The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE DEATH OF BELLA WRIGHT by Edmund Pearson

If ever a man worked hard to put a rope around his own neck, declared one seasoned crime reporter, it was Ronald Light. But in spite of himself and his foolish behaviour, Light was cleared of murdering Bella Wright and her death has remained a total mystery ever since. She was last seen alive on a summer’s evening in 1919 accompanied by an unknown stranger on a green bicycle. The couple rode off into the dusk gathering over the remote Leicestershire countryside. Less than an hour later, twenty-one-year-old Bella was found dead in the road, shot in the head. Some six months later, a green bicycle dredged from a canal at Leicester was traced to Ronald Light. With it was a revolver holster containing live cartridges. Light admitted encountering Bella Wright on his bicycle, but said their ways later parted and he left her alive, albeit with a wobbly wheel. Spooked by the publicity over the girl’s death, Light said he panicked and ditched his green bicycle and holster in the canal. “I didn’t make up my mind deliberately not to come forward,” he later explained. “I was astounded and frightened at this unexpected thing. I kept on hesitating and, in the end, I drifted into doing nothing at all.” Edmund Pearson (1880-1937) wrote on the case in a collection of pieces on murder published the year before he died. Pearson was a trained librarian, and worked at the New York public library from 1914 until 1927, when he resigned to take up a full-time writing career. In 1923, following in the tradition of de Quincey, he wrote an essay on murder considered as one of the fine arts. “The study of murder”, he wrote, “is the study of the human heart in its darkest, strangest moments. Nothing surpasses it in interest”. The following year Pearson published Studies in Murder, his best-known work which established his international reputation as the leading American writer on famous crimes.

There was a murder case in England which not only needed a Sherlock Holmes but seemed as if it had been devised in solemn conclave by Conan Doyle, Holmes, and Watson themselves. It could be entitled The Mystery of the Green Bicycle; or, The Curious Incident of the Dead Raven.

Unfortunately, there was no great hawk-faced detective from Baker Street in it. Only, at the beginning, a local constable named Hall. Perhaps that is why one of the men best informed on this case says that it has “considerable claims to be regarded as the most fascinating murder mystery of the century”.

Bella Wright was twenty-one and lived with her father and mother in a tiny place called Stoughton. This is within a mile or two of the city of Leicester, and in that city she was employed in a rubber factory.

She was a girl with good looks and good character, and was engaged to be married to a stoker in the navy.

The country round about Leicester is full of little villages connected by old Roman roads or by lanes with high hedges. To the north is the famous hunting center of Melton Mowbray.

The lanes are charmingly picturesque and lonely, but were made for a less motorized age. They are sometimes full of surprises and excitement for the pedestrian or the cyclist. At a curve he may suddenly be confronted by a flock of sheep just as an enormous motor bus, brushing the hedge on either side, comes up behind him.

Miss Wright was accustomed to go to and from her work on a bicycle, and sometimes, in the long daylight hours of the English summer evenings, to cycle from one hamlet to another to do errands or to call on her friends. Her uncle, a man named Measures, lived in the village of Gaulby, three miles from her home.

She was on the late shift at the factory, and one Friday evening in July rode home from her work at eleven o’clock, going to bed soon after. Next day seems to have been a holiday, so she thoroughly made up her sleep, not getting up again till four o’clock Saturday afternoon. Then, after writing a few letters, she rode with them to the post office at Evington. Again she came home, but finally, at six-thirty p.m., set out on her cycle in the opposite direction, away from Leicester. Her mother had seen her start for Evington, and never after that saw her alive.

At nine twenty that evening (still daylight) a farmer named Cowell was driving cattle along the old Roman road called the Gartree Road or Via Devana. At a point about two miles from Gaulby, where the way is very lonely and the hedges, at that season, more than eight feet high, Cowell found Bella Wright lying dead in the road. Her head was covered with blood, and her cycle lay askew, with its front wheel pointed toward Stoughton-that is, toward home.

The farmer supposed that she had been killed by a fall or similar mischance. He placed her on the grass at the side of the road. Her body was still warm. Close to the spot where it was found-and this may be important-there was an opening in the hedge: a field gate which led into the grassy meadow beyond.

Constable Hall and a doctor came later, after it was dark. The doctor’s hasty examination led to nothing more than a general impression that Miss Wright, being thrown from her bicycle, had fractured her skull on a stone. Cowell’s statement as to his discovery of the body seems to have been accepted as quite satisfactory. This was due, I suppose, to his good reputation, since the only witnesses he could call to prove his story were his cows.

Miss Wright’s body rested that night in a cottage nearby. Early next morning Constable Hall decided to make further investigation. He carefully examined the road; and seventeen feet from the bloodstain which marked the spot where the girl’s head had lain in the dust he found a bullet, caliber.45, partly embedded in the road as if it had been stepped on or run over.

He made another exceedingly curious discovery: the gate which led into the field was painted white, and on the top bar were marks of claws-marks in blood. There were tracks of these claws, also in blood-twelve such sets of tracks, six going and six returning-leading from the body to the gate. In the field the constable came across a large bird with black plumage-dead. This bird was found to be gorged with blood. Indeed, that surfeit of blood was supposed to have killed it.

In England everybody is keen about birds and their habits. As soon as the Leicester police said that this bird was a raven, other folk flew to the defense of ravens. They said that (a) there were no ravens around Leicester; and (b) if there were, they had never been known to drink blood.

(The bird of which the Book of Job says “Her young ones also suck up blood” is not the raven but the eagle.)

This creature, said the bird experts, must be a rook or a carrion crow.

Whatever bird it was, there are two schools of thought about it, and all the authorities, Messrs H. R. Wakefield, Edward Marjoribanks, and others, have discussed it. There are the severely practical ones, who think that the raven (or rook) had no connection with the death of Bella Wright; and there are the romantics, who believe there was a very close connection.

At all events, how did the bird obtain so much blood from the poor dead or dying girl as to cause its own death? Was that really the cause of its death? How did it chance to be in that vicinity at the moment? Since the body is supposed to have been found within a few minutes of death, how was there time for all this gruesome feasting and tracking back and forth from road to gate?

Let’s return now to Constable Hall and the bullet. He and the doctor made another examination of the body. After the blood had been washed from the girl’s face, they found a small bullet wound one inch below the left eye, and another slightly larger, the mark of the exit of the bullet, in her hair. Thus it seemed that this heavy bullet had passed through the girl’s head, yet had gone no farther than seventeen feet from her!

At all events, this was murder; and it was the duty of the police to inquire where she had been, and with whom, between six thirty and nine twenty of that summer evening-daylight all the time.

At seven thirty she had ridden up to the cottage of her uncle, Mr Measures, in Gaulby. Calling on Measures at the time was his son-in-law, a man named Evans. So both of them were important witnesses to her arrival and departure. With her, when she came, was another cyclist, a young man. Bella Wright went in, leaving the young man outside. She remarked that he was “a perfect stranger”, and added:

“Perhaps if I wait a while he will be gone.”

Yet she did not ask her uncle to drive him away, as if he were objectionable. And when, an hour or more later, they came out again, the young man was still there-having either returned or waited. This time, he greeted her, so said Measures and Evans, with the remark:

“Bella, you have been a long time. I thought you had gone the other way.”

Evans had some friendly conversation with the stranger about his bicycle. And finally, the girl and the young man pedalled away together-at, say, eight-forty. Forty minutes later, or thereabouts, Cowell, the farmer, was finding Bella’s dead body in the Gartree Road.

Now, as the reader has noticed, there are some contradictions in this. If the man was “a perfect stranger”, how had he progressed so far as to call her Bella? This has been answered by the statement that what he really said was “Hello!” And that certainly goes more reasonably with the rest of his remark.

How is this for an explanation of the incident? That he was a stranger, as she said, who had joined her as she rode along; and that, while his company was perfectly tolerable to her, she had offered a little tribute to strict propriety when she said to her uncle that if she waited around a bit he would go away. Girls do not, today-if they ever did-scream and say, “Sir, I have never met you!” when a presentable stranger starts conversation, while riding along a country road. They may welcome it, or they may simply bear it, not wishing to make a fuss, and knowing that, in most cases, the man will soon go away without becoming an annoyance.

Measures and Evans had had a good look at this man and his cycle, and so in a few days the police were offering a reward for a man of thirty-five, about five feet seven to nine inches in height, hair turning grey, and with rather a high-pitched voice. They gave a description of his clothes and various other particulars.

The notable thing was that he rode a green bicycle.

And for the next few months each man in Leicestershire unfortunate enough to own a green bicycle wished to heaven that he had never bought it. After he had satisfied the police as to where he had been on that July evening, he had to encounter the jeering remarks of his friends as to his diversions and his murderous disposition.

But the man really sought-the last man alive with Miss Wright-was not so easily discovered. Scotland Yard had a try at it, but could do nothing with the murder, the missing green bicycle, or the dead raven.

Half a year went by, and Bella Wright had long been lying in the churchyard, past which she rode that evening. Then, one day in February, something happened: a most peculiar chance, which, for a time, probably revived faith in the ancient falsehood, “Murder will out.”

A canal boat was passing through Leicester, carrying a load of coal to the rubber works where the dead girl had been employed. A boatman named Whitehouse was idly watching his towrope when he saw it slacken down into the water and then tighten. As it became taut it brought up part of a bicycle, which hung in plain sight for a moment-long enough to change the whole current of a man’s life-then slipped back into the water. Whitehouse had not forgotten all those police advertisements and the reward: he came back next day and dragged the canal. He hauled up the bicycle frame again, and, as he hoped, it was green.

The police were soon busy-dragging the canal for other interesting objects and examining the one the boatman had found. From the canal they fished other parts of the machine; also a revolver holster with twelve ball and seven blank cartridges in it.

The green bicycle was of a special model, made in Birmingham, and from it the name and number plate and other identifying marks had carefully been removed. But, in an obscure place, was found the number 103,648-and this was the number of a bicycle sold years before to a Mr Ronald Vivian Light.

This gentleman was found teaching mathematics at a school in Cheltenham. He was a good-looking, rather earnest man; a little prematurely old in appearance, possibly as a result of his experiences in the war. He was a Rugby School boy; a civil engineer, who had served four years in France, part of the time with an officer’s commission. Shell-shocked and slightly deaf since the great German attack in 1918, he had been discharged in 1919. For about a year thereafter (the year 1919, in the summer of which Miss Wright was killed) he had been out of work and living in Leicester with his mother. His present position dated only from January, 1920, the month before the discovery of the green bicycle.

Invited by a police inspector to explain how the fragments of his bicycle happened to be at the bottom of the canal, Mr Light proceeded to tell a pack of lies. He said he had never owned a green bicycle; he had never seen Bella Wright; he had never been in the village of Gaulby-certainly not on that crucial evening last July.

Naturally, there was nothing to do but arrest him-especially as Bella’s uncle, Mr Measures, and Evans also, positively identified him as the mysterious man who rode away with her so shortly before the murder. And two little girls, Muriel Nunney, aged fourteen, and Valeria Caven, twelve, believed they recognized him as a man who had followed and frightened them, about five thirty on the day of the murder, and in the same vicinity. They remembered this many months after the event. Some of the cartridges, by the way, found in the holster suspiciously near the sunken bicycle, had bullets like the one found in the road. But of course Mr Light denied the holster as firmly as he did all the other relics.

Now, here was a beautiful case of circumstantial evidence. The net was drawn tight around the poor young man, who would, of course, be convicted-as in the detective novels.

About three months after his arrest, Ronald Light was placed on trial. The Attorney General stated the case against the prisoner in all its deadly detail. He began to prove by his witnesses that the bicycle belonged to Light; that he was with the girl shortly before her death; that he had concealed evidence, and lied about it, over and over again.

In the middle of this testimony, the prisoner’s counsel quietly interrupted. This was Sir Edward Marshall Hall-the famous defender of accused persons, for whom everybody sent in time of great trouble. Sir Edward courteously intimated that the learned Attorney General was going to unnecessary pains. He need not prove that the bicycle belonged to the prisoner; they admitted it. He need not prove that his client rode up to Mr Measures’s house that evening, with Bella Wright; they admitted that. Most of the Crown witnesses would not be cross-examined by the defense; only one or two points did they deny.

The Attorney General and the police were probably somewhat disgusted. Here was the defense conceding three quarters of the case at the outset. What about the other quarter?

Sir Edward denied, and his client would deny, that his client had used the name “Bella”. He had said “Hello”. And Sir Edward took in hand, very kindly and gently, the two little girls, who said they had met Ronald Light near the scene of the murder, and who described him going about the lanes seeking to molest unprotected damsels.

When he got through with Miss Muriel and Miss Valieria, they no longer looked like two little angels of justice, but rather more like two busy little brats who, feeding for months on sensational newspapers and pictures, had suddenly begun to remember something which might have happened to them on some day or other-but which they obligingly fixed for a certain day, after the police had suggested the date.

At the end of the trial the judge advised the jury not to trouble themselves at all with the testimony of Miss Muriel and Miss Valeria.

When he began to present his case, Sir Edward played his ace. He called the prisoner to the witness stand. Ronald Light was serious, calm, and dignified. He was what we call “a shell-shocked veteran”, who had, moreover, become partially deaf as the result of an exploding shell. There was no attempt to emphasize Light’s wartime services, except in so far as his shattered nerves might explain some of his conduct.

Light now testified that he had never had a revolver or pistol since he had been sent home from France on a stretcher. On the evening of the murder he left home at about five forty-five for a bicycle ride, expecting to return at eight o’clock. He rode through Gaulby, a district he did not know very well, and at six forty-five he was near a place called Little Stretton. He did not see the two small girls anywhere. As it was still early, he turned about to go home by the long route, and this led him again toward Gaulby.

He met a girl, who was a stranger to him, standing at the roadside examining her bicycle. She asked if he had a wrench. He had not, but he looked at the front wheel, which seemed merely to wobble a little. There was nothing he could do for it. They rode on together, chattering as they went. She said that she was going to see some friends in Gaulby, and added:

“I shall only be ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.”

Light then testified:

“I took that as a sort of suggestion that I should wait and we should ride back together. I waited for ten minutes or more, then walked my machine up the hill to the church. Here I got on the bicycle to ride back to Leicester, when I found the rear tyre flat. I pumped it up, and sat down on a gate; but the tyre went down again and I had to mend the puncture. By this time it was eight fifteen, and I knew I was late anyhow. I thought I would ride back and see if this girl had come out. She came out the gate as I rode along, and I said, ‘Hello, you’ve been a long time. I thought you’d gone the other way.’ I talked with Evans, and all that he says is correct, except that I did not say ‘Bella’.”

He further testified that they rode together for only about ten minutes; that he had still more trouble with his tyre; and that the girl left him at a crossroads. He kept on the upper or more direct road; she took the lower, the Gartree Road. He had to walk nearly all the way home and did not arrive till nearly ten. On the following Tuesday he heard of the death. He read the description of Bella Wright and of his own bicycle and came to the conclusion that he was the man wanted.

He was utterly terrified. Both for his own sake and for his mother’s, who was an invalid, he wanted to escape the horror of an investigation, perhaps a trial. Foolishly, as he now admitted, he refrained from going to the police at once, and drifted into a policy of silence, then of concealment, and finally of falsehood. He never went out on the green bicycle again, but hid it and at last broke it up and threw it (together with the holster) into the canal. He now frankly admitted all the lies told when the police came to him.

“I see now, of course,” he said to the judge, “that I did the wrong thing”.

He must have been astounded again when the evidence rose against him from the canal. It is recorded that he had looked at this water from his cell, while he was awaiting trial, and exclaimed:

“Damn and blast that canal!”

Ronald Light’s story, as he now told it, could not be contradicted or disproved in any detail. Five hours of cross-examination failed to trip him once.

His lawyer, who was himself an expert on firearms, sharply questioned the Crown witnesses who testified on technical points: about the wound, and about the bullet. Sir Edward maintained that such a heavy bullet, fired, as they thought, from a distance of seven feet, would have blown out the back of the skull. It was absurd that it should not have travelled farther. The only explanation would be that she was shot as she lay on the ground, and even this was not wholly satisfactory.

That it was the same caliber as bullets found in Light’s holster meant nothing: bullets like this one had recently been made in England by the thousand million. Sir Edward suggested that the bullet found in the road might not be the fatal one at all, and that she might have been killed by an accidental shot fired from the neighbouring field. It could be a rifle bullet.

No one had appeared who could testify that Light and the girl were together on the Gartree Road; he was never placed at or even very near the scene of the crime.

The Crown had shown no motive. It was not a lovers’ quarrel; the two were strangers. There had been no sexual assault. Why should Light have shot her?

The defense, of course, slid over the fact that certain kinds of murders, particularly of women and children, are committed for no apparent motive whatever.

The judge, in his charge, seemed rather to lean to the side of the defense. The jury argued the case for three hours, standing nine to three in favour of the prisoner. Then the three were won over, and they reported Ronald Light “Not guilty”. The verdict was cheered.

But who did kill Bella Wright? Probably we shall never know. Probably, also, we shall never know whether we ourselves, if innocent, but in a predicament like that of the rider of the green bicycle, would behave any better.

Now to come back to our raven. A gentleman named Trueman Humphries went down to the Gartree Road, took pictures, and looked about. At the end he wrote, for the Strand, an entertaining bit of fiction. He imagines a scientific detective challenged to solve the mystery of the green bicycle. This detective organizes, in the neighbourhood of Gaulby and Little Stretton, a shooting match. A prize is offered and all the boys and men in the region are drawn in.

There are various targets: disappearing images of deer, running rabbits, or the like. All of them are sprung upon the contestants suddenly and as a complete surprise. Before one of these sportsmen-a young lad-as he lies on the ground, firing, there rises what seems to be a dark hedge cut in the middle by a white gate. And on this gate sits a raven!

The boy tumbles over in a faint. When he comes to, he is ready to make his confession. He was in the field near the Gartree Road that July evening. He had sighted a bird of some kind on the white gate. He lay behind a sheep trough two or three hundred yards away (there is really such a trough) and fired. He killed the raven-but the bullet also killed the girl who rode by the gate at that moment.

Far-fetched? Very likely. But it’s not unworthy of the great Sherlock!