The Thing Itself

TWENTY-NINE

Bob Watts had piled his father’s exercise books beside the wingback chair in front of the window looking over the Thames. A bottle of his father’s whisky was set on the table beside the chair with a jug of water and a shot glass. It was raining again, pocking the waters of the river. He picked up the first book.

Notes on Brighton and the Trunk Murders

by

Victor Tempest

Exercise book one

A lot has been written about these two 1934 murders. The one of a prostitute by her pimp, the other of an unidentified woman by person or persons unknown.

At the time the public confused the two — thought one man had done both. And, at first, that’s what the police thought. But here’s how it was.

On either 10th or 11th May, a small-time crook and pimp called Tony Mancini — I recall he went by other names too — killed Violette Kay, his prostitute mistress a decade older than him, in their basement lodgings on Park Crescent, off the Upper Lewes Road in north Brighton. He crammed her, fully clothed, into a trunk and moved digs to Kemp Street, up near the station.

He took the trunk with him and kept it by his bed. Some say he ate his meals off it. He told Violette Kay’s sister that Violette had gone off to the Continent for a good job — she had been a music hall performer until the drink and the morphine got to her.

Nearly a month later, on Derby Day, Wednesday 6th June, between 6 and 7 p.m. in the evening, someone else left a trunk at Brighton railway station’s left luggage office.

The next day, incidentally, Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt biff-boys tore into hecklers at his Olympia rally with coshes and razor-blades. A party of Blackshirts had gone up from Brighton on the morning train.

On 10th June, in the evening sun, a boy and a girl taking a walk on the beach at Black Rock found a head half-wrapped in newspaper in a rock pool. The boy persuaded the girl to leave it there, on the idiotic grounds it was the remains of a suicide the police had finished with.

On Sunday 17th June 1934 — a hot, close day — the attendants at the left luggage office at Brighton station were being overpowered by a foul smell coming from somewhere in their store. They narrowed it down to the trunk that had been deposited on Derby Day. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I went up there with a colleague and we opened the trunk. It fair stank. It wasn’t Violette Kay inside — she was still in a different trunk at the end of Tony Mancini’s bed. It was the naked torso of a woman wrapped in brown paper.

Once this hit the newspapers, it was bedlam in Brighton. We were overwhelmed with information — no computers back then. It was big news every day. When the big news should have been Adolf getting into position to try to take over Europe. I remember that at the end of June Hitler ordered the massacre of almost a hundred of his former supporters whom he now saw as opponents. They were calling it the Night of the Long Knives. But that didn’t even make it on to the front page because there was some daft new clue found in Brighton.

The press went even more insane when Violette Kay’s body was found on 15th July. Her friends had reported her missing and thought she might be in the trunk found at the station. Mancini was called in and acted suspiciously enough for the police to call round at his house the next day to question him again. He’d scarpered. A decorator reported a foul smell in the basement.

Strangely, neither Mancini’s landlord nor landlady had a sense of smell. They had noticed nothing.

The two Trunk Murders were front-page news; didn’t matter what else was going on in the world. Well, except for about a week later when the front pages were taken with the story of how on 22nd July, in Chicago, John Dillinger — America’s Public Enemy No. 1 — had been shot to death by FBI agents as he came out of the Biograph Cinema. One policeman apparently shook hands with the corpse. A mob gathered to dip their hankies in his blood. Later, at the autopsy, someone stole his brain.

Needless to say, every copper in Brighton went to see the film he’d been watching when it came out over here, probably hoping the glamour of police work Chicago-style would somehow rub off. It was Manhattan Melodrama, with William Powell as a public prosecutor sending up his best friend, Clark Gable, for murder.

Dollfuss, the Chancellor of Austria, was murdered on 25th July but that was buried somewhere on page three. A bloke in Ohio who had slipped on a banana skin and died made the bottom of page one.

Anyway, to cut a familiar story short, Mancini was eliminated as a suspect in the Brighton station trunk murder (it was being called No. 1) but put on trial for murdering Violette Kay (No. 2). His barrister, name of Norman Birkett, got him off, claiming that Kay had been murdered by one of her clients and that Mancini had come home and found the body and panicked that he would be blamed so he’d packed her in the trunk.

By mid-September, with 12,000 letters, cards and telegrams on file — plus notes of phone calls — the police were no nearer finding either the identity of the first trunk murder victim or her murderer. Nor ever were. No policeman ever had a clue. Except one. Me.