Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Nancy gave evidence of her parents’ hostility towards her husband. She added that she had been approached by Barker and Melchen after her father’s funeral. They claimed that the prints had been positively identified as Freddie’s. They were claiming there was more than one print. This too cast doubt on the truthfulness of Barker and Melchen.

  The jury came to the majority verdict (nine out of twelve jurors) of not guilty. The opinion of the islanders had been swayed by the trial and its exposures. Now, instead of being reviled, Freddie de Marigny was exonerated. He had not killed Sir Harry Oakes. But if Freddie had not killed him, who had?

  Many theories have been put forward over the years, many of them implicating one or more of Nassau’s leading citizens of the time, including Axel Wenner-Gren, Sir Harold Christie and (inevitably) the Duke of Windsor. The Mafia has also been blamed. So far none of the theories has been proved. Sir Harry Oakes was a tough, uncompromising man and it is likely that he made some enemies over the years. Perhaps someone from his chequered past turned up on Nassau to exact revenge. Oakes wielded considerable power on Nassau, and perhaps he seriously disadvantaged someone on the island as a result of his recent decisions and strategies. It is also worth remembering that Nassau had a high crime rate, and that maybe Oakes was just a victim of a casual break-in, that it was no more significant than an aggravated robbery.

  Christie may have seen the possibility of making an enormous amount of money from casinos, and become angry at being blocked by Oakes. Christie could have murdered Oakes himself or hired someone else to do; he was certainly rich enough to hire a killer. Alternatively, Frank Marshall may have seen Oakes as the major obstacle in the way of the casino plan. Marshall, it is alleged, had connections with Lucky Luciano and his associate Meyer Lansky. It is thought that Luciano and Lansky were the masterminds behind the plan to develop casinos in the islands, and that Marshal was their go-between. It may have been extreme pressure from Luciano and Lansky that drove Marshall to kill Oakes in order to facilitate the casino deal, or Luciano and Lansky may have sent in a hit man behind Marshall’s back: hence the mysterious unidentified boat. Wenner-Gren may have murdered Oakes because Oakes had found out too much about Wenner-Gren’s spying activities. Possibly the Duke of Windsor murdered Oakes for a similar reason. It is thought that Oakes knew about the Duke’s links (through Wenner-Gren) with the Nazis.

  The possibilities lie in these areas, but the truth of what happened remains curiously elusive. Nothing of any significance, except the Duke’s dealings with the Nazis, ever really emerged after the 1940s to shed any light on the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. That in itself implies that somebody very powerful, somebody with a big name to protect, was behind the killing. One question that has never been satisfactorily answered is the key question about Barker and Melchen. Why did the Duke of Windsor send away to Miami for two completely incompetent detectives? Was it a further example of the Duke’s legendary bad judgement? Or was the bungled investigation a carefully orchestrated pantomime that would distract people from what had really happened – and incidentally destroy all the forensic evidence along the way? On the face of it, the Duke snubbed his own Bahamian law enforcers in order to bring in Laurel and Hardy to solve the crime, but one suspects there was more to it than that.

  PART FIVE: Unsolved Crimes of the Late Twentieth Century(1951–2000)

  Death at the Roadside: Sir Jack Drummond

  On 4 August 1952, an English family on a camping holiday in the south of France pulled into a layby on the N96 near the village of Lurs, seventy-five miles from Aix. The Drummond family consisted of the scientist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife Ann and their ten-year-old daughter. It was a hot afternoon, and they had decided to camp for the night beside the River Durance. Not long after that, all three of them were violently murdered.

  It was a puzzling crime. Sir Jack was a very different character from Sir Harry Oakes. He was sixty-one and a former professor of biochemistry at London University. It seemed very unlikely that a former co-worker would have tracked him down in order to exact revenge. Drummond had been rather more than an ordinary academic, though. During the Second World War he had done some major work on nutrition, which had earned him a knighthood; he had also been a senior researcher at the Boots pharmaceutical laboratory in Nottingham.

  On the face of it, the triple murder looked like a casual, opportunist act of violence with robbery as its probably motive. The French police apprehended the peasant farmer whose smallholding was the nearest property to the scene of the crime, and charged him with the murders. He was Gaston Dominici, a man of seventy-five.

  First on the scene after the murder was Gaston’s son, Gustave Dominici. He initially told the police he had heard shots at one o’clock in the morning on 5 August, and thought there were poachers about. He found the body of the daughter, Elizabeth, at half past five. She was lying near the river, battered to death with a rifle butt. Gustave Dominici had waved down a passing cyclist at six o’clock to tell him to fetch the police. Lady Drummond’s body was found close to a Hillman car and Sir Jack’s body lay just across the road. Both of them had been shot from behind, as if they had been attempting to run away from their killer. The stock of the gun was found floating in the River Durance; the barrel was later found on the river bed.

  But Gustave Dominici changed his story, which aroused serious suspicion. One of his neighbours, Paul Maillet, reported that Gustave Dominici had told that when he found Elizabeth she was still alive. One of Dominici’s relatives reported that he had seen Lady Drummond and Elizabeth calling at the Dominici farm with a bucket, to ask for water, when Gustave Dominici, his brother Clovis and their father, Gaston, insisted they had had no contact with the Drummonds. The police were confronted with a wall of silence and deception. Some witnesses were reluctant to say anything. Others made contradictory statements. The police tried to set one family member off against another, which caused even more confusion. The police went on pressing the Dominicis for the truth. Eventually Gustave and Clovis told the police what they wanted to hear, that their father had admitted that he had ‘killed the English’, and on 13 November 1953, the seventy-five-year-old Gaston confessed to the murders.

  But this was a classic case of a confession given after a protracted period of determined police interrogation. If the police go on questioning for long enough, interrogation subjects will confess to anything – just to bring the interrogation to an end. This is what seems to have happened in l’affaire Dominici. Needless to say, confessions squeezed out of people under these conditions are meaningless. Shortly after confessing, Gaston Dominici changed his story again, saying he had not committed the murders and had confessed to them only to protect his family. Gustave withdrew his earlier statement too.

  The various different versions of what had happened drew strong suspicion on the Dominici family, and the police went on questioning them for fifteen months, certain that the Dominicis were behind the murders. The French legal system went through the whole process of putting the old man, Gaston Dominici, on trial, but it was hard to see what his motive might have been. He was a pillar of the local community. There were other questions, too. Men were seen in the area at the time of the murder, men who were never identified. The murders were committed with a battered old American Rock-Ola carbine; where had it come from? One promising line of investigation in recent years has been the probability that Drummond was a spy, caught up in the Cold War.

  Nevertheless, Gaston Dominici was brought to trial in Digne a year later. In November 1954 he was found guilty of the three murders without any extenuating circumstances and sentenced to death. He faced the guillotine. But there were so many loose ends in the investigation, the total lack of motive being a major worry, and there were several moves from the central government in Paris to overturn the verdict. One such move came from a young minister, François Mitterand, but initially these had no effect. Then, in 1957, the French President René Coty commuted Dominici’s sentence to one of life im
prisonment. Three years later, Coty’s successor Charles de Gaulle set him free. In 1960, de Gaulle watched a television programme about the case. It showed the pathetic eighty-four-year-old man locked up in the prison of Les Baumettes in Marseilles. He affirmed his innocence. It was evident that he was unhappy to be so far away from his farm, and to be separated from his dog. The programme was profoundly influential. As a viewer, de Gaulle was moved by the old man’s predicament and granted him a pardon on 13 July 1960.

  One reason for believing that Gaston Dominici was innocent is that in his forced ‘confession’ the reason he gave for killing the whole family was that Sir Jack had caught him offering to have sex with an undressed Lady Drummond, which was completely absurd. Presumably Gaston thought that up, forgetting that he was seventy-five and distinctly past his best, as press photographs of the time clearly show. A second reason is that the US army rifle did not belong to him and he had no idea how to use it.

  Some time after the murders, a man called William Bartkowski was arrested in Germany in connection with another crime. He unaccountably and spontaneously admitted to being one of four contract hit men who had been hired to kill Drummond. This confession has never been satisfactorily explained. Bartkowski’s scenario involving four hit men would tie in with the sighting by at least four local passers-by of some unidentified men (not Sir Jack and not the Dominicis) on the road near the crime scene. Post mortems on Sir Jack and Lady Drummond revealed that the bullet entry wounds were of different sizes, so two guns were used; by implication, there were at least two killers.

  A closer scrutiny of Sir Jack Drummond’s past life revealed what may have been a highly significant pattern of activity. The camping holiday had not taken Drummond to Lurs entirely by chance. He had been there at least three times before, in 1947, 1948 and 1951, so he had visited the place four times in five years. Close to the village, about six miles away, was a chemical factory that had started manufacturing advanced insecticides for crops. During the Cold War, insecticides were widely believed to have the potential to be used as a chemical weapon. One possibility is that Drummond was acting as a kind of industrial spy, with a view to reporting back to the authorities in Britain on the chemical production activities at Lurs. The camping holiday was therefore a cover for this espionage. In support of this hypothesis is the fact that Drummond’s camera was never found; by implication it was taken by the hit men in order to conceal the nature of Drummond’s recent activity.

  Sir Jack had a long discussion in Lurs, just two days before he died, with a man called Father Lorenzi. Father Lorenzi was a priest who was known to have been a prominent figure in the French resistance during the Second World War. We can only speculate about the nature of Drummond’s conversation with Lorenzi, but it is significant that Paul Maillet was another French resistance fighter and a friend of Gustave Dominici. Maillet is believed to have been the true owner of the US army rifle.

  The Dominici family evidently knew things about the murders, or the run-up to the murders, which they were unable to reveal – even though it meant that old Gaston might be guillotined as a result. It may be that their web of friendships in the area gave them some knowledge not only of the French resistance during the war, but also knowledge of what secret activities of resistance fighters were continuing in the Cold War, too. The Dominicis may have been persuaded to help some scheme, perhaps to outwit or block Drummond’s espionage work, not knowing that the outcome would be the murder of the whole family. That would certainly be consistent with their confused state of mind in the weeks following the murders.

  Gaston Dominici is now long dead, but his family is still fighting to clear his name. William Bartkowski may have been one the four hit men, though there is no corroboration for his confession; the identity of the other three, if indeed there were three more, has never been discovered.

  The A6 Murder: Was Hanratty Guilty?

  One August evening in 1961, a married man called Michael Gregsten drove his girlfriend Valerie Storie out into the country for sex. They worked together at the Road Research Laboratory near Slough in the south of England. Gregsten’s wife knew about the affair. Gregsten drove his Morris Minor, as he had driven many times before, to the chosen spot and parked on the roadside next to Taplow Meadow, just outside Maidenhead. As they embraced and kissed in the front of the car, there was a sharp tap at the window behind Valerie. Michael could see the man, but Valerie couldn’t. The man threatened Michael with a gun, said, ‘I am a desperate man’, and climbed into the back seat of the car. Then he ordered Gregsten to drive off, insisting that they keep looking ahead; they were not to turn round and look at him. They set off through the outskirts of Slough, then onto the open road. After a tense two-hour drive, the stranger ordered Michael to stop in a lay-by on the A6. It was fairly sheltered, surrounded by bushes and known as Deadman’s Hill. It was a favourite spot for courting couples.

  The menacing stranger asked Michael Gregsten to hand him a duffel bag, and either Gregsten saw this as an opportunity to take a look at him or tackle him and disarm him, or the stranger interpreted his movement as a threat. Maybe the gunman had realized that Gregsten had already taken a good look at his face through the passenger window and would be able to identify him; he had had time during the drive to decide that Gregsten could not be trusted to leave the scene alive. Whatever the reason, as Michael Gregsten passed the bag, the stranger fired twice and Gregsten was killed outright instantly.

  By now it was dark, and the terrified Valerie found herself alone with a homicidal maniac. The stranger savagely raped her, shot her in the back several times at close range and left her for dead in the lay-by. She in fact survived, but remained disabled for the rest of her life. In spite of spending as much as six hours at close quarters with the gunman, Valerie only really saw his face clearly once, for a few seconds, as it was lit up by the headlights of a passing car. She was able to supply police with a description, but it remains uncertain whether that description is at all reliable. By the time she caught the single glimpse of the gunman’s face, she had already been traumatized by the shooting of her lover and terror at her own impending death. The police circulated a picture of the wanted man, based on her description.

  Recognition by voice played a key part in the prosecution case at the trial. Just before the man raped her, he said, ‘Shut up, will you? I’m thinking’. He spoke with an accent that was very distinct but Valerie could not identify it geographically. It wasn’t London. It wasn’t Glasgow. But a distinct way of speaking just the same. He pronounced the word ‘thinking’ as ‘finking’.

  As soon as Michael’s body and the scarcely living Valerie were found in the A6 lay-by, a massive murder hunt was launched. It was a very peculiar case. The man had appeared from nowhere, disappeared into nowhere, seemed to have no connection with Michael or Valerie, and seemed to have no motive whatever. There was really nothing at all to go on, except the knowledge that there was a violent madman on the loose, a man who said ‘finking’.

  The police had a suspect, a man called Peter Louis Alphon. His face fitted the identikit picture, and he could not give any account of his movements on the night of the murder. The police even got as far as arresting him, and they were probably right.

  At this point, bizarre things began to happen in the development of the case. Michael Gregsten’s widow happened to be in Blackpool on holiday, after the murder of her husband, when she spotted a man, a total stranger, about whom she had an intuition. She got in touch with the police. The man was James Hanratty. It says something about the strange and desperate mindset of the police involved in this case that they acted on this absurd contact. Mrs Gregsten had not been at the scene of the murder, had no reason to think she had ever seen the murderer, and so could not have expected to recognize him. She only had the identikit picture. The police picked Hanratty up and questioned him. Initially he could not account for his whereabouts on that fateful evening – but how many of us could do that? – and they started investi
gating his recent movements.

  The police discovered two .38 cartridge cases from bullets fired from the murder weapon in the Vienna Hotel; one of the rooms had been occupied by a Mr James Ryan, which was an alias used by James Hanrattty. The police decided they need look no further. There was nevertheless no forensic evidence from the car to connect Hanratty to the murder.

  Hanratty was lined up in an identification parade. Valerie was unable to pick anyone out that she recognized. ‘I’m sorry. I only saw him for a few seconds. It’s very difficult.’ She knew and freely admitted that she had been badly traumatized during and after her ordeal and that this had blocked and distorted her memory. The police ran a second identification parade. This time the police asked the men to repeat the line, ‘Be quiet will you? I’m thinking’. Valerie felt sure Hanratty was saying ‘finking’. The police thought they had got their man.

  Hanratty made himself doubly vulnerable at this point by producing an alibi. He had not mentioned Rhyl before, but now he claimed that on the night in question he had been in Rhyl, 250 miles from the murder scene. It looked like an improvised smoke screen, and the police saw no reason to make no more than a cursory check on his alibi.

  James Hanratty was arrested in Blackpool on 9 October in 1961, identified by Valerie at an identity parade, and sent for trial at Bedford Assizes. Much of the trial proceedings turned on Hanratty’s alibi, that he had been at Rhyl in north Wales on the day in question.