Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (21 page)

On 15 April Mahon telegraphed Ethel asking her to meet him at Charing Cross the next day. The story becomes almost surreal at this point. Mahon turned up with his wrist bandaged, telling her that he had received this injury when he had fallen off a bus. He had of course sustained it during his scrap with Emily. Ethel and Mahon had a candlelit dinner during which he wooed her for all he was worth, and the successful outcome of all his efforts was a promise that she would spend a weekend away with him.

Ethel duly arrived at Eastbourne on 18 April and was elated and flattered to receive such a rapturous welcome from Mahon who, after all, was really little more than a stranger. The couple spent the following three days and nights largely engaged in energetic and no doubt passionate bouts of love-making. Ethel’s participation in this activity might have been rather less that fervid had she known that a few feet away in a trunk in a room which Mahon kept locked lay the dismembered remains of her paramour’s previous sexual partner. The butcher’s knife and meat saw had already played their appointed role in this unfolding drama.

On Monday 21 April Ethel and Mahon travelled up to London, he ostensibly being engaged ‘on business’. The next day he returned to the bungalow and set about disposing of Emily’s physical remains. He then gratefully made
his way home. His wife welcomed him back from his ‘business trip’ knowing full well that it had almost certainly involved some heavy-duty philandering. This time, however, she found that he was behaving very strangely.

Normally he acted with total sang-froid and happily lied through his teeth if quizzed about his activities. Jessie, his wife, had largely learned not to probe too deeply but she quickly realised that this time there was something different about her husband. He seemed jittery and snappy. Such behaviour was of course not surprising given that he had just branched out to include murder in his bulging portfolio of multifarious criminal activities.

This is where the railway connection comes in. Normally sanguine about her husband’s quirks and peccadilloes, Jessie now felt that there was something amiss and she took the opportunity while he was out to go through his things. This was not the kind of thing she would normally do and was a measure of the unease she felt. She found a cloakroom ticket issued at Waterloo station. She mentioned her suspicions to a friend who happened to be a retired police officer and he surrendered the ticket at the cloakroom receiving in exchange a canvas bag. This was opened to reveal a knife and bloodstained female clothing. Our ex-police friend then acted with great canniness. He deposited the bag back into storage and informed the police, who agreed to watch and wait for Mahon to turn up to retrieve it. Understandably, they thought that he might be able to help them to elucidate a few points about which they were curious.

The surveillance was slow in bringing results but it was eureka at half past six on the evening of 2 May. Mahon turned up to reclaim the bag, was instantly arrested and then blurted out the first thing which came into his head. This was that he could account for any bloodstains which had been found in the bag – he had used it for carrying dog’s meat. He was less fulsome when he was informed that tests showed that the traces of blood in the bag were human. Also which dog was this that he was so generously feeding? He did not have a dog. He did not even like them. Swiftly recovering his composure, however, he told his interrogators that he would now come clean. He had butchered her body, he said, because no one would believe his story about how Emily had died and he was afraid that he himself might even have come under suspicion of having murdered her! A response to this might be ‘perish the thought’.

Ongoing investigations could not find any evidence in the doorframe that an axe had been forcefully thrown at him only to miss him and go on to hit the woodwork. Reassembling Emily’s bodily parts was a painstaking task for the pathologists and left uncompleted because her head was never found, but on the evidence available it was thought that Mahon had either strangled her or battered her with the axe. The jury had little difficulty in deciding that he was guilty of the murder.

The main entrance to Waterloo station. The Victory Arch was opened in 1922 as a War Memorial for employees of the London & South Western Railway who died in the First World War.

Mahon was a seasoned railway traveller, using trains to take him both to genuine business meetings – including those with crooked dealings in mind – and to his various amorous trysts. The canvas bag recovered from the Waterloo cloakroom he had taken with him on a train from Eastbourne to London with various items of Emily’s anatomy wrapped up in brown paper. He had intended to throw these from the carriage windows at various points along the line but he found to his chagrin that the train was too crowded to allow him to do this. He had to dispose of them randomly elsewhere, and it was the unpredictable placing of these gory relics that gave the pathologists so many headaches in trying to reconstruct the body of the unfortunate Emily Kaye.

Mahon showed many of the classic symptoms of psychopathy. He was amoral and ruthless, he made a career out of dishonesty and duplicity, he appeared to
lack any sense of remorse and was seemingly totally indifferent to the judicial process and the sense of what is socially right and wrong, which the criminal law and the penal system, no matter how imperfectly, attempts to implement.

The Girl who Never got to the Station

In August 1881, the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway Co. opened a line from Eridge to Polegate, giving access from the Tunbridge Wells area to the Sussex coast at Eastbourne. This route became known affectionately as the ‘Cuckoo Line’, which gives some sense of the delightful rural scenery through which it passed.

In 1926 Emma Alice Smith, aged sixteen, set off on her bicycle from the village of Waldron to her local railway station nearby. This station had a number of name changes over the years but it was generally known as ‘Waldron and Horam’. Unfortunately Emma never got there. Her death remains an unsolved murder.

In 2008 a descendent of Emma’s family told the police that back in 1953 a dying man had confessed to Emma’s sister that he was responsible for her murder. He claimed to have killed her and then thrown her weighted body into a pond and disposed of the bicycle. When this revelation was made the family decided that it was best to keep quiet, and so it was more than fifty years later that the embargo on the information was lifted. It is unlikely that the details of the murder will ever come to light. Perhaps this is no bad thing.

The latest news in February 2009 is that the police are going to reopen the case.

The Left Luggage Horror

The railways no longer handle parcels and small consignments but they do, somewhat unwillingly, place lockers for left luggage in a number of major stations and there are still a few stations which operate a left luggage office. These are convenient for those wanting to leave a few items of hand luggage while they perhaps go and explore the town. Back in 1927 a new shade of meaning was added to the word ‘deposit’. Someone ‘deposited’ a large black trunk at the left luggage office at London’s Charing Cross station of the Southern Railway. ‘Deposited’ in the trunk was the dismembered body of a woman.

There was nothing particularly unusual about such large items as trunks being left in the temporary care of the railway and it is unlikely that the station worker who accepted payment for it and found it a shelf would have turned a hair. It would have been all in a day’s work. Anyway, the reasons why
someone should wish such a trunk to be stored were the depositor’s business, and likewise the nature of its contents. The contents ceased to be a private matter, however, when the trunk started to exude an appalling stench.

Waldron & Horeham Road station. A Standard 2-6-4T heads a local train at the station which had changed little since the days of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway.

It was opened and it was evident that not only were there human remains inside but they were the remains of someone who had died some while previously. The body parts were in brown paper parcels, but a leading pathologist was able to state that death had been due to asphyxia as the result of strangling and that the woman had been dead for at least a week. The initials ‘I.F.A’ were on the lid of the trunk and a label bore the name ‘F. Austin, St Leonards’. There was some blood-stained clothing. One item bore the name ‘P. Holt’. Others had what appeared to be laundry marks, including ‘447’ and what looked something like ‘588’.

There was a rush to get around to the home of F. Austin at St Leonards but the police were quickly satisfied that he had nothing to do with the trunk. It
was extremely unfortunate that the paperwork relating to the depositing of the trunk was missing. The police thought that this was carelessness and that there were no sinister connotations. Doubtless the railway worker involved got a rollicking.

Enquiries were made about the shops that sold such trunks, either new or second-hand, and photographs of the trunk, its contents and an appeal for help were published in the press. The line of enquiry concerning the shops proved to be of little help, but someone called Holt living in Chelsea got in touch with the police as a result of seeing the appeal in the paper. One of the blood-stained items in the trunk, the police were told, belonged to a Miss P. Holt. The body in the trunk, however, was not a deceased member of the Holt family but that of a female cook who had worked for them briefly. The Holts did not know what had happened to the woman concerned, whose name was Roles, but they believed that she had been married.

In fact the woman in the trunk did indeed call herself Roles but she had lived with, rather than been married to, the Mr Roles who the police traced quickly. His story was that they had cohabited for some years but the relationship had cooled, and after a fair amount of bickering she had left. On the face of it this story gave Mr Roles a motive for murder, but after further enquiries the police were convinced that he was not the killer and so they concentrated on trying to find out more about the dead woman, her movements and her associates.

She turned out to be a prostitute named Minnie Bonati and she was married to an Italian waiter from whom she had long been estranged. He in turn was interviewed but was also able to satisfy the police that he was not involved. A general dealer in second-hand goods with a shop in downtown Brixton then volunteered the information that he had sold the – by now nationally famous – trunk to a man whose appearance he was unfortunately unable to recall.

Police investigations involve much unglamorous but painstaking and meticulous information gathering and the pursuit of trails which often turn out to be dead ends. On occasions sheer happenstance helps the police with their enquiries. In this case an entirely new, and what turned out to be extremely fruitful, line of enquiry was embarked upon – all by the merest of chances.

Older readers may remember shoeblacks who, mostly in busy parts of central London, provided a boot and shoe polishing service, for a fee of course. Although some of them had well-established pitches and a regular and appreciative clientele it always seemed to be a hard way to make a living. Anyway, a shoeblack just happened to pick up a small crumpled piece of paper which when unravelled proved to be a ticket giving details of the deposit of a large trunk at Charing Cross station.

Like everyone else he had heard about the body in the trunk, and, thinking that this ticket might provide vital clues, he went to the police. They pounced on it with glee because it gave the date that the trunk was deposited – 6 May.
Now they had the date and soon they had the time, having traced the person who had the preceding ticket. It was a woman who had arrived at the station by taxi.

It was obvious that whoever had deposited the trunk could not have carried it to Charing Cross so they turned their attention to the cabbies and porters at the station. They found a cabbie who distinctly remembered a fare he had taken from Westminster to the station on the day in question. He was accompanied by an unusually large black trunk which could only just be fitted in the back of the cab. Not only was it unusually large, it was also unwontedly heavy. He had helped the man to get the trunk in the back of the taxi and had commented about its weight. ‘It contains books,’ the man had quickly replied.