The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

A COINCIDENCE OF CORPSES by Jonathan Goodman

Between the wars, the golden age of rail travel produced a sanguinary slew of trunk crimes. In Brighton, a raffish seaside town on the English south coast, there were two in the same summer, that of 1934; only one was ever solved, leaving the other (so to speak) still to be called for. The unsolved case became known as the Brighton Trunk Crime No. 1. The victim-a woman-was never identified, and her killer never caught. By the most extraordinary of coincidences, barely a month later, a second corpse was found in a second trunk in the same town. This time, the remains were identified; they were those of Violette Kaye, a onetime dancer turned prostitute, whose lover, a petty crook calling himself Tony Mancini, was tried for her murder in a case known as the Brighton Trunk Crime No. 2. Thanks to an Olympian defence by his lawyer, the great Norman Birkett KC, Mancini was acquitted. Sensation (eventually) followed sensation: forty years on, in 1976, in an interview with the News of the World headed“I’ve Got Away with Murder”, Tony Mancini confessed his guilt. Trunk Crime No. 1, meanwhile, remains unsolved. This account is by Jonathan Goodman (b. 1931), unquestionably Britain’s leading historian of crime. A former theatre and television director, his dissection of the Wallace case in Liverpool in 1931 (see F. Tennyson Jesse’s Checkmate pp. 81-93), published in 1969 as The Killing of Julia Wallace remains an unrivalled achievement of original research and forensic insight.