by Phil Mason
At the same time, the Sheffield officer who had originally picked him up remembered Sutcliffe had gone off ‘for a pee’ into an alley. When the scene was searched, the hammer and knife that Sutcliffe had stashed in undergrowth was discovered. In the days that had elapsed, any passer-by could have picked them up.
The suspicious weapons, and the results of the blood test – Sutcliffe was B, a type shared by only six per cent of the population – were the breakthrough evidence. His run of extraordinary luck and near misses had come to an end, nearly three years – and four murders – after the evidence had started to point to him.
Within four months of his arrest, Sutcliffe had been tried, convicted and jailed for life.
Later, an even deeper irony emerged. In 1992, Sutcliffe confessed to a 1975 attack made before any of those already attributed to him. The victim had had a clear sight of him and had given police a detailed description. An identikit photograph of him had appeared in the local paper, matching Sutcliffe’s particular features, especially the gap in his teeth and his distinctive beard. When the Ripper attacks received publicity later, the victim told police she was convinced that her attacker had been the same man. Police dismissed her claims.
Chance prevailed throughout the Yorkshire Ripper case. It would keep Sutcliffe beyond suspicion for such an inordinate length of time, and then at the end bring police the break that counted.
Britain’s most notorious murder case of the 20th century, the conviction of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen for supposedly killing his wife, would never have come to light but for a series of ill-fated actions on his part. And astonishingly it has since emerged that he may have been innocent of the crime for which he was executed.
Crippen, whose place in history is cemented by being the first criminal to be apprehended through the use of wireless telegraphy, was caught on arrival in Canada after fleeing Britain on a steamship in July 1910. He had taken his mistress Ethel le Neve with him, poorly disguised as a boy. The captain of the SS Montrose had become suspicious at the odd-fitting disguise – le Neve’s clothes were sizes too big, and the trousers were held up by safety pins – alongside the strange, over-friendly behaviour Crippen was showing to his ‘son’.
Crippen’s ineptitude at masking the pair’s identity was compounded by bad luck: Captain Henry Kendall was an aficionado of modern technology. Earlier in his career, he had actually worked with the radio pioneer, Marconi, in developing ship-to-shore radio. Not surprisingly, then, the Montrose under his command had been one of very few ships to be equipped with radio telegraphy (at the time there were just 60 in the whole world). Kendall sent a message back to London and Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard raced out on a faster ship to board the Montrose as it arrived in Canadian waters.
Crippen’s decision to flee at all had been his undoing. The police, who had been alerted by friends of Crippen’s wife who were concerned about her sudden disappearance, had visited Crippen’s Holloway home in north London and not seen any evidence of foul play. His story that she had run away with another man seemed plausible. Police were about to drop the case. It was only after Crippen had lost his nerve, and disappeared, that police took further interest and re-investigated his house. They still found nothing on the second inspection, and it took a third before they spotted the loose brickwork in the cellar that led them to discover a mutilated body. Had he stuck it out at home, he might have got away with it.
The headless and limbless torso was never identified as Cora Crippen, but the circumstantial evidence now surrounding the case was sufficient to convict Crippen of murdering his wife. He was tried at the Old Bailey in October 1910 and hanged a month later.
The final twist to the case, however, surfaced only in 2007. Scientists from Michigan State University tracing the DNA of the body found in the Crippen cellar discovered that it could not have been his wife. It did not match the DNA of known relatives of Cora Crippen. The tantalising prospect to emerge was that Crippen was most likely guilty not of murdering his wife but probably of conducting illegal abortions and that this was one which had gone wrong.
Even if his actual crime had been discovered, and in the circumstances of illegal abortions the chances were always going to be slim, the penalty would have been significantly lower than the one he eventually ended up suffering. Crippen’s own lack of nerve, and the bad luck of picking the wrong ship to escape on, led to his downfall.
A British murder case was solved with a confession the culprit never needed to have made. Peter Reyn-Bart was accused of murdering his ‘wife-of-convenience’ whom he had married in 1959 to conceal from his employers that he was homosexual. She had disappeared shortly afterwards.
Over 20 years later, a former associate of Reyn-Bart’s told police that he had been told the story of her murder. Police had no evidence and could not act on the tip-off. By coincidence, in May 1983 workers collecting peat found a human skull 300 yards from Reyn-Bart’s home in Wilmslow, Cheshire. When confronted by the news, Reyn-Bart confessed to the killing. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment the following December.
By which time, a strange twist of fate had emerged. In October, when the skull was tested, it was found to date from Roman times. It had absolutely no connection with Reyn-Bart’s case.
The unluckiest lottery player in Spanish history was arrested for fraud on Christmas Eve 1986 after his plan to make certain money out of the country’s annual ‘El Gordo’ (the ‘fat one’) national lottery fell to pieces when the least expected and worst possible outcome ensued – he won top prize.
Jacinto Sanchez Zambrano, a bar owner in a poor neighbourhood in Palencia in northern Spain, had bought one of the £130 tickets. His clever wheeze was to then sell shares in it to his customers for £2.60 each, supposedly a fiftieth of the ticket. Except that he sold 250 of them.
He made a small fortune from the sale, recouping £650 for his original outlay. And all would have been perfect except that his ticket won £1.3 million. His 250 ticket holders all assumed they had won over £25,000 each, five times as much as Zambrano would receive. Many went out on spending sprees before the ugly truth dawned.
Two days after the lottery was declared, Zambrano handed himself into the police for his own protection.
A bureaucratic oversight in the chaotic Indian legal system led to a man arrested for the minor offence of fare dodging on a train spending more than 29 years on remand in jail awaiting trial.
The High Court in Patna, in the eastern state of Bihar, ordered the release of Ramchandra Kashiram in January 1982 after discovering that he had been arrested in March 1953 and held in prison ever since, after his papers had been lost.
He had been sent to a second prison shortly after his arrest and had languished for six years awaiting a decision on his fitness to stand trial. In the meantime, his first prison lost all record of his charges or where he was. It was only when his second jail decided in 1981 that he should be returned that the first jail became aware of him again.
He was last heard of preparing for his long-delayed trial in February 1982, supported by two lawyers, neither of whom had even been born when he was first detained. Speaking to reporters, Kashiram said that he would not mind if he was sent back to jail. Having spent two-thirds of his life there, ‘I’ve rather grown to like it.’
The longest incarceration of an untried person is thought to be the 54 years that Indian man Machang Lalung spent in an Assam asylum awaiting assessment for his mental state as to his fitness for trial.
The case was revealed in 2005 when a court in the northeastern Indian state released him after it emerged that the authorities had forgotten about him. Lalung had been arrested in 1951.
Ironically, it appeared that the cause of his plight had been that no one had backed up the complaint for which he had been detained, no charges had actually been filed and thus no record existed of his presence in the system.
An Israeli couple wanting to get married in 1994 were refused permission by a Jewish
religious court because of an offence committed by one of their ancestors 2,574 years earlier.
Massud Cohen and his girlfriend, Chochana Hadad, were denied because the Galilee rabbinate had recorded that in 580BC one of Hadad’s priest forefathers had married a divorcee, breaking a Jewish ban for the priesthood. The punishment was imposed on all his descendants, and was ruled to apply in this case as Cohen was a divorcee.
John Lee, a 20-year-old convicted Victorian murderer, escaped execution in February 1885 because the trapdoor on the scaffold jammed three times in a row as authorities in Exeter jail tried to hang him.
With the rope round Lee’s neck, the hangman pulled the release lever but the trapdoor failed to open. He was returned to his cell, the problem apparently remedied, and he was brought out again – for the same thing to happen. When it jammed for the third time, Lee was returned to his cell for good as none of the prison staff was in a state to continue.
All the officials present were so shocked that the execution was cancelled and the Home Secretary petitioned to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. Lee served 22 years before being released in 1907 – the man they couldn’t hang.
The world’s biggest bank robbery could have been 10 times bigger had it not been for a rainstorm.
The ingenious assault on the Nice branch of the Société Générale bank in July 1976 is thought by French police to have netted close to £50 million. The branch specialised in safety deposit boxes for the discreet and wealthy of the French Riviera. Much of the wealth comprised illicit valuables stashed away out of the reach of the tax authorities or the police. Hence the robbers were confident that there would be few people willing to pressure police too hard to recover the ill-gotten gains.
The gang spent two months tunnelling from the city’s sewer system into the basement of the bank directly into the vault. They broke through on a Friday evening after the bank had shut for the weekend, and had until early Monday to rifle the boxes at their leisure.
One small hitch upset the operation. Heavy rain early on threatened their escape. The sewer they had used was the city’s storm drain. Its flooding risked them being left marooned inside the bank, so they fled – in rubber dinghies – early, having opened only 317 of the 4,000 deposit boxes.
Despite the curtailment, the amount stolen, while officially declared at a relatively paltry £6 million, was thought by police to be significantly higher, because of the reluctance of many victims to come forward. The unofficial estimate was put at £50 million, which remained the largest heist on record until the £53 million theft from a Securitas cash depository in Britain in 2006. (In 2007, three guards at a bank in war-torn Baghdad are said to have walked off with £146 million from the bank’s vaults. The accuracy of the story has never been confirmed.)
British police were taken aback in March 1993 when a drunk looking for a place to sleep for the night unknowingly broke into the headquarters of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, in Pimlico, south London. He remained undetected for an hour, and might have stayed so had he not wandered round the corridors instead of bedding down quietly.
Greater Manchester police had to review the convictions of 742 drink-driving offenders in 1989 when it was discovered the police were using swabs already impregnated with alcohol.
Forensic scientists became suspicious when they noticed large discrepancies between the blood sample and the breath test from the same people. It was discovered that someone had decided to change the swabs used when collecting the blood, as those being used were deemed ‘too dry’. They had been replaced with swabs already impregnated with four per cent alcohol. The mistake had gone unnoticed for nearly two years.
10
Business – Enterprise and Intuition
‘As safe as the Bank of England’ was not always the case in its first 50 years. Twice in the half a century since its founding in 1694, the Bank came close to collapse when it faced a run on its reserves. It survived by adopting some small but clever devices to defuse the panic.
In 1720, in the wake of the South Sea Bubble investment scandal, and again in 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rebellion saw invading Scots reach as far south as Derby, the Bank was overwhelmed by panicking investors wanting to withdraw their money. They resorted to tricky wiles.
Clerks were told to work strictly to rule regarding office hours, and pay out only in sixpence coins (then a 40th of a pound). This deliberately slowed down each transaction, with cashiers also using the clamour as a reason for often losing count and having to repeat the slow process of reckoning up the withdrawal.
Large sums were also paid out to friends of the Bank’s management who then ostentatiously paid it back in at the cashier’s desk to restore confidence. The Bank put its own staff in the crowd too, and got them to deposit the Bank’s own money again and again, all the time both restoring faith in the Bank and, more pragmatically, slowing down the chances of real investors actually getting at their money.
The discoverer of the Witwatersrand goldfields in South Africa never realised the value of his find. George Harrison, an Australian prospector, sold his claim in November 1886, four months after he secured it, for just £10. The site, near present day Johannesburg, was found to be the world’s richest deposit of gold, with the reef running for a length of 50 miles.
At the time, Harrison was not convinced. He cashed in his luck and disappeared from history’s view. He was not heard of again.
In 1993, Chilean futures’ trader Pablo Davila, employed by Codelco, the state-owned copper company, pressed the ‘buy’ button on his computer instead of the ‘sell’ button. When he realised his mistake, he had already lost $40 million on the trades. So he attempted to recoup his losses, but these trades failed to pay off too. He eventually ended down $207 million – having lost Chile half a per cent of its entire gross national product.
‘PG-Tips’, the puzzling name of one of Britain’s best-selling brands of tea derives from a legal dispute and a trick to try to get round restrictions on false advertising.
Brooke Bond, the makers, sold its tea to chemists and grocers in the 1930s as a medicinal product. It was long thought to be an aid to digestion. Brooke Bond’s ‘Digestive Tea’ was a successful brand. After the Second World War, the Ministry of Food banned the description ‘digestive’. In response, Brooke Bond re-branded its tea ‘Pre-Gest-Tee’, to try to circumvent the restrictions. Delivery parcels were labelled by the letters ‘PG’ and by the 1950s the name had evolved into ‘PG-Tips’, from the fact that only the tips of the tea plant were used in the blend.
Forrest Mars, the creator of the Mars Bar and dozens of other world famous sweet brands, only went into the confectionery business after being arrested for a minor offence which led to a chance reunion with his father, whom he had not seen for 15 years, who came to bail his son from the police.
Forrest was, in the early 1920s, studying at the University of California to be a mining engineer. He had been separated from his father since his parents divorced when he was a young child. During his vacations, he worked as a salesman for Camel cigarettes. He was arrested for illegally fly-posting adverts on shop windows in Chicago, and the case was reported in the press. This was seen by his estranged father, who came to bail him out.
That reunion led Forrest to collaborate with his father’s sweet business, which was enjoying only modest success. He quickly developed the ‘Milky Way’ bar and, at the company’s British plant in Slough in 1933, the ‘Mars Bar’.
Mars died in 1999 a billionaire, having given the world, amongst others, the Snickers bar, M&Ms, Maltesers, Twix and Skittles. And all because of a minor misdemeanour and a chance sighting of a press story.
The spark of insight that led to the development of the home power drill, and arguably launched the modern trend for DIY, came accidentally. Alonzo Decker (of the Baltimore-based Black & Decker Company) began receiving repeated replacement orders for his industrial hand-drills, used by the US military in making armaments dur
ing the Second World War. He feared that his product was failing too regularly.
Rather than simply replace the orders, he asked why. He discovered that the problem was not failure, but success. Companies were finding that their female production line workers were taking the pistol-grip drills home at weekends to do home repairs and not returning them.
Black & Decker produced the world’s first domestic power drill in 1946. Just four years later they were producing their millionth. The tool that set off the post-war DIY fashion was an instant success. Had Decker just quietly replaced the drills to keep the military happy, he would never have found the phenomenal market just waiting to be tapped.
The modern criss-cross sole of trainers and sports shoes, was inspired by the inventor using his wife’s waffle iron to make the first imprint.
Bill Bowerman, founder of the Nike company, pioneered his soles in 1971 after experimenting with the iron after being inspired by the design of his waffles at breakfast. The ‘Waffle trainer’ was trialled in 1972 and by 1974 had become the best-selling running shoe across America. Nike had revolutionised the market by producing running shoes that were lighter, gave more traction, and were more flexible and more comfortable than any others. Bowerman claimed that his design meant athletes lifted 200 pounds less during a race.
The Saga holiday empire, caterer to the retired holidaymaker, was born from a conversation on a seaside park bench as a hotel owner bemoaned the end of the summer season.
Sidney De Haan, a 30-year-old with a 12-bed hotel in Folkestone, was sitting with his wife as winter beckoned in 1949 after a good, but short, summer. Facing the prospect of having to close for six months, his wife then sparked the idea that was to lead to a revolution in holiday marketing. She pointed out that all around them were people who did not have to go home as they had all the time in the world. She thought the retired ought to be attracted when the peak season holidaymakers had gone home – no crowds, reduced rates, and good company for each other.
