gunned down by a jealous former lover, of which there were many, the prime candidate being a woman called Alice de Janze who killed herself not long after the episode. A wilder theory posited that Erroll had been the victim of a secret service assassination because of his links with Oswald Moseley’s fascists back in Britain.
Yet it seems most likely that Delves Broughton was indeed responsible for Erroll’s murder. Juanita Carberry, a 15-year-old schoolgirl at the time, stated that he had even confessed to her a few days after the killing. She also claimed that she saw a pair of white plimsolls, like the ones linked to white scuff marks found in the back of Erroll’s car, burning at Delves Broughton’s home. In 2007 author Christine Nicholls even claimed to have discovered the identity of a driver who picked Delves Broughton up after the shooting. She put forward the idea that an incensed Delves Broughton, wearing a pair of white plimsolls, had sneaked into the back seat of Erroll’s car while the earl was saying goodbye to Diana at his home on the fateful night. He had
then shot him, before being picked up at a pre-arranged location by an unwitting friend.
LOCATIONS: The Britannia Adelphi Hotel, Ranelagh Street, Liverpool, Merseyside, L3 5UL, 0871 222 0029, www.britanniahotels.com
DARK DEEDS IN A HOTEL’S SUMMERHOUSE, 1943
Housel Bay Hotel, The Lizard, Cornwall
The site of the Housel Bay Hotel, which opened in 1894, was chosen because of its ‘beauty of situation and salubrity of climate’. Its directors believed that the stunning location, above the cliffs on the rugged Lizard peninsula, could not be surpassed in all England. The site, at Britain’s most southerly point, is certainly breathtaking. Yet even this remote eyrie could not avoid the shadow cast by a global conflict. During the Second World War it was taken over at first by the army and later the RAF.
The Housel Bay was surely one of the best places in the country to be billeted. In the summer of 1943 a new local air station commander, Flying Officer William James Croft, 32, from Bath, arrived. He, along with many of the men and women staying at the luxurious hotel, enjoyed the odd bathing party on one of the nearby beaches. It was at one of these that the married father of two met Corporal Joan Norah Lewis, 27, from Porthcawl, South Wales. She was a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force radar plotting team who were stationed nearby. Soon the pair fell madly in love, but their affair did not stay secret for long. Racked with guilt over the relationship, Croft revealed what had been going on to Freda Catlin, the officer in charge of the WAAFs. She told him that the liaison should end immediately. Reluctantly Croft agreed and arrangements were soon made for Joan to be posted to another station in Devon. Yet Croft, who had been married for thirteen years and had two daughters, was tormented by the idea of Joan’s departure. In one of several letters to her he wrote, ‘The thought of some other male sharing your company drives me to distraction.’ She, too, was besotted, writing, ‘I know it is really better I should go but the thought that I have to leave you is driving me crazy.’ The couple went on seeing each other right until the date that Joan was destined to leave, Saturday 16 October.
At 11.30 p.m. on 15 October, Croft and Joan met for a final tryst at a romantic summerhouse in the hotel garden. The wooden building, which had a comfortable settee inside, looked out over the sea. It was the couple’s favourite spot in which to spend time together and on this night they ‘smoked, talked and dozed’ until around 4.30 a.m. Suddenly, two shots rang out above the crying of seagulls and crashing of waves below. As the rain and wind lashed the Lizard, Croft ran back into the hotel where he informed the duty officer that he had killed Joan. Then he rang another officer saying, ‘I have killed Joan Lewis!’
Dashing to the summerhouse, two RAF officers discovered Joan’s body slumped on the floor in a pool of blood. She had been shot twice, one of the bullets passing through her chest, the other entering her head through the left temple. On a table was Croft’s service revolver with two empty cartridges. The gun contained four other rounds that had not been fired. A post-mortem found that the shot to Joan’s head had been the fatal one.
Following a police investigation Croft was charged with Joan’s murder on 16 November. He was brought to trial on 14 December 1943 at Winchester Assizes. In his defence, Croft maintained that he and Lewis had made a suicide pact after becoming depressed about their impending separation. They had discussed the possibility of throwing themselves off the cliffs before settling on using Croft’s gun. Croft said that the pair had sat on the settee together, clasping the gun, for some time that morning. The idea was that whoever had the courage to shoot first would fire and then the other would use the same gun to kill themselves. He swore that when the gun had eventually gone off it was Joan that had squeezed the trigger and that she had then said, ‘Fetch some help quickly.’ Croft testified that he had then rushed to get help, but that he had heard the gun fired again. Going back to the summerhouse he discovered that Joan had shot herself a second time. Seeing that she was dead he had then got down on the floor and put the gun to his own head. However, he had been unable to go through with the deed. Croft explained away the fact that he had afterwards admitted killing Joan to other officers, saying that he had simply meant that he felt responsible for the situation.
The prosecution insisted that medical evidence proved Joan could not have fired the shot that killed her. Dr Frederick Hocking, a pathologist who had examined the body, concluded that it would have been difficult for Joan to have fired the first shot as she would have had to hold the heavy gun 5in away from her body. It would have taken considerable strength – exerting 18lbs of pressure – to discharge it. To fire the second shot, he said, would have been impossible. Damage to her chest muscles from the first shot would have made her too weak to lift the gun. Joan would have needed to hold the gun 12–18in from her own head. This, he stated, was implausible.
It was also pointed out that if the jury believed that Croft had not killed Joan but had abetted her suicide, that also meant he was guilty of murder in the eyes of the law. After just twenty minutes of deliberation Croft was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. He appealed and, in February 1944, received a reprieve from the Home Secretary. Instead of being hanged he was given a life sentence. We’ll never know whether Croft really meant to kill Joan or whether the tragic event was indeed a suicide pact gone wrong. But some believe that Joan’s spirit still lurks in the grounds of the Housel Bay. In the decades that have followed several visitors to the hotel have spotted the ghost of a young woman in a Second World War uniform sitting on a bench in the garden.
LOCATIONS: Housel Bay Hotel, The Lizard, Cornwall, TR12 7PG, 01326 290417, www.houselbay.com
WARTIME SHOOT-OUT AT A COUNTRY PUB, 1944
The Crown and The Swan, Kingsclere, Hampshire
By late 1944 the threat of invasion by Hitler’s armies had waned and the Allies were well on their way to winning the Second World War. So the picturesque village of Kingsclere in rural Hampshire should have been one of the safest places to be. But that autumn the tranquillity of this rural idyll was shattered by a shocking shoot-out at the The Crown Inn. This largely forgotten chapter in the history of wartime Britain was more reminiscent of something from a gangster movie than the leafy Home Counties. Incredibly, the culprits were not enemy agents but a group of American soldiers who had gone on the rampage. One of those who survived would describe what happened as ‘all hell let loose’.
It was just before 10 p.m. on 5 October when the dramatic episode unfolded. Time was about to be called at The Crown where a dozen or so locals and several military policemen were finishing their drinks. Some American soldiers inside were finishing a game of bar billiards. Meanwhile, ten GIs from 3247 Quartermaster Service Company were taking up their positions in the churchyard opposite the pretty Victorian pub. Suddenly, without warning, they opened fire on the pub, shooting indiscriminately with their semi-automatic rifles. By the time the guns fell silent, three people lay dead.
The soldiers of the all-black 3247 Company had only been in the area a few hours, having been moved earlier that day from their base in Devon to a new camp at Sydmonton Court, not far from Kingsclere. They had arrived at 4.30 p.m. and, having had some dinner, some of the men decided to go into the village.
There had already been some problems with discipline at Sydmonton Court and military policemen patrolled Kingsclere in case any of the men left camp without permission. So the renegade group, who were wearing their work clothes rather than their best uniforms, were heading for trouble. Arriving in Kingsclere in the early evening they called first at a pub called The Bolton Arms, which has since closed. There, just after 7 p.m., they were confronted by four MPs. The men were told to return to camp immediately as they were improperly dressed and had no passes allowing them out. One of the regimental policemen was said to have cocked his rifle to make his point.
The group headed back to the camp, hitching a lift in a lorry. Angered by how they had been treated, they now came up with a plan for revenge. The soldiers
’ rifles, which they had been carrying during their transition to Sydmonton Court, had not yet been collected for safe storage. All but one of them grabbed their weapons, along with 100 rounds of ammunition, and headed back to the village, intent on teaching the MPs a lesson.
It appears that, initially, they had only intended to give the MPs a beating. The situation soon got out of hand. At some point, some of the men boasted that they would kill the offending MPs. Wielding their guns, the GIs entered the Bolton Arms again looking for their targets. Not finding them there, they then headed to The Swan, another pub in the village. Finally discovering that the MPs were inside The Crown, just a few hundred yards away, the GIs took up their positions. Two of the military policemen who were having a drink at the pub, Privates Anderson and Brown, rushed out to see what was happening only to be met by a hail of bullets. Jacob Anderson, who was unarmed, was hit in the chest. He managed to run 150yds before collapsing, dead, in a nearby garden. Brown hurled himself back inside the door and survived.
At the sound of the firing, most people in The Crown had hit the floor while one dived through a window. But some could not escape injury as bullets ricocheted around the bar. One of the unlucky ones was private Joseph Coates, a black GI who was sitting with his back to the window. He was hit in the head and killed instantly. Another victim was the Crown’s landlady, Rose Napper. She had been dragged to the floor by her husband, Frederick, but had nevertheless been hit in the jaw – the bullet passing out through her neck. A US colonel immediately drove Rose to hospital in Newbury but the 64-year-old died the next morning. Many others who had been drinking in The Crown were wounded.
At 10.17 p.m. the local police sergeant rang the larger station at Andover for help. Detectives who arrived found thirty-three empty bullet cases in and around The Crown. The walls of the gabled pub had been left pitted with bullet holes. Some of those responsible were rounded up that night and the rest weeded out over the next twelve days. On 9 November ten men were brought to a military court martial at Thatcham, Berkshire. They were Privates James L. Agnew, Ernest Burns, Willie J. Crawford, Hildreth H. Fleming, Herbert Lawton, John E. Lockett, Herbert Moultrie, Percy D. Oree, Willie Washington and Corporal John W. Lilly.
