Murderabilia

by Craig Robertson

  She was daring him and he could picture her standing up defiantly to her husband’s reddening face and bunched fists.

  ‘Was your husband violent, Mrs Welsh?’

  She laughed bitterly. ‘He had a temper on him. Couldn’t stand things not being the way he wanted. And when he’d a drink in him, which was most of the time, he’d lash out. I caught a few slaps. He always regretted it and sometimes he even told me. But he didn’t kill our boy.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I knew the man.’

  Winter persisted. ‘Lots of people knew their partners but their partners still did terrible things.’

  ‘Aye, I’m sure that’s true. But those wives knew and ignored it. If I thought Alec had done it, I’d have killed him myself. He was a drunk and a coward but he wasn’t a murderer. And certainly not his own. He loved Martin. And that’s a fact.’

  It was time to change tack.

  ‘Mrs Welsh, do you know about the items relating to Martin’s disappearance that are being sold?’

  Her brow furrowed. ‘Sold? What do you mean sold? Why would people be selling things?’

  ‘That’s partly why I’m here. There are people who collect things relating to . . .’ – he nearly choked on the word – ‘murders. They buy and sell and collect things. They’ve been doing that with items connected to Martin.’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s disgusting.’ She sounded as if she’d been slapped again. ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Posters from when Martin went missing. Some items from school. The letter you sent to the newspapers. They have some of his clothes.’

  ‘His clothes? How . . .?’

  Mrs Welsh suddenly looked very small indeed. She shrank before his eyes as she contemplated her son’s things being passed around like collectible stamps or football stickers. It took a lot for someone who’d suffered the life she had to find fresh disappointment with the world, but she just had.

  ‘How would people even get them? His clothes?’

  Winter shrugged. ‘I’d be guessing but they could have been taken from the bin or if you’d given them to charity.’

  ‘I threw them all out. I didn’t want them and I didn’t want anyone else to have them.’ Disappointment had given way to fresh anger and he saw her brittle fingers go white at the knuckles as she folded her hands into tight, small fists.

  ‘Who’s selling these things? And who the hell is buying them?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

  ‘And you can stop them?’

  He shook his head. ‘Only if they’re breaking the law, and that might be hard to prove. But I can name them and shame them.’

  She thought about it for a moment before nodding. ‘That’s something. Do it if you can. Because it is shameful. It is.’

  ‘I’m certainly going to try.’

  ‘Thank you. But if you excuse me I’ll no get my hopes up. Everyone else that’s come to my door and said they’d try their best hasn’t managed to do what they said. They said they’d do their best to find my son and they didn’t. Then it was they’d find the person that took him and they didn’t. Then it was they’d find my boy’s body and they didn’t. So I’m all out of hope that folk will do what they say. But I thank you for trying.’

  Winter left the house feeling that he’d let the woman down before he’d even begun.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE JEWELLER

  He had a technique that had never let him down. He knew it wasn’t exclusively his but he’d refined it and made it work for him particularly sweetly. It was his own little niche in the murderabilia world. Or her niche, depending on how you looked at it.

  He was straight. That’s the first thing you need to know. This was a strictly business-only practice.

  It was just like acting, he imagined. Not that he’d ever done any, not on the stage at least. Maybe everyone was an actor to some extent. He’d assume a role, a part, and he’d play it through. He was Alison. Alison Dale. Ali, to special friends.

  Ali was single. Her job didn’t give her time to get involved. She was attractive but not so attractive as to be unattainable. Kind. A good listener. She didn’t mind faintly suggestive remarks. In fact, she quietly implied she might like it without quite saying so. Above all, she cared. She cared a lot. Ali was a good friend to those who needed it. And they certainly needed it.

  Ali was blonde and blue-eyed. She didn’t like to talk about her figure but she might admit she was in good shape. The horse riding and the running saw to that. And, yes, people said she was pretty. Men said that.

  If you wanted a pen friend, someone happy to write – and receive – lots of letters, then you couldn’t do better than Alison Dale. Ali to you. You could tell Ali anything. Anything at all.

  And they did.

  It first worked with a lifer in HMP Durham named Francie Rowlands. Alison wrote to him, claiming an interest in his case. Rowlands didn’t stop to wonder why Alison would be interested in the case of a man who’d strangled his wife and daughter and buried both in the garden. He was just happy to have someone to talk to.

  It helped that Alison was sympathetic. She understood that sometimes things just happened. That wasn’t Francie’s fault. We all have a breaking point and a person shouldn’t pay for the rest of their life for one mistake. Francie loved that. Pretty quickly, it wasn’t all he loved.

  Soon he loved Ali so much that he told her how his wife drove him to kill her, practically begged him to do it with the way she’d behaved. She didn’t understand him the way Ali did. She didn’t understand that men had needs and moods that didn’t make them bad, just human, just normal. Ali got that.

  So he told Ali how he’d planned it. How he’d wanted to do it for weeks, maybe months. He laid bare the details of the murders in a way he never had in court or to the police. It was gold dust.

  The Jeweller wasn’t always Alison. Sometimes he was Nicole Ellis. Nicole was a campaigner for prison reform. She really cared about the inhuman way prisoners were treated. She was their friend. Nicole was popular in the UK but, man, was she ever a big hit in the US!

  Nicole got particularly passionate about capital punishment and solitary confinement. She had empathy and the Death Row guys loved that. There was over two thousand miles between Aaron ‘Whitey’ Hooper in Eyman, the state prison in Arizona, and Wayne Barrett in Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. That suited Nicole just fine, as there wasn’t much chance of either finding out about the other. Both might have been upset to find she wasn’t their one true love.

  Whitey and Wayne were both waiting their turn to die and, while they did so, they poured their hearts out to Nicole. Whitey spilled his guts about the family of four whom he’d butchered and how it was all his daddy’s fault for what he did when Whitey was a kid. Wayne wrote all about his seven-year spell as the Pine Woods Killer, telling her the stuff that didn’t make it into the papers or onto TV. He let her know that there had been twelve victims, not nine, and that the voices were still there, still talking away to him in the middle of the night.

  Nicole even had correspondence going with Charlie Manson for a while. They swapped a dozen letters but Charlie was too busy being in love with himself to fall for Nicole. All she was getting back was some crazy shit poems and songs that made no sense and, worse, weren’t worth much. She ditched Charlie and wished him well.

  Alison and Nicole were his favourites but sometimes he’d also been a social worker named Emma Hart, a kind and wealthy crusading grandmother called Olivia Wright, and a naïve but pretty student by the name of Jennifer Jackson. Hell, he’d even been a corruptible young nun named Sister Catherine.

  The Jeweller didn’t see anything wrong in it. Far from it. It worked a treat.

  He got regular letters from some of the most infamous killers on the planet. Sometimes extremely intimate and revealing letters. He’d been told things the press and the police had no idea about. More than that, he’d been a good friend to those w
ho needed one. He’d been loved and had brought happiness in return. How many of us can truly say that?

  Best of all though, he knew, quite literally, where bodies were buried. That, my friend, was priceless.

  CHAPTER 43

  Within a minute of being in Abbadon, she knew she was in the right and the wrong place. It was like tripping through a waking nightmare.

  On the face of it, it looked like any normal website. Well laid out, functional rather than flashy, it was like a dozen buy/sell and forum sites she’d used over the years. The difference was behind the forum subsections, inside the topics. The difference was in what you could buy.

  Drugs or guns? No problem. Someone to supply them, someone to fire them? Easy. Someone taken care of? That could be arranged. Anything you wanted. Dreams and nightmares catered for.

  Abbadon’s speciality, though, was the one she’d come looking for. Collectibles.

  She tentatively entered one of the American sections, seeing names both familiar and unknown leap out at her. Some of them, those who had killed most often, she knew. Others she had to look up, single killings that never made headlines even across the US, never mind across the Atlantic. And there were so, so many of them.

  She couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. Anything and everything was for sale as long as you had the stomach for it.

  Some guy named John Terence Bosko had murdered his brother. You could buy the brother’s bloodied shirt. Arturo Aguilar had stabbed a man to death in a bar brawl and, somehow, the knife was for sale. Hollis Allan Newton had poisoned a family of three and, seemingly, not all of the poison had been taken into evidence.

  The prices tended to match the fame: the more victims the more money, just as on surface sites such as KillingTime. Yet these items from little-known murders were higher because of the nature of it, because they were so hard to get.

  Then she saw a figure that made her sit up. Twenty thousand dollars for a knife. Her eyes flashed back for the murderer’s name but there wasn’t one, just the victim. Hayley Elizabeth Poulsen. She didn’t know the name at all and the sky-high price puzzled her. And no named killer.

  It took her a while to grasp the concept. The figure for this knife wasn’t so high despite the murder’s lack of notoriety but because of it. She opened a new window and went to her search engine to confirm it. Hayley Poulsen was missing, presumed dead, not seen since she left her home in Akron, Ohio, in August 2013.

  This was someone who hadn’t been caught. This was an unsolved, where the victim hadn’t even been found. The knife was, almost certainly, being sold by the killer.

  She didn’t know where to start processing that. Shock. Outrage for sure. Disgust. She wanted to phone the cops in Akron but stopped herself. That could, and would have to, wait. So, too, would a phone call to Hayley Poulsen’s family. She forced herself to go on.

  Some of the files didn’t include things for sale but macabre wish lists. People seeking to buy things related to specific killers or crimes. Neither money nor morals seemed to be any hindrance. Want Ed Gein furniture. Money no object for Albert Fish victim items. Bundy victim clothing wanted. Anyone? It went on and on.

  Some of the things that were or had been available must have been in circulation for many years without the rest of the world having a clue. She saw items from the twenties and thirties, gangland slayings and brutal murders, things that could only have got out there by someone being paid to turn a blind eye or to smuggle objects out.

  The scale of it was overwhelming, and she had to stop and collect herself. Her stomach was tightening and she could feel the stabs of pain increasing as her stress levels grew with every new discovery. She wanted to stop just as much as she wanted to go on.

  Just as the urge to get the hell out of it began to engulf her, she found a United Kingdom subsection and couldn’t ignore it. She felt a trail grow warmer and was loath to leave it, no matter how twisted.

  There were many fewer names but many more of them were familiar. Hindley and Brady. The Wests. Christie. Nilsen. Atto. Norris. Sutcliffe. You could buy belts, furniture, stolen underwear from victims, hammers . . . Christ! Her stomach somersaulted. Flesh. You could buy human flesh.

  Some sick bastard was offering the boiled flesh taken from the drains of Dennis Nilsen’s flat in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. The remains of his rent-boy victims.

  She shouldn’t be surprised, she told herself. But she still was. Nilsen killed them, cooked their body parts on his kitchen stove, then poured them down the sink. Liquefied, then solidified, the flesh clogged the drains and had to be removed. It was how Nilsen was finally caught.

  ‘As seen in the police crime museum in London’ was how the seller described it. Some of the congealed gunk had found its way into the Met’s black museum and some of it had also found its way into Abbadon.

  She leaned back on her pillow for a bit, nauseous at the thought. Her little lodger turned as her stomach did, resenting being disturbed. She patted her tummy, said an apology out loud, and carried on her trawl through hell.

  Inside the UK piece of Abbadon, she saw another subdivision. ‘Whitechapel’. She had no choice but to enter.

  She’d wondered before why there were virtually no Jack the Ripper collectibles on the surface sites apart from a copy of the fake ‘Dear Boss’ letter and some collector cards worth a couple of pounds. Even though it was over a hundred years since the killings, they were still incredibly high-profile and she had no doubts that items would have survived.

  Even before getting into all this, she’d read about the shawl that had supposedly been found on the body of Catherine Eddowes, the Ripper’s fourth victim. The story being pushed was that a policeman, Sergeant Amos Simpson, took the surprisingly expensive silk shawl from the crime scene and asked if he could take it home to his wife. It turned up nearly a century later and was said to have both the victim’s and the killer’s DNA on it. Sure, that didn’t seem far-fetched at all.

  The shawl, said to be coated with Kate Eddowes’s blood and the Ripper’s semen but actually covered more in doubt than either of those, went on sale at auction for a touch under three million dollars. Not surprisingly, no one wanted it.

  She’d wondered where such artefacts might be, and now she knew. They were all circulating underground, now, right in front of her eyes. Maybe they always had been in some shady, pre-Internet way, bought and sold by word of mouth, secret locations, used notes.

  She ran through them, barely able to stop herself. Little things. Old things. Odd things. Incredibly expensive and much wanted things. Many of them came with disclaimers, some came with guarantees of provenance. Or as much guarantee as a hundred-plus years of separation can offer.

  At least one of those things made her jaw drop. It came with the Abbadon stamp of certification in as much as everyone on the community seemed to have no doubt it was genuine.

  Liz Stride’s coat.

  Elizabeth Stride, Ripper victim number three. Found in Berner Street, Whitechapel.

  There was a photograph on the screen. A grainy crime-scene image of a wraith. More like a sketch than a photograph. The poor woman lying on her back, eyes closed, mouth bloated. Her lips were curled into a smile, as if she’d just been told a secret, a secret no one should ever know.

  Lizzie Stride was wearing what looked like a black cloth coat. It sat high on the neck, with a raised crisscross pattern as part of the material. Now, that coat, 128 years on, was for sale.

  Half of her wanted to know what was wrong with these people. The other half wanted to know how much. And she wanted to see it. A large and dirty part of her wanted to touch it, connect with it. A bit of that was professional but another, greater, portion was just rubbernecking. It was Jack the Ripper. And she wanted to know what it was like.

  It took less than an hour to find what else Stride had on her person when she was murdered. A black skirt and black crêpe bonnet. A checked neck scarf, a dark-brown velveteen bodice, two petticoats, a white chemise, whit
e stockings and spring-sided boots. In the pocket of her underskirt were a key, a piece of lead pencil, six large buttons, one small button, a comb, a spoon, a hook, a piece of muslin and two small pieces of paper.

  She went to the site’s search function and put in each item in turn. The white stockings were there. Available to buy. So too, were the collection of buttons. A poor woman’s bits and bobs, a pocketful of mix-and-mend, now worth money because she had her head nearly cut from her body. Blood money.

  She jotted down what she found, then searched Abbadon again.

  A white pocket handkerchief said to belong to Mary Ann Nichols. An empty tin matchbox and a mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, both in the possession of Kate Eddowes when she was killed. A comb in a paper case, belonging to Annie Chapman. Murder money.

  There was Ripper suspect murderabilia, too. A handwritten letter from Dr Neil Cream, almost certainly not Jack but the killer of at least four women and one man. A pair of kid gloves found on the drowned body of Montague John Druitt. A tie that had belonged to George Chapman, who poisoned three women during the Ripper era.

  Hell, there were case files, too. Police case files. She couldn’t believe that and had to go back online, and wasn’t sure whether to be glad or not when she found out it was true. Several case files had gone missing over the years. She couldn’t be sure what was truth and what was conspiracy theory, but the suggestion was that cops on the investigation had taken them as souvenirs, something to show their grandchildren that they’d worked the most famous murder case on the books.

  There were few or no case files left. Those that hadn’t been sneaked away were destroyed during the Blitz in World War Two along with most of the City of London files. Of course, there were bunker nuts online who believed this was just a convenient cover-up and that the files were removed to stop the truth being revealed.