The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

By midsummer of 1934, that year had the stench of decay about it. It was the sort of year that is remembered for what most people who lived through it would prefer to forget.

In Callander, Ontario, an accident of fertility called the Dionne quins was perverted into a multimillion-dollar industry. Only a day or so after the births on 28 May, while it was still touch-and-go whether any of the babies would survive, the father received an offer for them to appear, a constellation of stars outshining singular freaks of nature, at the Chicago World’s Fair; he signed the agreement after consulting the local priest, who gave his advice in return for a commission on the deal. But before long other offers, and more lucrative ones, poured in, giving ample reasons to welsh on the bargain with the Chicago promoters, ample funds to contest their claim. The Dionne Quins (yes, with a capital Q by now) went on to become an advertising symbol, a public relations exercise, a product to boost sales of other products. It never occurred to anyone that they might need protection against anything other than breach of contract.

On the sweltering-hot Sabbath-day of 22 July, John Dillinger-“Public Enemy No. 1” and the first gangster to have a fan-club-was shot to death by an impromptu firing-squad of FBI agents as he left the Biograph Cinema, Chicago, after seeing ManhattanMelody, in which a prosecutor (played by William Powell) convicted his friend (Clark Gable) of murder. Following the shooting, the most human gesture was that of a policeman, so delighted to see Dillinger dead that he shook hands with the corpse. Spectators dipped hankies in the blood; some lady onlookers went so far as to kneel and soak the selvedges of their skirts in it. As soon as the inquest was over, a queue-shaped mob surged past the body as it lay in state in a mortuary. A crowd even more dense-5,000 strong, it was reckoned, many carrying picnic-hampers-was locked outside the cemetery (and was drenched but not depleted by a thunderstorm-“God’s tears,” according to someone who was prevented from attending) while Dillinger’s remains were interred. Those remains, for which Dillinger’s father had turned down an offer of $10,000, weren’t quite complete: during the autopsy-a select, all-ticket affair-a light-fingered person with a quaint taste in mementoes had pocketed the brain.

June 30 ended as the Night of the Long Knives: Adolf Hitler, self-styled as “the supreme court of the German nation”, organized the massacre of ninety or so people whose political views and morals did not coincide with his own. And on 25 July, over the border in Austria, the Heimwehr Fascists attempted a coup d’état. The timing was awry, though: the Nazis turned up at the Chancellery just after the Cabinet had gone to lunch. Still, Dr Dollfuss was shot as he tried to escape. The Nazis refused to allow anyone out of the building to summon medical help, and the “little Chancellor” bled to death on a red leather couch.

Few people in Great Britain seem to have been specially concerned about the atrocities in Germany and Austria-least of all, Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted biff-boys, who were far too busy carrying out atrocities of their own, all in the name of King and Country. On 8 June, members of parliament expressed disquiet at the scenes of well-drilled thuggery they had witnessed at a Nuremburg-style rally at Olympia, the night before, and the Home Secretary recited an assurance that “the situation is under most careful scrutiny”. Maybe it was some consolation to victims of blackshirt brutality to know that the Home Office was watching what was happening.

A casual scanning of newspapers of 1934 gives an impression of a year that had more than its fair share of death; but this is probably an optical illusion induced by a large tally of banner-headlined accounts of bizarre deaths and post-mortem occurrences. On a blustery day at the recently-opened Whipsnade Zoo, a man seeking to retrieve his bowler from the lions’ den fell on the fatal side of the barrier… the first man to be hanged in Austria for fifteen years was a half-witted hobo who had set fire to a hayrick… the wife of the Nepalese Minister to Great Britain having died, she was cremated at an alfresco, coffin-less ceremony at Carshalton, South London… in America, a resident of the buckeye state of Ohio suffered a slapstick-comedy death by slipping on a banana-skin. And in Brighton-addendum to attractions that were part and parcel of the holiday season-bodies were treated as baggage.

BRIGHTON. County borough, Sussex, 51 miles south of London (3rd-class return rail-fare, 12/10d.); on English Channel; magnificent promenade (3 miles) with two piers; fisheries. Pop. (1933 census) 146,700.

Its fortune founded in the middle of the eighteenth century by Dr Richard Russell of Lewes, who enticed rich sufferers from scrofula (otherwise known as the King’s Evil) to bathe in-and even to quaff-the sea-water at Brighthelmstone, a fishing village whose sole claim to fame was as the place where Charles II embarked for France following his defeat at Worcester, Brighton owed much of its subsequent prosperity and growth, and all of its architectural splendour, to the morally insane but aesthetically inclined George, Prince Regent, who was a regular visitor in summers from that of 1783 till that of 1820, shortly before he was crowned King, and in half a dozen summers afterwards. The First Gentleman’s influence was at least two-fold: his presence acted as a magnet to others, and aspects of his taste were mimicked in the design of houses and hostelries that were erected to cope with the rush.

In 1934, Brighton was still the most resplendent seaside resort in England, perhaps in Europe. Pebbledashed and Tudorbethan residential nonentities were already blemishing the hem of the town, and office blocks, posing as architecture, degrading the skyline, but these were just first symptoms of a disfiguring rash. The general impression was of the Regency: of bowfronts and balconies, of faded stucco, of snooty squares, terraces and crescents (some of which in propinquitous Hove had conveniences for dogs, few of which took advantage of them).

In this setting-and, by a perverse visual alchemy, seeming to be apt to it-there were all the gaudy trappings of a trippers’ town: red-blue-and-predominantly-white seafood stalls, assailing the nostrils with the intermingled scents of vinegar and brine… fortune-tellers’ booths, their velveteen-curtained windows patched with pictures of customers as celebrated as Tallulah Bankhead, Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha (whose lollipop-like beacons appeared on the streets that year) and Amy Johnson… arcades crammed with penny-in-the-slot peepshows and pin-tables… a display of waxwork dummies… hundreds of greasy-spoon cafés (“Thermos Flasks Filled with Pleasure”) and near as many pubs… dance-halls… an aquarium… souvenir emporiums that did a roaring trade in miniature-po ashtrays, sticks of rock-candy, boaters with ribbons that extended invitations such as “KISS ME QUICK”, and naughty postcards painted by Donald McGill. There was even, on the prom, a store that offered not only Rhinestone jewellery and strings of paste beads but also-unsurprisingly, come to think of it-“Ear Piercing While-U-Wait”.

Since the days of the Prince Regent and his corps-d’amour, Brighton had enjoyed a reputation as a place where sexual illicitness was allowed, expected, invited even; when the town was mentioned in conversation, a knowing wink was very nearly implicit. “A dirty weekend at Brighton” was a catch-phrase so familiar as to suggest that the town had cornered the market as a venue for sexcapades-that weekends were never at all grubby at resorts like Frinton, Lytham St Anne’s and Bognor Regis. As is often the case, with people as well as with places, the reality was less exciting than the reputation.

Brighton had acquired more nicknames over the years than anywhere else in the land. In the decade or so following the Great War, when the race-course and the town were infested by villains, “Doctor Brighton”, “London-by-the-Sea”, “Old Ocean’s Bauble” and other chamber-of-commerce-nurtured sobriquets were joined by “Soho-on-Sea” and “The Queen of the Slaughtering Places”. But the preposterous coincidence of the town’s being the scene of three of the five known trunk-crimes in Great Britain made “Torso City” perhaps the most deserved nickname of all.

The first trunk-murder was committed in 1831 by John Holloway, a twenty-six-year-old labourer on the Brighton Chain Pier, who was assisted in his post-executional chores by the fact that his victim, his wife Celia, had stood only four feet three inches tall. His crime was brought home to him at Lewes Assizes on 14 December, and he was hanged two days later.

The next two trunk-murders were London sensations.

In 1905, Arthur Devereux, a chemist’s assistant, poisoned his wife and two-year-old twin sons with salts of morphine, and crammed the bodies into a tin trunk fitted with a home-made airtight cover, which he deposited in a warehouse at Kensal Rise. Three months later, in April, his mother-in-law got permission to have the trunk opened. Arrested in Coventry, Devereux was tried at the Old Bailey in July; the jury rejected his plea of insanity (which was supported by a clergyman who asserted that Devereux was “a little bit off the top”), and he was hanged in August.

The third trunk-employing murderer was John Robinson, an estate agent who in May 1927 did away with an aspiring prostitute called Minnie Bonati in his office facing Rochester Row Police Station, and afterwards dismembered the body, packed the portions in a trunk and deposited the trunk in the left-luggage office at Charing Cross Station. Robinson, who had scattered incriminating evidence as if it were confetti, was, like Devereux, hanged in the month of August and at Pentonville Gaol.

As far as is known, there was a lull of nigh on seven years before Brighton, home of the inaugural trunk-crime, became the main setting for more than one.

17 June 1934, the day when a large amount of the first-discovered body came to light, was a Sunday: a bright, tranquil day, one of many that summer, with the temperature on the south coast rising into the seventies by early afternoon. In Brighton’s railway station, on the brow of Queen’s Road, the sunlight, softened by its struggle through the grimy glass of the vaulted canopy, descended in dust-dotted, steam-flecked columns that emphasized the shadows.

Four o’clock; the median of a busy day at the station; a hiatus of calm between the arrival of the last of the special trains that had brought thousands of trippers to the town and the departure of the first of the trains that would take most of them-moist, pink-faced, salty-lipped-away after a Nice Day by the Sea.

It was stuffy in the left-luggage office. Occasionally, the movement of a bus, cab or car in the forecourt of the station would send a breeze scuttling across the linoleum-surfaced counter; but this merely rearranged the stale air. And it certainly had no deodorizing effect on an item of luggage that, at that moment, was being discussed in unflattering terms-and not for the first time-by William Vinnicombe and James Lelliot, the attendants on the two-till-ten shift.

The plywood trunk was brand-new. Its covering of light-brown canvas was clean, unscratched-marred only by the counterfoil of the threepenny ticket, number G. 1945, that had been dabbed on the lid when the trunk had been left for safe-keeping eleven days before, on 6 June.

The trunk stood solitary on the stone floor, as if shunned by the pieces of luggage on the tiers of wide, slatted shelves. Actually, it had been left on the floor because of its weight. Harry Rout, the attendant on the other shift who had accepted the trunk, had told Vinnicombe that he remembered saying how heavy it was to the man who had handed it in. The only other thing that Rout had recalled of the transaction was that it had taken place some time between six and seven on the Wednesday evening. In his memory, the depositor of the trunk was faceless, formless; he might, just might, recognize the man if he saw him again-doubtful, though. After all, 6 June was Derby Day, and crowds of racegoers returning from Epsom Downs had combined with the usual early-evening commuter-rush to overcrowd the station.

Now, standing as distant from the trunk as the confines of the left-luggage office would allow, Vinnicombe and Lelliot agreed that the smell from it-which they had first noticed a couple of days before and wrongly attributed to a shoulder of lamb insufficiently wrapped in sheets of the BrightonArgus-was growing stronger, more pungent, with every minute that passed. Before long-and in no time at all if the fine weather persisted-the odour would be unbearable.

Something was rotting within the trunk; there was no doubt about that. But what? The smell, as well as being noxious, was unique in their experience. In all probability, both men surmised what was causing the smell. Neither of them, however, was prepared to put the thought into words.

“Whatever is is,” William Vinnicombe prevaricated, “it’s definitely not lilies of the valley.”

The conversation about the trunk drifted on; aimlessly, repetitively, uncertainly. At last-spurred, perhaps, by a specially rich whiff-Vinnicombe decided that enough was enough. Leaving Lelliot to hold the fort and to endure the smell alone, he went in search of a railway policeman.

As it happened, the officer he found was hidden from public gaze, having a chat with the constable of the Brighton police force assigned to uphold law and order in the environs of the terminus. Neither officer was pleased at having his unofficial tea-break interrupted, but when Vinnicombe explained the reason for his own absence from his post, both of them accompanied him back to it. Having sampled what troubled the attendant, they agreed with him-and with the more talkative Lelliot-that the trunk gave cause for suspicion; they only nodded their agreement, then hastened from the left-luggage office and began breathing again. Talking to each other, they concluded that the trunk had to be opened and its contents examined, but that the adding together of their respective years of service did not equal the authority to take on the task. The Brighton policeman “got on the blower” to his station, which was a section of the town hall, and within a few minutes (the town hall being just over a quarter of a mile away, close to the sea) they were joined by Detective-Constable Edward Taylor. The latter, a man of action, borrowed his uniformed colleague’s truncheon and used it to prise open the two catch-locks on the side of the trunk. Then he flung back the lid. And then, his need for resuscitation easily overcoming his curiosity, he staggered out on to the concourse. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he was sure that the fumes from the trunk had seeped into his clothing. (Perhaps not imagination at all: even a year later, the trunk, sans contents and having had dozens of drenchings with disinfectant, gave off such a disgusting odour that the spare room at the police station where it was kept was dubbed the “stink-hole”.)

Taylor was joined by another detective-constable, Arthur Stacey (whose slight delay is explained by the fact that, having been ordered to proceed to the terminus, he had decided to wait for a tram rather than make himself intolerably sweaty by walking). The two of them dashed into the left-luggage office, stared into the trunk, observed a large brown-paper parcel tied with cord of the type that was used in venetian blinds, scrabbled some of the paper away, sufficient to reveal a female torso, and dashed out again. Having recovered, Stacey telephoned the police station to request-no, to insist upon-the despatch of the head of the CID (never mind if it was his Sunday off) and other senior detectives and an undertaker’s shell and canvas screens and the police surgeon and a posse of uniformed constables to what he described as “the scene of the worst crime we’ve had in donkey’s years”.

By the time the rush of homeward-bound day-trippers got under way, the left-luggage office was obscured by decorators’ sheets; a scribbled notice apologized for the inconvenience of temporary closure. The offensive trunk, contents and all, had been removed to the mortuary. Its floor-space had been scrubbed with boiling water and lysol soap, and half a dozen detectives (known in Brighton as “splits”) were perusing the remaining left-luggage for indications of the presence of the limbs and head that had been detached from the torso. No such parts were discovered. (But the search did reveal other human remains. A battered Moses-basket, on the lid of which the initials VP had been partly scratched away, was found to contain the body of a baby-a girl who, if she had lived at all, had survived no longer than a few days. As the basket had been deposited as far back as 23 February, Detective-Inspector Arthur Pelling, the officer in charge of the investigation, felt confident in saying that there was “no possible connection between this discovery and the trunk case”.) The search was still going on when Captain W.J. Hutchinson, the ex-soldier who was chief-constable of Brighton, got in touch with the duty officer at both Scotland Yard and the London headquarters of the railway police, to ask for all left-luggage offices in the south of England-in coach depots as well as railway stations-to be scoured for suspicious baggage.

At the mortuary, the trunk was unpacked by the police surgeon. Not all at once, but over the next couple of days, the following facts were established apropos of the contents:

Excepting the wounds of decapitation and dismemberment, the torso appeared to be uninjured; a small pimple below the left breast was the sole distinguishing mark.

As well as the brown paper and the venetian-blind cord (19 feet of it; disappointingly unpeculiar, available from thousands of hardware stores at a halfpenny a yard), there were some hanks of cotton wool (used to soak up the blood?) and a once-white face-flannel with a red border. Written in blue pencil on one of the sheets of wrapping paper were letters that looked like f-o-r-d; there seemed to be a preceding letter-d, perhaps, or a hasty l-but this was only just visible, on the right-hand edge of a patch of congealed blood. Was “ford” the end of a surname? Or of a place name?-Dartford, Guildford, Stafford, for instance. Or was “ford” a misreading? Were the letters actually h-o-v-e?-and, if so, was there a connection with the so-named western continuation of Brighton? (None of those questions would be answered. Towards the end of the week, the sheet of paper would be sent to the government laboratories in Chancery Lane, London, but none of the new-fangled tests, using chemicals and ultra-violet rays, would bring to light the letter or letters that lay beneath the blood; and later, any number of people practising as graphologists would come up with any number of different readings of the visible letters.)

On Monday morning, Inspector Pelling enlisted the help of the press. “What I should like,” he said, “is that members of the public, particularly those residing in the Southern Counties, including London, should contact the Chief Constable of Brighton if a female relative or friend disappeared without explanation on or prior to the 6th of this month.” (The response to the appeal was over-gratifying: by the beginning of September, twelve thousand letters, cards and telegrams-not to mention many telephone calls-had been received; more flowed in during the autumn and winter, but no one at the police station bothered to count these.)

While Arthur Pelling was talking to reporters-guardedly concerning the crime itself-some of the policemen assigned to the investigation were scanning the Brighton and Hove missing-persons files, others were trying to establish whether those files required deletions or additions, others were at the railway station, working in the left-luggage office or quizzing staff and travellers in the hope of finding people who had been there between six and seven on Derby Day and noticed a man who, perhaps with assistance, was carrying, pushing, pulling or in some less conventional way transporting a trunk.

And at other stations, policemen of other forces were sniffing unclaimed baggage or, more fastidious, standing by or back while left-luggage attendants sniffed on their behalf. One of these stations was, of course, King’s Cross, a primary metropolitan terminus of the LNER. There it was, on Monday afternoon, that William Cope, a porter deputizing for an attendant who was on holiday, sniffed and then unhesitatingly opened a cheap brown suitcase. Crammed inside the case were four objects wrapped in brown paper and copies of national newspapers, those wrappings soaked from within by blood and from without by olive oil. Cope looked no further before hailing a constable, who, having taken a fleeting glance at the discovery, blew his whistle to summon other, more senior officers, one of whom felt obliged to pay greater heed to the parcels. Finding that two contained a human leg apiece and that the other two each contained a human foot, he assumed that the feet had been cut from the legs, and that this had been done because, whereas the four parcels fitted snugly inside the case, two larger ones, roughly L-shaped, could not have been accommodated.

The first of those assumptions was confirmed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the honorary Home Office pathologist, who, once the legs and feet, still in the case, had been removed to the St Pancras mortuary, went there to examine them. As well as noting that the legs and feet were, so to say, a matching set, he concluded that they had been chopped from the body of a woman-a natural blonde, he believed, basing that opinion on a microscopic examination of the faint down on the legs. The state of the feet-free of corns or other blemishes, the nails expertly trimmed-led Sir Bernard to believe that the woman had worn decent shoes (size 4½, he reckoned) and that she had paid regular visits to a chiropodist, the final visit being shortly before her death.

By the time the police received the pathologist’s report, officers at King’s Cross had learned that the suitcase had been deposited round about half-past one on the afternoon of 7 June, the day after the trunk was left at Brighton station; they had interviewed Cyril Escott, the attendant who had issued the ticket, but had been unable to jog from him the slightest recollection of the person to whom he had issued it. However, the newspapers that had been used as wrappings-one dated Thursday 31 May, the other Saturday 2 June-seemed to provide a small and very general clue: after looking at the blood-and-oil-sodden sheets, a newspaper printer said that the “make-up”, and “compositor’s dots” on a front page, showed that the papers were copies of editions distributed within about fifty miles of Fleet Street.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury travelled to Brighton to examine the torso. He was occupied for three hours (during which time a crowd gathered outside the mortuary-a few locals, several reporters, and many holidaymakers, including “jazz girls”, some conspicuous in beach-pyjamas, some of these and others rendering the hit-song, “It’s the cutest little thing, got the cutest little swing-hitchy-koo, hitchy-koo, hitchy-koo”, over and over again) and then informed Inspector Pelling that:

Internal examination of the torso had not revealed the cause of death;

the legs and feet found at King’s Cross belonged to the torso;

the victim had been well-nourished (which, put with the chiropody, suggested to Spilsbury “a middle-class background”); she had been not younger than twenty-one and not older than twenty-eight, had stood about five feet two inches, and had weighed roughly eight and a half stone; she was pregnant at the time of her death.

On the Monday afternoon, Brighton’s seaward newsboys, standing at corners on the promenade or crunching through the pebbles on the front, had a cry in common:

“Horrible murder in Brighton! Dead body in trunk!”

The cry gave a man known as Toni Mancini the worst shock of his twenty-six years of life. Since the start of the holiday season, he had been employed as a waiter and washer-up at the Skylark Café, which took up one of the man-made caves beneath the promenade, entered from the beach. On this particular day, his attention had been almost wholly directed at the kitchen-sink. Therefore, he had heard nothing of the discovery at the railway station.

“Toni Mancini” was not his real name but just the current favourite among an accumulation of aliases that included Jack Notyre, Luigi Pirelli and Antoni Luigi. He had committed a few petty crimes, but the Italianate aliases, rather than being inventions aimed at misleading the police, were symptoms of his Valentinoesque dream-world; so was the way he smarmed his dark hair diagonally back from a central parting, and so was his attitude towards a string-thin moustache, which was there one week, gone the next. Actually, he was a native of the South London borough of Deptford, where he had been born on 8 January 1908 to an eminently respectable couple-the father a shipping clerk-with a determinedly unforeign surname; the parents had borrowed from the nobility for his Christian name and made the mother’s middle name his, thus arriving at Cecil Lois England.

Still, to save confusion, we may as well refer to him as Toni Mancini. He was already calling himself that when, in 1932 or thereabouts, in London, he met up with and soon moved in with a woman sixteen years older than himself. Though her first name was Violet, and despite the fact that she was still married to a man named Saunders, she insisted on being called Violette Kaye, which was the name she had used during an ill-fated career as a dancer in chorus-lines-first, “Miss Watson’s Rosebuds”; finally, “The Parisian Pinkies”-at tatty provincial music-halls. Subsequent to terpischory, she had turned to prostitution, and she was well versed in that trade when Mancini joined forces with her, soon to add business to pleasure by appointing himself her pimp. The partners moved from London to Brighton in the spring of 1933. Occasionally, slumps in the never great demand for the forty-one-year-old Violette’s services forced Mancini to work; but more often than not he spent afternoons and evenings in dance-halls, usually either Sherry’s or Aladdin’s Cave, for he was as much a master of the tango and the fox-trot as Violette had ever been mistress of tap and clog-dancing routines. They shared a succession of small flats, the last being in the basement of 44 Park Crescent, almost opposite the Race Hill Inn on the main Lewes Road.

That was their residence on Wednesday 10 May 1934, when (according to the account given by Mancini a long time afterwards) he finished a stint at the Skylark Café, went home for tea, had a flaming row with Violette, who was the worse for drink or drugs, and, in the heat of the moment, threw a coal-hammer at her-with such unintended accuracy as to kill her. Flummoxed, he left the body lying on the floor, close to the fireplace. When he eventually thought that he must put it out of sight, rigor mortis was complete, which meant that he had the devil’s own job fitting it, standing in an upright pose, into a wardrobe (within which, as the rigor wore off, it dropped in fits and starts, making rather alarming noises while Mancini was trying to sleep). To forestall the arrival of Violette’s sister, who was looking forward to spending a week in Brighton, sleeping on the Put-U-Up, in the basement flat, he sent her a telegram:

GOING ABROAD GOOD JOB SAIL SUNDAY WILL WRITE VI

A week or so later, he decided for some reason to move from Park Crescent to the diminutive basement flat at 52 Kemp Street, the southern bit of a dingy thoroughfare that, after being crossed by a main road, became Station Street-so named because its western aspect was the blind side-wall of Brighton’s railway terminus.

In preparation for the move, he purchased a black fibre trunk from a dealer in secondhand goods, not haggling at the asking-price of ten shillings. Having stowed his and most of Violette’s belongings in cardboard boxes and suitcases, he transferred the corpse from the wardrobe to the trunk, packed the crevices with female garments that remained, scattered a bag of moth-balls over the contorted body, closed and locked the trunk, and threw away the key. As, on his own, he could hardly shove the trunk, let alone lift it, he borrowed a wheelbarrow, then persuaded two acquaintances, a blind piano-accordionist named Johnnie Beaumont and a kitchen porter named Tom Capelem, to help him lug the trunk to the barrow and trundle the barrow to Kemp Street. When Capelem enquired, “What yer got in ’ere-a body?”, Mancini replied, with every appearance of nonchalance, “Silver and crockery do weigh surprising heavy, don’t they?”

He involved himself in additional expense in the basement flat, for he decided that as he intended to use the trunk as a makeshift seat when he had more than one tea-time guest, he needed to cover it with something: he bought a square of pretty, primrose-patterned American cloth from Woolworth’s. Though, as the weeks went by, the trunk became increasingly malodorous and began to leak body fluids, Mancini continued to have visitors. He was fortunate in one respect: the landlady had no sense of smell-and when she commented on the fluids seeping into the floorboards, he told her that they were a unique blend of French polishes, so were enhancing the boards rather than disfiguring them, a reply that pleased her so much that she asked for a quote for spreading the stuff wall-to-wall. On one occasion, a lady guest broke off from munching a muffin to say, “Do excuse my curiosity, but I’m wondering if by any chance you breed rabbits or… um… skunks.” “That funny smell, you mean?” Mancini asked. “I must apologize for it. And when I have a minute to spare, I’ll remove the cause-which (I hesitate to admit this) is an old pair of football boots, reminders of my lost youth: QPR were keen to sign me on, you know. Won’t you partake of the raspberry junket? I made it with my own fair hands, and it would be such a shame to let it go off.”

When, on the afternoon of Monday, 17 June, Mancini was allowed a five-minute break from his chores in the kitchen of the Skylark Café, he sauntered between the white-painted cast-iron tables and out on to the beach. There he heard the newsboys’ cry. Assuming, reasonably enough, that he was the only person in or anywhere near Brighton who had lately put a body in a trunk, he furthermore assumed that Kemp Street was at that moment a hive of police activity; and, once he was able to hear his thoughts above the beating of his heart, he registered surprise, astonishment even, that the only uniformed person within arresting distance of him was a deck-chair attendant. Extending his five-minute break, he staggered across the pebbles to where the occupant of a deck-chair was reading a copy of a special edition of the Brighton Argus. Forcing himself to look over the man’s shoulder, he read the headlines above, and stared at the picture illustrating, the report of the trunk-crime. Of a trunk-crime that was quite independent of his own. At last believing the unbelievable, he strode back to the café. And he whistled a happy tune.

You will recall that when Toni Mancini first heard of what came to be called “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 1”-differentiating it from the death and subsequent bundling of Violette Kaye, which was billed as “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2”-Sir Bernard Spilsbury was toiling over the torso in the mortuary. Also, policemen were traipsing the town, some checking on whether women reported missing were still astray, others looking in empty premises and even burrowing in rubbish dumps on the offchance of happening on the head and arms to augment the portions found fifty-one miles apart; and, at police headquarters, a trio of detectives was considering the first suggestions from the public regarding the identity of the victim (who, by the way, had already been dubbed “The Girl with the Pretty Feet” by a London crime-reporter-the same man, perhaps, who would call Violette Kaye “The Woman with Dancer’s Legs” and her terminal souteneur “The Dancing Waiter”). And, some time during the same period, Captain Hutchinson, the chief constable, had a word with Inspector Pelling and then telephoned the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to request that Scotland Yard detectives be sent to Brighton to take control of the investigation; by making the request promptly, Captain Hutchinson ensured that the cost of the secondment would not have to be met by local rate-payers.

The “murder squad” detective chosen for the assignment was Chief Inspector Robert Donaldson, who was, in comparison with most other policemen, quite short. His relative diminutiveness and neat apparel might have led people to believe that he was a “desktop detective”; also that he lacked endurance. Both notions would have been far from the truth. Not only had he taken part in a number of murder investigations, but on several occasions he had “gone in mob-handed” to arrest violent criminals, some carrying firearms. Any doubts about his stamina would be dispelled by his sojourn in Brighton, during which he worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end.

The detective-sergeant who accompanied Donaldson to Brighton was Edward Sorrell, who at twenty-six had only recently joined Scotland Yard. Donaldson had not worked with him before, but chose him as his assistant after talking to him and getting “an impression (proved accurate) of intelligence and alertness”. (That and subsequent otherwise unattributed quotations are from letters that Robert Donaldson wrote to me from his home in New Zealand in the early 1970s.)

Donaldson knew that it was vital to get the support of Arthur Pelling, who might feel put out at having had control of the investigation taken away from him. This he succeeded in doing; indeed, the two men became friends. Donaldson considered Pelling “a very competent detective. A Sussex man whose father had been in the force, he was serious-minded and conscientious. He showed no resentment that Scotland Yard were summoned to the inquiry, and it was largely through his efforts that the Brighton Constabulary, as a whole, were most co-operative.”

Captain Hutchinson arranged for Donaldson to have a team of a dozen detectives and uniformed officers, and promised that additional manpower would be provided if and when it was required. As no large offices were available to be turned into “trunk-crime headquarters” at the police station, Captain Hutchinson asked the town clerk if there was space to spare in any council-owned premises, ideally in the centre of Brighton. Thus it was that the investigators took over three apartments adjoining the music salon in the Royal Pavilion, and there, amidst the chinoiserie bequeathed by George IV, and sometimes to the muffled accompaniment of string quartets and of choirs eager with hosannas, got on with the task of trying to identify the Girl with the Pretty Feet, of trying to establish who had gone to such lengths to make that task difficult.

The police did all the things one would suppose they would have done; and many that were out of the ordinary. The investigation, uniquely thorough, comprised a myriad of activities, some of long duration, others of a day or so or a matter of hours. For instance:

As a result of what the press called “the great round-up”, 732 missing women were traced. A questionnaire was sent to every hospital and nursing home in the country. Hundreds of general practitioners and midwives were interviewed. At Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, 5,000 women, some from abroad, had received pre-natal advice or treatment between the beginning of February and the end of May; all but fifteen were accounted for.

Statements were made by several residents of Worthing, just along the coast, to the effect that a man who had until recently owned a sea-going vessel had offered them the opportunity of seeing a rather unusual double-bill: first, the murder of a woman, then her dismemberment. The would-be exponent of grand-guignol was tracked down, interviewed, and dismissed as being “all mouth and no achievement”. Much the same description was applied to the several men and two women who insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that they were the “trunk criminals”. Donaldson’s men took notes but little notice of what clairvoyants, water-diviners, teacup-readers, numerologists, vivid dreamers, and people who had been given ouija-boards for Christmas had to say. (One of the clairvoyants, known to his many fans as Grand Wizard of the Past and Future, told a Brighton detective-and, after being shown out of the Royal Pavilion, a reporter for the Sunday Dispatch-that “the trunk criminal is probably called George; he has busy hair, works in a wholesale seed-store, and originally used the brown paper found in the trunk for wrapping up tyres”.)

Police throughout the country asked register-office clerks whether in the past few months couples had given notice of marriage but not turned up to complete the transaction. The thought behind this question was that whoever had made the trunk-victim pregnant may have bolstered the conning of the girl with indications of legitimizing intentions.

Of the many people who responded to repeated appeals that anyone who was at Brighton railway station between six and seven on the evening of Derby Day should come forward, two women and a man, the latter a retired warrant officer of the Royal Engineers, claimed to have seen the-or a-trunk being transported towards the left-luggage office. The trouble was that, whereas the women-fellow-Tory-travellers from a garden party at North Lancing-were convinced that they had seen just one man coping with a trunk, the ex-soldier was sure that he had seen two men sharing a similar load. Still, his description of one of the men-“about forty-five, tall, slim, dark, clean-shaven, and quite respectably attired”-came close to the description arrived at (perhaps after much “No, you’re wrong, Mabel”-“I’m certain I’m right, Edna” discussion) by the women; and as all three witnesses had been at the station within a period of a few minutes, it was reasonable to hazard a guess-based on the station-master’s notes of the actual times that trains had reached Brighton-that if the trunk was brought to the station by rail, its journey was short, probably from the west and no further away than Worthing. An artist was called in to make a portrait from the witnesses’ specifications, and copies of this were shown to staff at local stations; but though one or two railwaymen raised hopes by saying that the drawing slightly resembled someone or other who at some time or other had entrained to somewhere or other, the eye-witness evidence led nowhere.

An imperfection was observed in the serration of a piece of brown sticky tape affixed to part of the wrapping that had been round the torso. Therefore, policemen called on every single stationery supplier in London and the Southern Counties, trying-but without success-to find a saw-blade cutter with one tooth blunted in a peculiar way.

So as to check a London suspect’s alibi, particles of sand found in his car were compared with samples of sand from near Brighton and from sandy-beached resorts east of Bournemouth and south of Yarmouth. The sand turned out to be unique to Clacton, in Essex-a fact that lent support to his story.

Upon completion of one of the early-begun tasks-the interviewing of residents of Brighton who might help to establish the whereabouts of women who had suddenly become conspicuous by their absence-Donaldson ordered that the interviews be repeated. A roster was prepared, its aim being to ensure that everyone already interviewed was revisited-and by a different officer.

Right at the end of the first sweep, one of Violette Kaye’s customers had called at 44 Park Crescent and, having been told by the landlady that “Mr and Mrs Mancini” had gone, she knew not where, reported the prostitute’s departure to the police. On Saturday 14 July, a constable had traced Toni Mancini to the Skylark Café and, not liking the look of him, decided to take him to the Royal Pavilion rather than question him at his place of employment. But after Mancini, ostensibly quite at ease, had said that his “old friend Vi” was trying her luck in France, Germany, or somewhere like that-and that she was forty-two, at least fourteen years senior to the trunk-victim-he was allowed to leave.

But Mancini did not return to the Skylark Café; nor did he go to the house in Kemp Street-the front of which had since the day before been latticed with scaffolding, put there on behalf of a firm of decorators who were to start repointing the brickwork on Sunday. No; he sought out a girlfriend and treated her to a plate of cod and chips at the Aqua Café, which was at Old Steine, near the Palace Pier. He was not his usual cheery self. Ever the perfect gentleman, though, he commented that the girl looked rather nice in her new dress (which was not new at all: once the possession of Violette Kaye, Mancini had presented it to the girl a week or so after Vi’s demise, suggesting that it could do with dry-cleaning). The girl was still eating when Mancini abruptly asked for the bill, paid it, left an over-generous tip, and, muttering something that the girl didn’t catch, walked out of the café. The waitress scurried across to bag the tip. Lifting the cup of tea that Mancini had barely touched, she pointed out to the girl that he had left her a message, scribbled in blue crayon on the tablecloth: SEE YOU LATER, DUCK.

Mancini was already on his way to the northern outskirts of the town, where he would hitch a ride to London.

On Sunday morning, just as one of Donaldson’s team was about to leave the Royal Pavilion to start a round of repeat-interviews, including a second chat with Toni Mancini, at his home this time, a telephone call was received from a foreman-decorator, who insisted that the police come to 52 Kemp Street at once. Why? Well, for the simple reason that he and his mates, repointers all, needed gas-masks against the dreadful smell coursing into the street from the nether regions of the dilapidated house.

The detective with 52 Kemp Street on his list of addresses was told to delay his departure. When he left the Royal Pavilion, he was accompanied by colleagues, one of whom was Detective-Constable Edward Taylor-who, you may recall, was the officer who had opened the stinking trunk at the railway station exactly four weeks before. Arriving outside the house, the detectives at once followed the example of the waiting decorators and turned up their noses; Taylor afterwards expressed mystification that the smell, which must have been polluting the outside air for days, had not offended any of No. 52’s neighbours, nor the scaffolders, into complaining about it to a health officer. As there was no reply when the detectives banged on the front door (it turned out that the landlady and her husband-he as senseless of smell as she was-had arranged to be away on holiday while the external decorations were being done), they broke it down.

Having descended the uncarpeted steps to the basement, the detectives first of all flung open the windows, front and back. Then the highest-ranking of them pointed an accusing finger at the black trunk and twitched another finger in Taylor’s direction, indicating that he had been selected to open it. The detectives, every one of them, were sure that the trunk contained the missing head and arms. Taylor grabbed a sharpening iron from among the stuff on the draining-board and, his head reeling from a blend of stink and déjà vu, prised open the locks and pulled back the lid.

You will be aware-basically at least-of what was revealed. Though predictable, mention must be made of the fact that the contents were lavish with maggots, the most gluttonous of which were more than an inch long.

In the afternoon, Sir Bernard Spilsbury visited Brighton for the second time within a month. Following his examination of the body of Violette Kaye, he noted on a case-card that

she had been five feet two inches in height and well-nourished;

she had used peroxide to turn her brunette hair blonde;

her head was badly bruised, and she had been killed “by a violent blow or blows with a blunt object, e.g. head of hammer, causing a depressed fracture extending down to the base, with a short fissured fracture extending up from its upper edge.

Even before Spilsbury’s arrival, Robert Donaldson-depressed that he now had two trunk-crimes to deal with, though “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2” seemed to be virtually solved-broadcast a message to all police forces, giving a description of Toni Mancini and asking that he be apprehended.

At about eleven o’clock on the night of Thursday, 18 July, Police Constables William Triplow and Leonard Gourd were sitting in a patrol-car near the Yorkshire Grey pub in Lewisham, South London, close to Mancini’s birthplace. All at once, Triplow nudged his partner and pointed through the windshield in the direction of a well-lighted roundabout. A man was walking towards an all-night café. “So what?” Gourd muttered. “Look at his walk,” Triplow said. Gourd looked. Yes, there was something odd about it: it was more of a prance than a walk; the feet merely dabbed the ground, making one think of a liberty-horse-a tired liberty-horse. “I reckon it’s the Brighton-trunk bloke, the ‘dancing waiter’,” Triplow said. With that, he left the car and ran towards the man.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be Mr Marconi?”

“Mancini,” he was corrected. “I couldn’t half go a cup of tea and a sandwich or something.”

Triplow and Gourd took Mancini to the local police station. A phone call was made to Scotland Yard, and from there a message was sent to Brighton police headquarters, saying that Mancini would be arriving under escort in the town in the early hours of the morning.

The arrest was front-page news on papers that reached Brighton at about the same time as did Mancini. The reports heaped praise on William Triplow, one going so far as to call him “the sharpest-eyed policeman in the Metropolis”. (When I met him at his home in Lewisham in 1970, he had been blind for several years.)

Presently, a queue began to form outside the magistrates’ court. Most of the queuers were young women, some of whom bragged of having partnered Toni on the dance-floor, others of whom went farther in boasting of their knowledge of him. Soon there were more than fifty people in the queue. As there were only fifty seats in the gallery of the court, the thousand or so latecomers disorganized themselves into a cheering, singing, waving-to-press-photographers mob. Mounted policemen were needed to bisect it when Mancini, flanked by detectives, made his first public appearance as a celebrity. He looked as if he had been allowed to shave, but his clothes-dark blue jacket, grey shirt, white tie, flannel trousers-were crumpled. He smiled in response to the shouts and screams of “Hello, Toni,” “Keep your pecker up,” “Don’t worry, love, all will be well,” and frowned concernedly when a woman in beach-pyjamas fainted, either from sheer emotion or from absence of underwear on a rather chilly morning. The girl he had treated to fish and chips at the Aqua Café stood apart from the mob; she was again wearing the dress he had given her.

Similar scenes were enacted when he left the court, having been remanded in custody, and when, over the next few weeks, he was brought from Lewes Goal, first for further remands, then for the committal proceedings, at the end of which he was ordered to stand trial at the forthcoming Lewes Assizes.

The trial lasted four days. Beforehand-perhaps on his own initiative, perhaps at the suggestion of his counsel, Norman Birkett-he had done some preparation:

“I had carefully rehearsed my lines like an actor. I had practised how I should hold my hands and when I should let the tears run down my cheeks. It might sound cold and calculating, but you have to remember that my life was at stake.”

His story-in its essentials, entirely false, as he admitted when the rule against double-jeopardy protected him-was that he had found Violette Kaye lying dead when he returned to the basement flat in Park Crescent on 10 May. As he had a record of convictions for petty crimes (none involving violence-an important point in his favour, Birkett contended), it would not have occurred to him in a month of Sundays to report the matter to the police: “I considered that a man who has been convicted never gets a fair and square deal from the police.” So-very silly of him, he now understood-he had bought the trunk, wedged the body in it, and moved, trunk and all, to a different basement.

Birkett brilliantly abetted the lies, saliently by patching together disparate answers from prosecution witnesses so that they seemed to support the theory that Violette Kaye had either taken a mite too much morphine and fallen down the area steps or been pushed down them by a dissatisfied, over-eager or jealous client-and that, whatever had caused the fall, she had struck her head on a projecting rail or a pilaster of masonry.

Holes gaped in both Mancini’s story and Birkett’s theory: but the jury, having stayed out for some two hours, returned to the bijou court with a verdict of “Not guilty”.

Was Mancini surprised? One cannot tell. When he entered the dock to hear the verdict, he was wearing an overcoat-indicating that he expected to walk out into the high street a free man-but when the foreman of the jury spoke two words rather than the fatal one, he staggered and stared, and when he was at last able to speak to his counsel, muttered, “Not guilty, Mr Birkett-not guilty?”, as if he were a character in someone else’s dream.

(The following summer, Mancini toured fairgrounds with a sideshow featuring a variation on the trick of sawing a woman in half. Instead of a box, he used a large black trunk; his “victim” was his wife, whom he had met at Aladdin’s Cave shortly before his flight from Brighton and married a week after his acquittal. He did not draw the crowds for long, and was almost forgotten by 1941, when he was serving in the navy. In that year, a man who really was named Toni Mancini was hanged for a gang-murder in Soho, and people recalled the earlier case, the self-styled Toni Mancini, and said, “Now there’s a coincidence.”)

While Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2 had been delighting the populace, Robert Donaldson and his eventually reduced team of helpers had been working hard to solve Trunk-Crime No. 1. Donaldson had reason to believe, but was never able to prove, that one or both of the missing arms had been burned on the Sussex Downs, close to a place where, after the Great War, the bodies of Hindu soldiers who had died in hospitals in or around Brighton were cremated. As to the whereabouts of the head-well, perhaps Donaldson obtained a general indication of its resting place when, early in September, he was put in touch with a young man of the town. The latter stated that “shortly before the discovery at the railway station, he and his girl had been walking along Black Rock, to the east of Brighton. In a rock pool they found a head. It was the head of a young woman. The man explained to his sweetheart that they should leave it alone as it was probably the remains of a suicide and that the police had removed all they needed of the body”.

As soon as Donaldson received this information, he caused a search to be made of the whole beach: “Nothing relevant was found, so I consulted various marine authorities on the question of where the head might be; the sweep of the tides indicated that it could have been taken out to sea and then swept ashore at Beachy Head, but nothing was found there either.”

The courting couple’s silliness was just one thing among many that Donaldson had to hide his anger about. His greatest reason for anger was the action of a high-ranking policeman stationed at Hove.

By early July, Donaldson had garnered indications that the person directly or indirectly responsible for Trunk-Crime No. I was Edward Seys Massiah, a man in his mid-fifties who hailed from the West Indian island of Trinidad. One of Massiah’s parents had been white, the other black, thus making him a mulatto, his skin dark but not ebony, his hair more wavy than crinkled, his lips quite thin. He had an impressive collection of medical qualifications: MD, MB, B.Ch, DTM. All but the last of those designatory letters, which stood for Doctor of Tropical Medicine, were scratched larger than his name on his brass shingle, which in 1934 gleamed beside the imposing entrance to a slightly less imposing house within sight of the sea at Hove: 8 Brunswick Square.

The fact that he lived as well as practised there was something he stressed in conversation with prospective patients and with gentlemen whose lady-friends were pregnant or at risk of becoming so; he was, so to speak, open all hours, and that convenience was allied with a guarantee of confidentiality. No doubt you will have guessed that he was an abortionist; and it will have occurred to you that abortion was a criminal offence.

Now, a likely cause of the death of the Girl with the Pretty Feet was a mishap during an attempt to abort her embryonic child; if that was the cause, then a person who had been involved in the arrangements for the abortion or the person who had tried to perform the operation, or both, would have been most anxious that the transaction and, more important, their roles in it remained secret.

When Robert Donaldson had put together diverse reasons for being suspicious of Edward Massiah (whose qualification of B.Ch was, by the way, a shortened form of the Latin Baccalaureus Chirurgiae, meaning Bachelor of Surgery), he found a sum greater than its parts. But as that sum did not equal justification for making an arrest, he came to the obvious conclusion that efforts were needed to ascertain whether there were additional reasons for suspicion-or whether there was a single exculpatory fact. Towards that end, he gathered a number of people together in one of the apartments at the Royal Pavilion; among those present at the meeting were Captain Hutchinson, Inspector Pelling, key-members of the trunk-crime team, and a senior officer from Hove. Donaldson enumerated the points that seemed to tell against Edward Massiah, invited discussion of them, and then-speaking specially to the man from Hove-requested covert collection of information regarding the doctor’s background, his present activities and acquaintances, and his movements on Derby Day. He emphasized the word covert.

However, that emphasis was overlooked or ignored by the Hove policeman. Having come upon-and kept to himself-a further unflattering fact about Edward Massiah, he went, uninvited and unexpected, to 8 Brunswick Square and laid Donaldson’s cards on the consulting-room table. Massiah paid attention, smiling the while, never interrupting. The sun shining through the tall windows glistened on the ranks of surgical instruments, on the green and crystal-clear pots of medication, on the framed diplomas, tinctured the red-plush couch, nestled in the careful creases of the doctor’s pearl-grey cravat, black jacket and striped trousers, flashed from the unspatted parts of his patent-leather shoes. Towards the end of the policeman’s speech, the doctor took a silver pencil and began jotting on a pad. Notes of what he had said and was saying, the policeman guessed.

But no, he was wrong. When he had quite finished and, pleased with himself, was feeling in a pocket for his own pad-he would need that to record the doctor’s exact response-he was nonplussed by what the doctor was doing: carefully tearing the sheets from the pad on the ormolu table, turning them round, and using one manicured finger to prod them towards him. He looked at the writing. Names. Addresses, too. Telephone numbers following some of the addresses. Many of the names he recognized: they belonged to important personages of Sussex, or to national celebrities, members of noble families, or extravagantly wealthy commoners who gave financial support to worthy causes. The doctor explained. These were people who, if he were ever threatened with court proceedings and, in turn, threatened them with publicity relating to services he had rendered them, would do all in their power to protect him and ruin his accuser or accusers. The list of names was only a small sample-come to think of it, he had omitted the name of Lord So-and-So, of the member of parliament for the Such-and-Such constituency, of the owner of the Thingummyjig group of newspapers…

It seemed to the policeman that the sun had gone in: all of a sudden, the consulting room was a place of sombre shadows. The doctor was speaking again-quoting the forewarned-is-forearmed adage, thanking the policeman for revealing each and every fact known to Donaldson, adding that he was much obliged since he could now set about sanitizing most of those facts. And, needless to say, he would make blessed sure that Donaldson-whom he would be delighted to meet some time-made no further headway towards his objective of foisting responsibility for Trunk-Crime No. 1 on a quite innocent person: himself, he meant. Could the officer find his own way out…?

The officer could. And did.

Of course, he didn’t volunteer an account of the interview to Robert Donaldson. The latter learnt of the visit from one of the people named by Edward Massiah. The doctor had just happened to mention it-casually, with all the humour of a hyena-to that person, whose consequent fear was manifested as a quietly-spoken threat to Donaldson. The threat didn’t worry Donaldson; but the disclosure of the Hove policeman’s action made him very angry indeed. Even so, though he got the full story of the interview from the policeman himself, and berated him for “putting ambition before professionalism”, he did not instigate disciplinary action.

(Shortly afterwards, Edward Massiah left Hove and started practising in London. There, a woman died following an illegal operation that he had performed. It would be wrong to say that there was a “cover-up”, but somehow or other he managed to escape retribution; his name was not erased from the Medical Register. By 1938, he had left England and was living in a fine house, “Montrose”, near Port of Spain, Trinidad. Not until December 1952 did the General Medical Council strike his name from the Register, and then only because he had failed to respond to letters.)

At about the time of the Massiah incident, Robert Donaldson brought his family to Brighton: “Not wanting this to be found out by a gossip-columnist, we lived in a private hotel under the name of Williams. I was supposed to be an engineer. My wife and I briefed the children as to their new surname and we thought all would be well. However, my six-year-old younger son, not realizing what was at stake, would solemnly ignore the injunctions of ‘Andrew Williams, come here,’ etc., and would tell all and sundry that he was a Donaldson. My cover was quickly blown.”

Months later, the strain of the inquiry took its toll on Donaldson: “I found that I was having trouble with my eyes. I went to an oculist in London, and after extensive testing he said there was nothing organically wrong with my eyes. He recommended that I see a nerve specialist. His diagnosis was that I had been overworking. Under the circumstances, that was somewhat self-evident. However, I was then given a Detective-Inspector-Taffy Rees-to help me. But Taffy too became a casualty with a stomach ulcer.”

There is a final-one could say unforgivable-coincidence to be mentioned. In September 1935, Robert Donaldson took a well-earned holiday. He went motoring in Scotland. On the way home, he parked his car near the border-town of Moffatt and sat on the bridge at Gardenholme Linn for a quiet smoke. Beneath the bridge, tucked well out of sight, were some of the neatly-parcelled remains of Dr Buck Ruxton’s common-law wife and of his children’s nursemaid, Mary Rogerson. By the time Donaldson reported back to Scotland Yard, those parcels and others had been discovered, and it goes without saying that it was he who took charge of the London end of the inquiry into the north-country variant on bodies-as-baggage. Though not a superstitious man, he must have been at least slightly worried when he learnt that Dr Ruxton, guilty beyond doubt, was to be defended by Norman Birkett, the barrister who had been so helpful to Toni Mancini. But no: this time Birkett’s client was found guilty and was duly hanged.