The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

INTRODUCTION by Roger Wilkes

Twenty-five years ago, I disturbed the bones of an old murder case. It was unsolved; a man had been convicted but then freed on appeal, and no one else had subsequently been brought to book. Back in 1931, the hot-from-the-hob headlines had blazed the tale. An insurance agent called Wallace had murdered his drab little wife, beating out her brains in their blood-boltered front parlour in Liverpool with such unclerkly ferocity that the walls were streaked, spattered and flecked as high as the picture rail. Wallace was accused of having devised an alibi of consummate cunning, involving the critical synchromesh of logged telephone calls, word-of-mouth messages, at least three tram timetables and a bogus appointment. Picking it over for a radio programme half a century later, a panel of experts agreed that Wallace did not murder his wife-indeed, could not have done so. Moreover, newly uncovered testimony suggested a different solution and buttressed the case against a different suspect, a much younger man who boasted secret CID connections, a propensity to steal and to dissemble, and who nursed a grudge against Wallace. Yet amid the excitement of discovery, we discerned an unexpected note of melancholy. It now seemed a shame to spoil a perfectly good whodunnit. We had, in a sense, performed the reverse of alchemy and transmuted the burnished gold of mystery into dross. Solving the riddle had diminished the story, reduced it to a commonplace. Everyone loves a good murder, but especially a murder that defies solution, that continues to frustrate and ultimately defeat our forensic skills and the constructs of logic. We’d rather our unsolved crimes remain unsolved. What draws us is the magnetic field of mystery.

For more than three hundred years, readers of crime fiction have accorded with the seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne. “I love to lose myself in a mystery,” declared this strange and curious sage in one of his few homespun moments. But his enthusiasm was characteristically prognostic-he had identified a trend that was only to achieve its full flowering a full three centuries later during the Golden Age of the detective novel. The English poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) was a self-confessed addict, but viewed the popularity of the whodunnit as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty, the dialectic of innocence and guilt. Auden was anxious to dignify the genre. He described the noir tales of the American Raymond Chandler, a writer of the hard-boiled school, as serious studies of a criminal milieu, to be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art. And yet, detective fiction is imprisoned within a basic formula. It is a ritual, as Auden himself reminds us: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.” [1]

The connoisseur of real-life crime is affronted by this comfortable and threadbare format. He knows that in the real world, not every crime mystery is solved by the arrival of the detective, the knitting of brows and the application of improbable powers of deduction. Murder is always mysterious. Even if (as the American murder scholar Wendy Lesser suggests) we know all the who-what-when facts, “the distance between our own lives and the act of murder leaves a space where mystery creeps in. We seem able, though, to accept the full subtlety, the full complexity of the mystery only in a work of fiction, which can give us other satisfactions than The Definite Answer.” [2] There is no fiction in the stories that follow; but neither is there a full tally of Definite Answers. Far from it. Here are crimes so puzzling, sometimes clueless, often motiveless, that we can only guess at the truth of them.

The history of unsolved crime is as old as the history of crime itself, but it has only been documented in any coherent form for the last 200 years or so. One of the earliest recorded cases of unsolved murder in London dates from 1678 when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, politician, magistrate and woodmonger, was found dead in a ditch. The crime remains one of the most celebrated of historical British mysteries. Sir Edmund was the magistrate before whom Titus Oates swore the existence of a Popish Plot, by which English Protestants would be massacred, the King assassinated and a Catholic ministry installed in his place. The “plot” was Oates’s invention, but Godfrey’s murder ensured that the tale gained widespread currency. Whoever did the murder was supposed to have dripped blobs of wax on to the body, possibly in an effort to throw suspicion on to the priests from the Popish Queen’s Chapel. Three Catholic suspects were duly arrested, tried and hanged for the murder, but the trial was a travesty and the part played by this wretched trio in Godfrey’s demise (if any) remains hidden. The great essayist in black humour Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), applying the principles of aesthetic criticism to murder (“as one of the fine arts”), judged Sir Edmund’s assassination “the finest work of the seventeenth century” precisely because no one knew who had done it. “In the grand feature of mystery, which in some shape or other ought to colour every judicious attempt at murder, it is excellent,” de Quincey declared, “for the mystery is not yet dispersed.” [3]

Another early unsolved case occurred in Bristol in the middle of the eighteenth century, de Quincey’s Augustan age of murder, a double killing he applauded for its “originality of design, boldness and depth of style”. This was the shocking case of a Mrs Ruscombe, who lived in College Green with a single maidservant. Some suspicion arising, neighbours broke into the house and found Mrs Ruscombe murdered in her bedroom and the servant murdered on the stairs. The case was never officially solved, although suspicion fell on several local tradesmen including a baker and a chimney sweep. Some fifty years later, de Quincey himself claimed to have learned the real murderer’s identity during a visit to the home of a celebrated surgeon. The surgeon kept a private museum, in which de Quincey was shown a cast or deathmask taken from a notorious Lancashire highwayman. This villain concealed his profession from his neighbours by drawing woollen stockings over his horse’s legs to muffle the clatter of its hooves as he rode up a flagged alley to his stable. The surgeon had dissected the highwayman’s body under curious circumstances. “At the time of his execution for highway robbery,” he explained, “I was studying under Cruickshank and the man’s figure was so uncommonly fine that no money or exertion was spared to get into possession of him with the least possible delay. By the connivance of the under-sheriff, he was cut down within the legal time and instantly put into a chaise-and-four; so that when he reached Cruickshank’s he was positively not dead. Mr -, a young student at that time, had the honour of giving him the coupdegrace, and finishing the sentence of the law.” De Quincey was sceptical at first, but two pieces of information from a Lancashire woman who knew the highwayman convinced him. “One was the fact of his absence for a whole fortnight at the period of that murder; the other that, within a very little time after, the neighbourhood of this highwayman was deluged with dollars-now, Mrs Ruscombe was known to have hoarded about 2,000 of that coin. Be the artist, however, who he might, the affair remains a durable monument of his genius; for such was the impression of awe and the sense of power left behind by the strength of the conception manifested in this murder, that no tenant (as I was told in 1810) had been found up to that time for Mrs Ruscombe’s house.” [4]

Such exceptional murders aside, crime chronicles from Biblical times until the eighteenth century disclose few cases that were unresolved or that proved insoluble; indeed, there was an underlying assumption that although the mills of justice may have ground slow and exceeding small, at least they ground passably straight. Justice always got it right. Forces of law and order, including those predating the modern police, were deemed incorruptible and all-knowing, incapable of making mistakes. Virtually every suspect fed into the machinery of the courts emerged at the other end bearing the brand of guilt and was often doomed to die. Acquittals were rare. A more brutal public appetite demanded vengeance. It would not do to have crimes left unsolved, loose ends trailing. Fortunately, when cases fell short of a conviction, few people came to hear about it.

The spread of literacy in the early nineteenth century put a brake on such ignorance. In Britain, a series of sensational murders (the Thurtell-Hunt case, the crimes of the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, and the murder by William Corder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn) excited the interest of an embryonic popular press, and the die was cast. Indeed, in 1824 the trial of Thurtell and Hunt, a couple of Regency conmen who bludgeoned their victim, shot him and finally slit his throat, was the first “trial by newspaper”. But these cases all ended with a snap of the hangman’s trap that was richly deserved, and the day of the unsolved crime as an identifiable genre had not yet dawned.

Murder was a favourite topic of popular literature in England as early as Elizabethan times, and accounts of occasional homicides “pathetic or merely horrifying” appeared in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsheets. Shakespeare read about real-life murder, and so, in a later age, did Dickens. In his day, an eager reading public drawn from the literate (and, by definition, “respectable”) section of the population devoured the accounts of crimes and criminals pulled together and published by the hacks of Grub Street. Detective fiction was also putting down roots, with Edgar Allen Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” of the 1840s establishing a format that would reach its apotheosis nearly a century later. Fashionable ladies despatched their servants to purchase the most celebrated of Grub Street compilations, the NewgateCalendar; their daughters and granddaughters thronged the Old Bailey half a century later for the trial of the Stauntons, the family accused in the so-called Penge Mystery: “well-dressed women, favoured occupants of the choicest seats [who] stared through lorgnettes and opera-glasses at the four pale and weary creatures… in the dock”, latter-day tricoteuses over-dressed, over-jewelled and over-victualled on champagne who lapped up every detail of the evidence “and [who] skimmed the pages of Punch when the interest flagged.” [5]

The lower orders, meanwhile, devoured their news of crimes and criminals from cheap broadsheets printed and hawked about the streets by entrepreneurs such as James “Jemmy” Catnach (1792-1841). At the time of the Thurtell-Hunt case, Catnach alone, operating four presses day and night, produced a quarter of a million such broadsheets; when the trial began he hired two extra printers and turned out half a million copies of the proceedings. They were crude and flimsy productions, but they had an immediate mass appeal. Few survive. Like those observed in London as early as the 1680s by the poet John Dryden, these sordid and often scandalous sheets were not designed for posterity. Most were passed roughly from hand to hand, or pasted to walls before becoming, in Dryden’s lapidary phrase, “martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum”. [6]

But it was the yellow press, launched in the middle of the nineteenth century, that offered its army of semi-literate readers a large weekly helping of crime that became as much an essential ingredient of the dreary British Sunday as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. By the 1830s, the Observer was proclaiming twenty columns of crime a week, a level of coverage only matched by the NewsoftheWorld, making its debut in 1843. By the 1870s, the DailyTelegraph, founded in 1855 as the first penny daily, was able to boast the biggest circulation in the world (200,000 copies a day), and to attribute its success chiefly to its comprehensive coverage of crime. At last, the British middle classes were becoming (respectably) crime-conscious.

Murder was also a staple of Victorian popular fiction. The Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century had spawned a low-life offspring, the crude genre known as the penny dreadful (and its collateral, the shilling shocker). On a higher plane altogether, Charles Dickens also helped to raise Victorian awareness of criminality, since most of his novels featured murder, robbery, rape, incest, arson or some assorted villainy. Dickens, an experienced journalist, published his early works in weekly parts and recognized the cliffhanging possibilities of crime-based plots. After his death in 1870, other writers like Wilkie Collins seized the flame and carried it forward. Collins’s novel TheMoonstone contains echoes of real-life Victorian cases, while the now-forgotten ChetwyndCalverley by William Harrison Ainsworth contains a poisoning case squarely based on the notorious Bravo mystery at Balham in 1876, one of the earliest “unsolved” crimes in the age of mass literacy.

I have surveyed the territory with a wide-angle lens. Every crime included in this collection is (or was) “unsolved” in one way or another, but in staking out the limits of my territory I have stretched the definition of that word in order to accommodate as wide a range of cases as possible. At the core of these cases are those real-life mysteries that are as perplexing now as they ever were – they encompass murders by person or persons unknown, crimes that resulted in no criminal charge, or where (demonstrably) the wrong person was accused or (again, demonstrably) the right person was not. Pre-eminent among these puzzlements are the crimes of Jack the Ripper in the East End of London in the so-called autumn of terror in 1888.

The Ripper killings remain shrouded in a fog of absurd claims and improbable culprits. No one will ever know the Ripper’s identity for certain, which is why the mystery still supports an annual crop of new books, articles, films, videos and websites, not to mention an entire society of Ripperologists, complete with official newsletter and merchandise. Among these seekers after truth are numbered some of the true crime industry’s most distinguished and talented, along with the daftest and most dismal. Happily and harmlessly, each keeps the other entertained. In 1998 Colin Wilson calculated that no fewer than fifty books had appeared on the case since Leonard Matters first proposed a certain Dr Stanley as the Ripper in a book published in 1929. And yet behind the terrifying and unstoppable juggernaut of Ripper writing, there is little that encapsulates the facts, the theories and the evidence in the digestible, if not bite-sized, form sought by the anthologist. Here, for the first time, Philip Sugden, historian, teacher and Yorkshireman, fills that void while keeping the coolest of heads.

The Victorian Ripper was the progenitor of the modern Mr X, that shadowy wraith responsible for countless unsolved crimes of the twentieth century. He and his kind were the people who killed Elizabeth Short, the American floozy known as the Black Dahlia; who murdered and mutilated heaven-knows-who in the Brighton Trunk Crime Number One; who spirited Shergar away in the mists of an Irish dawn. There is the Mr X who snuffed out Mary Rogers in Edgar Allen Poe’s New York, and the one who plugged Jake Lingle in the Chicago of booze and bullets. There is his more contemporary counterpart, the Mr X who masqueraded as the Zodiac killer in 1960s California, and another who brutally murdered Janet Brown in a peaceful English village as recently as 1995. We meet them all here, through a glass darkly, but not yet face to face. Irving Wallace, Colin Wilson and Jonathan Goodman are among those making the introductions.

This collection conducts us through the ranks of the acquitted, men and women who have placed themselves on a jury of their peers and received deliverance, but who have left a thousand questions unanswered. Eric Ambler ponders the case of Dr John Bodkin Adams in an essay seeing the light of day for the first time in nearly forty years. The American humourist James Thurber wryly recalls the classic Hall-Mills affair from the 1920s. Then there are classic puzzles from Britain between the wars, such as the case of the spinsterly wan Annie Hearn and her salmon sandwiches – retold by the ebullient Daniel Farson – and that of Ronald Light and his infamously abandoned green bicycle, related by the American master, Edmund Pearson.

These were cases in which the jury were agreed that the evidence against the accused was wanting. There are others where juries have returned guilty verdicts, only to have those verdicts overturned by a higher court. Of these, the case of William Herbert Wallace from 1931 remains pre-eminent, the neplusultra of murder mysteries. The trial jury’s verdict of guilty was speedily reversed on appeal, and Wallace went free, only to die within two years of a chronic kidney ailment. It was a nightmare of a case, straight from the pages of Kafka or Poe. Raymond Chandler reckoned it would “always be unbeatable”. In 1940, the doyenne of criminologists, Fryn Tennyson Jesse, drove around Liverpool on a crime-crawl. “We found the little house,” she wrote to her friend and fellow murder-fancier Alexander Woollcott, “and it was occupied.” Without knocking, Miss Jesse peered in from the street. “The windows were so thickly shrouded with swathings of Nottingham lace curtains that it was impossible to get a glimpse of the rooms within,” she reported. Her view may have been obscured, but not her insight. Miss Jesse’s estimation of the Wallace case, dating from the early 1950s, differs from mine, but here it is, appearing in print for the first time.

This miscellany also covers cases in which, although crime was committed, no one was subsequently charged. Included in this category is the murder of the Hollywood film director William Desmond Taylor, recalled by the super-selling Erle Stanley Gardner. Meanwhile another American, Dorothy Dunbar, puzzles over a causecélèbre from the London of almost half a century earlier, the Bravo mystery at Balham.

There is a small category of cases which remain unsolved because of outbreaks of judicial foot-in-mouth disease. These are instances in which those who were thought to have been responsible for crimes have subsequently been not only exonerated but officially pardoned. I have excluded the ordeal of Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and baby daughter at 10 Rillington Place, west London. Although Evans was eventually pardoned, the solution to the mystery seemed clear – Mrs Evans and her child had been murdered, along with others, by another resident at 10 Rillington Place, John Reginald Halliday Christie. We can be much less certain, however, about what really happened in a handful of other cases, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920 and the British Drummond family, massacred on a touring holiday in France in 1952. The American fish peddlers Sacco and Vanzetti were officially exonerated by the Governor of Massachusetts in 1977, fifty years after they were executed by electric chair.

Sometimes, juries are unable to agree on the question of culpability, and the legal process becomes deadlocked. The result can be that the accused goes free, leaving the question of guilt unresolved, as happened in two cases in different continents in the first decade of the twentieth century. In New York, Nan Patterson, the girl from the Floradora chorus, left little by way of a mystery when she emerged from her third trial to public acclaim in 1906, but the story comes up fresh at the hands of Alexander Woollcott and one is inclined to excuse him if his exuberance betrays a ring of invention. More soberly, as befits an English barrister, Jack Smith-Hughes is altogether less tolerant of black-bearded Willie Gardiner. The Methodist elder of piratical aspect seems to have bamboozled the juries at both his trials.

Was it murder? The question invites us to consider another selection of cases in which the evidence is just so intractable as to leave us at best doubtful and at worst openly sceptical. For nearly forty years, the debate over how Marilyn Monroe really met her death has spiralled this way and that, conspiracy theorists have laid siege to the facts, and the entire case has been sucked down into the black holes of the Kennedy assassinations. Kirk Wilson pulls together what is known about the death of Hollywood’s most potent female icon. From an earlier age and landscape, the Scottish criminologist William Roughead throws the tragedy of Ireland’s Eye into the sharpest relief, and explains that although the accused man Kirwan was convicted of murder and punished with a life sentence, subsequent medical opinion suggests that Kirwan’s wife probably died of natural causes, and that in fact there was no murder. In the Maybrick poisoning case of 1889, it is equally likely that no murder was done, and that the victim (the drug-driven cotton man James Maybrick) succumbed to his self-administered nostrums without the help of his neglected wife Florence. Arrested and tried for murder, but in reality convicted for the unpardonable sin of adultery, Mrs Maybrick’s martyrdom resounds with the grinding of gears to modern ears. At Liverpool prison, she lay in the condemned cell listening to her own scaffold being erected, but at least her deliverance was at hand, and a reprieve (the mob, for once, clamouring for mercy) snatched her from the brink.

Crime and its insolubility has hooked and held a surprisingly distinguished crop of writers. Well into middle age, Rebecca West, hailed at the halfway point of the twentieth century as the best writer in the English language, suddenly turned her talent to crime reporting. West produced a brilliant study of the post-war treason trials in TheMeaningofTreason; its portrait of William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was acclaimed as the best single biography she was ever to write. In December 1949 she turned to the case of Donald Hume, accused of the murder of the shady car dealer Stanley Setty. Her impressions at Hume’s trial, one of which is included here, were published in the newspapers before being reworked into her full-scale and haunting study MrSettyandMrHume which appeared a few years later. Hume was acquitted of murder, and Miss West thought it likely that Setty’s murder was likely to rank as one of the great unsolved mysteries. “The possibility that Hume murdered Mr Setty can definitely be excluded,” she wrote. “But who murdered Mr Setty, and how, and where, is known to nobody but the murderer. Not for lack of evidence. That is piled sky-high. There is so much that whatever theory the mind may base on that evidence, there exists some fact which disproves it.” [7] Hume had pleaded guilty to being an accessory to Setty’s murder, and served eight years of a twelve-year sentence. On his release, he went to a Sunday newspaper and confessed to murdering Stanley Setty. In fact, Hume went on to murder again and was sentenced to life imprisonment, spending nearly thirty years in Broadmoor.

Like Rebecca West, the critic Alexander Woollcott enjoyed a lifelong fascination with murder, and was one of the first to strike a distinctively American tone in writing about crime. The British may have the best mysteries, but by and large the Americans write up crimes with greater fizz. It was an American, Truman Capote, who in the 1960s invented a completely new genre, the non-fiction novel, and with the publication of InColdBlood raised the true crime book to the level of literature. In the 1930s, Woollcott relished the retelling of old murders in what he self-deprecatingly dismissed as “a grab-bag of twice-told tales”. He was living in a less sophisticated age than our own, in which the incidence of unsolved crime (or, at any rate, murder) is statistically rare. Of the 716 murders reported in England and Wales in 2003-4, for example, only fifty-four remained unsolved a year later, a clear-up rate of 92 per cent. Improved detection and scientific techniques are responsible, methodology that would have been unrecognizable (indeed, unimaginable) to the fictional 1940s detectives of the Department of Dead Ends, a non-existent branch of Scotland Yard, invented by writer Roy Vickers [8], in which details of all unsolved murders were stored. But in spite of such giant strides, unsolved murders will never be killed off altogether. Consigning mystery to history is not a realistic option. The American crime writer Ed McBain believes people like mysteries because they can come close to the violence without being part of it, and can be sure that “the people who are doing the violence at the end of it are going to be caught.” But the stories that follow have no ending, for they finish curled up in a question mark; we are drawn closer to them because the mystery is not yet dispersed.