Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (23 page)

News came from King’s Cross station in London where a search of the left luggage depository had located a scruffy suitcase emitting an increasingly revolting smell. Inside, wrapped in brown paper soaked in blood and what was apparently olive oil, were two legs and two feet. It did not take the experts long to establish without any doubt that these items were the missing legs and feet. It was a mighty step forward but who was the mystery woman to whom these bits and pieces belonged?

The leading Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury established that the victim of what had been an appalling murder had been a healthy middle-class woman aged between twenty-one and twenty-eight. She had been pregnant. The case had been placed in the left luggage facility on 7 June, which was the day after the stinking trunk had been left at Brighton station.

It is a known fact in the natural world that lightning can strike twice or more in the same place. The finding of human remains in trunks in the same town within a few weeks of each other is less common. We now switch to a seedy little chancer, a Londoner who posed as being an Italian – which he was not – but who managed to make a decent fist of looking the part. He thought it made him more exotic and attractive to women. He went by a number of aliases, one of which we will use which was ‘Tony Mancini’.

He was in and out of casual employment and filled in-between times with petty crime and small-scale swindles. In June 1934 he was working as a general factotum in a café overlooking Brighton beach. He had something of an on-off relationship with a woman whose name was Violet but who wished to be known as ‘Violette’ – again this was thought to sound vaguely foreign and exotic. The couple cohabited despite the fact that she was actually still married and they shared a succession of down-at-heel flats and bedsitters, first in downmarket districts of London and then in similar parts of Brighton.

She resented her failed attempt to make a career as a dancer and she also resented the fact that she was getting older and losing whatever looks she had had. Jobs were hard to come by and so she operated, sporadically and a little half-heartedly, as a prostitute with Mancini constituting himself her pimp. They both felt that life had dealt them a lousy set of cards and were resentful and disillusioned. They were bored and irritated with each other and had frequent rows.

Their growing mutual antipathy culminated on the evening of 10 May 1934 with a violent row and with Mancini hurling a coal-hammer at the lady in his life. It is probable that he had not really intended to hit her at all, but on this occasion he threw the missile with all the accuracy of a Bisley marksman. When he realised that he had killed Violet, he did not know what to do. He left her where she lay for a few hours but then, realising that her body needed to be put somewhere out of sight, he managed with difficulty to manoeuvre it in an upright position into a wardrobe, a task made difficult by the onset of rigor mortis.

After a few days he decided to move to another flat, in this case close to the railway station, and he placed Violet’s body in a trunk he bought specially for the purpose. He recruited two acquaintances to help him move the trunk onto a barrow and across town to the new address. Once moved into his new quarters, and with a suitable cover bought specially for the purpose, Mancini used the trunk as a place for any visitors to sit on. One or two visitors did come round and commented on an unpleasant smell around the flat. This smell was difficult to identify and it was difficult to pinpoint exactly where it was coming from. None of the few guests realised that they were sitting on a trunk which contained the source of the increasingly nauseating aroma.

The reader must wonder about Mancini’s mindset as he continued to go to work only to return nightly to a flat containing a trunk from which the rotting body fluids of his former mistress were oozing and permeating the whole place with an increasingly foul stench. Mancini had little interest in the news or current affairs and it therefore came as a shock when he saw a local newspaper with a headline about a body in a trunk being found in the town. His heart must have been in his mouth until he ascertained that this gory find had been made at the railway station. He relaxed – no one else knew about Violet’s death and the whereabouts of her torso or other remains.

A massive murder hunt was launched bringing in the services of Scotland Yard. Major lines of enquiry included following up all the reports of missing women and all women who had been receiving pre-natal advice and treatment. The police spread their net across the whole country on these enquiries. Door-to-door enquiries were carried out in Brighton and surrounding areas. Police had to deal with dozens of reports of sinister-looking men humping equally sinister-looking packages around or pushing them on carts or handbarrows. Most of these turned out to be easily explained and entirely innocent although they took time to be checked out which of course they had to be.

There was the usual crop of hoaxes and honest, well-intentioned but timewasting misunderstandings. An appeal to those who had been at Brighton station on the day the trunk had been deposited produced many responses but the only useful one was that it seemed highly likely that the trunk had been brought to Brighton on a train, and almost certainly from one of the stations not far away on the coast line and certainly not beyond Worthing. With a collective sigh the police decided to re-interview all those who had already been quizzed for information and to use different detectives. This was a long, tedious and drawn-out process, but if the dead woman was local, surely someone must have noticed her unexplained absence.

The dingy house in which Mancini had his flat and to which he had moved the trunk containing Violet’s body was badly in need of re-pointing and a firm had been taken on to do the job. Scaffolding went up around the building but it was not long before the workmen were complaining about the horrible smell that was emanating from somewhere low down in the building. Indeed so bad was the smell that the foreman decided to notify the police. Officers were detailed to investigate and had to agree that the smell was that of rotting flesh.

The owners of the house were away, and as no one else responded to the repeated knockings they decided to force the front door open. They gained access to Mancini’s quarters and homed in on a trunk which seemed to be the source of the smell. Retching almost uncontrollably the officers prised the trunk open and inside of course was the body of a woman. She was in an advanced stage of decomposition and myriads of large, prosperous-looking grubs were gorging themselves happily on her remains. Brighton now had a second trunk murder!

Sir Bernard Spilsbury found himself making a return visit to Brighton. He showed that the woman had been killed by a violent blow with a heavy blunt instrument. Enquiries quickly elicited who she was and her relationship with Mancini, who, feeling a growing sense of unease, had already decamped for London where he hoped to achieve anonymity until things quietened down. A description of Mancini was circulated throughout the UK. The description included mention of the rather odd way in which he walked.

On the evening of 18 July two police officers were sitting, rather bored, in their patrol car close to a pub in Lewisham, south-east London, when they
saw a man walk past heading for an all-night café. There was something so distinctive about the way in which he walked that they immediately recalled the circular they had read about a man wanted for questioning concerning the finding of a dead woman in a trunk in Brighton.

They arrested the man, who readily admitted that his name was Mancini, and overnight he found himself being whisked at high speed down the A23 to Brighton. He appeared at the magistrates’ court the next morning. He was remanded in custody on a charge of murder. Soon he found himself the star turn at a murder trial at Lewes Assizes. This is a role that brought out the hitherto unsuspected thespian in him. He lied through his teeth and quite unashamedly and histrionically tried to play the jury.

He had returned one night to the flat that he shared with Violet only to find her dead, he said. He had not reported the death because he claimed that a man like himself with a record of various petty criminal offences would never be treated fairly by the police. Yes he knew it had been stupid but he had decided to move Violet’s body in a trunk to another flat. All this, you understand, between gulps, sobs, snuffles, tears coursing down his face and silences while he tried to cope with the emotional trauma he was undergoing. It may not have won an Oscar but it did win a verdict of ‘not guilty’. Mancini walked away from the court a free man.

What about the dead baby? The enquiries continued; they went nowhere. The senior officer in charge of the enquiry accumulated pieces of evidence to suggest that the woman – Violet – might have visited a member of the medical profession to obtain an abortion. The performance of an abortion was illegal. Perhaps the abortion went wrong and Violet died. The father of the unborn child and the back-street abortionist would have been anxious to keep what had happened secret. Perhaps they therefore dismembered Violet’s body and placed it in the trunk which was then deposited in the left luggage facility at Brighton station.

A possible performer of the abortion was identified and upon being questioned smiled unctuously and issued a veiled threat that he had friends in very high places who would not only ensure his immunity from prosecution but would be able to make things very difficult for any overzealous police officers who attempted to proceed with their enquiries. The murderer of Violet was never brought to justice.

Murder in the South Side

Pollokshields East is a station serving the Cathcart Circle line on the edge of Glasgow’s smart South Side late nineteenth and early twentieth-century suburbs. The Cathcart Circle was immortalised in a characterful novel by
R.W. Campbell called
Snooker Tam of the Cathcart Railway
, published in 1919. The eponymous Tam is a lively and cheeky young station lad at the fictional Kirkbride station on the line, who gets into various scrapes with his elders and betters and finds many sonsie lasses to flirt with while he attends – or does not attend – to his platform duties.

Snooker Tam may be a cheerful and light-hearted read but there was nothing light-hearted about events at Pollokshields East around half past seven on the evening of 10 December 1945. It was a freezing night and three railway workers were sitting round the fire in the stationmaster’s office, glad of the respite from the cutting winds outside. They were Kerith Scott, an experienced railway employee who could turn his hand to just about any task around a railway station, a young junior porter called Robert Brown and a female clerk called Joan Bradshaw.

The three were chatting in a desultory fashion when suddenly a door burst open and a man opened fire with a revolver, aiming cold-bloodedly at each of them in turn. The woman was hit and she died immediately while Brown received injuries from which he died the next day. Scott was the lucky one. He was only grazed by the bullet fired at him. The intruder escaped clutching two metal boxes which he clearly hoped contained the day’s takings. They were actually empty.

A massive investigation was immediately set in motion by the police. The dying Brown managed to provide some kind of description, including the fact that the murderer seemed to be wearing ‘de-mob’ clothes. The net was thrown far and wide. Large numbers of people who had been in the vicinity of Pollokshields East about that time were traced and quizzed but with little result, and after six months the police had to admit that they were no further forward. It was therefore almost in desperation that a reward of
£
1,000 was offered to anyone providing information that led to the arrest and conviction of the murderer. Various cranks and time-wasters came forward but no useful information was gained. What could the police do that they had not already done?

On the morning of 9 October 1946, ten months after the murder at Pollokshields East, a police constable was on duty not far from Cathcart railway station on the same line when a young man walked up to him and requested that the officer accompany him to the police station because he wanted to confess to a murder. Was the man who made this revelation just another time-waster? The constable did not particularly want a rollicking from his sergeant for inviting a nutter into the police station but he would get an even bigger rocket if it turned out later that the man was indeed a murderer and he, the officer, had told him to go away.

He decided to play cautiously and to ask the man a few questions. The answers he gave made it clear that he was claiming to be the killer in the Pollokshields East murder. He had been living with the horror of what he had
done for all those months, he said, and had tried to commit suicide by shooting himself but his gun had jammed. Concluding that the fates were against him, he therefore decided to turn himself in.

Pollokshields East station on the Cathcart Circle Line in Glasgow’s southern inner suburbs. A recent picture, showing the unprepossessing building which replaced an attractive Caledonian Railway installation with a fine umbrella canopy.