Ghosts & Gallows (16 page)

Worksop, then as now, is nineteen miles by road from Sheffield, and the Grimes’ house in Neil Road was a twopenny tram ride from the Pond Street bus terminus. Anyone taking the trip would have had to walk to the tram stop and also have a long walk at the other end down the length of Neil Road to number nine. It was a black winter’s night, Mona Tinsley was ten years old and had not visited her aunt’s house for several years. ‘Uncle Fred’, it seemed, was happy for her to do this entire trip alone, despite the fact that ten days previously he had driven to Sheffield in his lorry seemingly without fear of arrest. Chief Constable Barnes was unconvinced and by the end of the following day, with no progress in the hunt for Mona, Nodder was charged with abduction and removed to a cell in Lincoln Prison.

Soon the entire country was caught up in the desperate search for the little girl from the Midlands. Newspapers reported the tireless efforts of search parties and volunteers: the searching of left luggage lockers and unopened parcels, the beating of woods and remote places around Retford by a search party of nearly 900 people, the dragging and draining of a five-mile stretch of the Chesterfield Canal, which ran suspiciously within fifty yards of ‘Peacehaven’ and Nodder’s garden, the opening up of cesspools and gravel pits, the countless statements taken by police forces across Britain from people who felt they had seen or knew where she was.

It was in this atmosphere of intrigue and fearful expectation that Estelle Roberts entered into the story of Mona Tinsley and Frederick Nodder. Douglas Sladen, a friend of the medium who had been following the story, spoke to Roberts and asked if she would be willing to help in some way in the search. She agreed on the understanding that there would be no publicity of her involvement. Sladen contacted the police and the request was put to Barnes in Newark. Roberts’ standing in the Spiritualist movement was such that the policeman was disinclined to view Sladen as a crank and he put the request to Wilfred and Lilian Tinsley, who agreed and sent a pink silk dress which belonged to Mona to the medium in Hampton. Estelle Roberts was 150 miles away from the centre of the search for the missing child, but as soon as she held the dress in her hand she knew Mona Tinsley was dead. At the same moment, the medium’s dog, which had been sleeping in front of the fire, howled mournfully and began charging around the room.

We will encounter this kind of experience, the reading or psychometrizing of an object by a sensitive for information, again in later chapters. All these cases are unique, but what makes this one stand out is that as well as psychometry, Roberts later claimed to have actually made contact with the dead child’s spirit and obtained first-hand information about the murder from the victim herself. After handling the dress, Roberts went into a trance and, making contact with ‘Red Cloud’, asked him to bring the spirit of Mona Tinsley to speak with her. The child told her how she had been taken to a small house and strangled, her body had been put into a sack and taken ‘on wheels to the water and thrown in’. She gave a description of the house and its location and Douglas Sladen wrote it down. When this was passed to the Newark police they realised the uncanny similarity to the lonely ‘Peacehaven’ – a small house with a water-filled ditch on one side (the way a child might describe a canal) and a field behind which lead on to a graveyard; there was an inn nearby and more fields and a river to which the medium felt compelled to move towards.

Barnes took the description seriously enough to request the medium to travel to Newark, and sent a car to pick her up from the railway station. At ‘Peacehaven’, Estelle Roberts walked around the garden and the house, a striking figure in her long black cloak. The house was exactly as she had seen it, seemingly through the eyes of little Mona Tinsley. She said that the child had spent some time inside the house copying writing from a book; she had slept in the first floor back bedroom and been killed there, and, specifically, the murderer had taken the body out through the back door. This corroborated details only the police were aware of – the writing discovered in the living room and the front door fixed shut with screws.

Outside, Estelle took the police down through Nodder’s garden and across the adjoining countryside – the graveyard and the layout of the fields were all as she had seen it remotely back at her home in Hampton. She told Chief Constable Barnes that the body of Mona Tinsley would be found in a river which lay beyond the fields and was not visible from where they were standing. The nearby River Idle had already been dragged but the continuing heavy rain had turned the stream into a raging torrent and had made the work incredibly difficult and dangerous.

Despite a police embargo at the time on the medium’s visit, corroboration of Estelle Roberts’ vision did come from local sources. A Newark Spiritualist medium told Wilfred Tinsley that Mona would eventually be found in the River Idle as, in trance, she had tasted mud in her mouth, while another psychic told the police that the child’s body would be recovered from water ‘thirty miles in a north-westerly direction from Newark’.

On 9 March 1937, two months after Mona Tinsley’s disappearance, Frederick Nodder appeared in front of the Warwick Winter Assizes at the Victoria Courts in Birmingham. The trial lasted a day and the jury took sixteen minutes to find Nodder guilty of abduction. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Swift, told Nodder: ‘It may be that time will reveal the dreadful secret which you carry in your breast. I cannot tell, but I am determined that, as far as I have part or lot in that dreadful tragedy … I will keep you in custody.’ Nodder was given seven years and returned to Lincoln Prison.

It was to be three months before both the judge’s and Estelle Roberts’ prophesies were to come true. By the beginning of June 1937, the weeks of inclement weather which had plagued the hunt for Mona Tinsley had finally subsided. On the afternoon of Sunday 6 June, Walter Marshall and his family were again enjoying a boat trip on the River Idle in the company of some friends. About a quarter of a mile below Bawtry, Mr Marshall noticed an object in the water about five yards in from the river bank on the Nottinghamshire side and steered his punt towards it. As they came alongside, Marshall was horrified to see the trunk of a small body, the legs floating in the water, the whole corpse held in position by the head, which had become buried in the silt. Mona Tinsley had been found at last.

Marshall sent his son to the nearest police station at Austerfield and officers removed the body to an outhouse at the Ship Inn at Newington, where Wilfred Tinsley was able to make a formal identification. The body was then taken to Retford Mortuary where Dr James Webster, the Director of the West Midland Regional Laboratory, carried out a post-mortem. Due to the extended time the corpse had been in the river there was extensive adipocere formation, which had prevented destructive decomposition or disintegration and Webster was able to state that death had been due to strangulation by a ligature (there was a dark circular mark around the neck) and that Mona had been dead before she was put in the water. A funeral service was held on Thursday 10 June at the Methodist Church where Mona used to attend Sunday school, and she was buried the same day at Newark Cemetery; several hundred people lined the streets and stood in silence as the coffin was laid to rest. Eighteen days later Frederick Nodder was charged with murder.

Nodder’s second trial opened at the Nottingham Assizes at the Shire Hall on 22 November 1937 in front of Mr Justice Macnaghten (the judge at Nodder’s first trial had died a month before) and lasted two days. Among the many witnesses for the prosecution was Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the troubled genius of British forensic medicine, who confirmed that the child had been killed from behind, strangled by a bootlace or similar item. Nodder clung to his original defence that an unknown person had killed Mona Tinsley after he had seen her off on the Sheffield bus at Worksop, but the retiring jury only took an hour to find him guilty. Sentencing Nodder to death, the judge made a notable reference to Mr Justice Swift’s summing up at the previous trial by saying: ‘Justice has slowly but surely overtaken you … ’. An appeal was quickly dismissed and Nodder, who entered criminal history at the time as a man who, for all practical purposes, was tried twice for the same murder, ate his last Christmas dinner in the condemned cell at Lincoln Prison. He was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint and Stanley Cross at 8 a.m. on 30 December 1937.

What drove Nodder to kill Mona Tinsley will now never be known, although it seems most likely that the motive was sexual. It was impossible to ascertain any evidence for this due to the advanced state of decomposition of the body but, tellingly, a packet of sweets and a tin of Vaseline were found under the pillow of the bed in the front bedroom at ‘Peacehaven’. Writing about the case in the early 1980s
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, Colin Wilson was of the opinion that Nodder had developed a sexual obsession with Mona during the time he lodged with the Tinsleys at Newark. Nodder was a known drinker (he had been dismissed from several jobs due to drunkenness) and may have abducted the child on an impulse after drinking heavily during the day. The attraction of Edie Grimes to Nodder was clearly sexual despite his filthy personal hygiene and dirty way of living. He had been thrown out of the lodgings he moved into after leaving Neil Road and before moving to Hayton for lack of cleanliness, and when the police searched ‘Peacehaven’ they found it in a squalid state. He had a strange hold over the woman and to a certain extent her husband; amongst other things successfully persuading Thomas Grimes to buy a second-hand car in which he drove the couple around.

Over the next twenty years the involvement of mediums and psychics in criminal cases, particularly those of murder, was to achieve greater public prominence and several will be discussed in detail later in this book. Before we encounter the first of these paranormal detectives, we move forward in time some twenty years after Estelle Roberts walked around lonely ‘Peacehaven’ to a time in post-war Britain during the 1950s, where the dreams of two ordinary London women were to become mixed with stories of strange crimes and with wife murder …

NOTES

1
. Helen Victoria Duncan (1898-1956), Scottish materialisation medium and prominent Spiritualist martyr famously imprisoned for nine months during the Second World War for ‘pretending to recall spirits of deceased persons’. Her death has been attributed to the effect of a police raid on one of her séances in Nottingham although there is no direct medical evidence for this. John (Jack) Boaden Webber (1907-40), Welsh miner and physical medium who was the subject of an investigation and biography by Spiritualist healer Harry Edwards. Webber’s mediumistic career was cut short by his premature death at the age of thirty-three. Alexander Frederick (Alec) Harris (1897-1974), Welsh foreman painter and highly regarded materialisation medium. Harris gave many séances in his native Cardiff and later in Johannesburg, and, like Helen Duncan, his death has been attributed to the effects of an attempted exposure by South African journalists in the mid-1960s.

2
. On 7 January 1939, two months before Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia,
Psychic News
published details of a communication from ‘Red Cloud’ which, with specific reference to the growing international disaster, included the famous phrase: ‘We have returned from the spirit world to succeed and not to fail.’

3
.
The Psychic Detectives
(Pan Books, London, 1984), pp. 205-7.

The ‘Black Museum’ at Scotland Yard seems to epitomise in its title more than anything else the human fascination with true crime and classic murder cases of the past. More correctly known as the Metropolitan Police Crime Museum, this notorious collection of criminal memorabilia was established in the early 1870s as a centre of instruction for detectives and policemen using the Prisoners Property Act of 1869, which gave the police power to retain items of evidence and personal property belonging to convicted felons for the purposes of training and education. For many years the Black Museum – a suitably macabre name credited to a disparaging remark by a disgruntled journalist from
The Observer
newspaper who, in April 1877, was refused access to view the exhibits – was housed at the New Scotland Yard building in Whitehall Place. In the late 1960s, the collection was relocated to new premises and today occupies two rooms on the first floor of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters at Victoria Street, SW1. Its exhibits, un-viewable by the general public, every one a tribute to the dark and sinister side of the human psyche, contain connections to some of the most notorious names in the annals of British criminal history: the bathtub used by ‘Brides in the Bath’ killer George Joseph Smith to drown three women; a human vertebrae held together by tree roots recovered from the garden of 10 Rillington Place, where officially seven people were murdered by necrophile John Christie; and the gas stove from a Muswell Hill bedsit on which homosexual mass murderer Dennis Nilsen boiled human flesh.

In September 1957, there was much speculation in the British tabloid press that an incomplete handwritten manuscript was to be deposited in the Museum’s archive by detectives from the ‘X’ Division at Harrow Road police station. If Frank Harrison’s short story ‘The Mad Killer of Vermin Alley’
1
did make it into this unique collection of death masks, blunt instruments and hangmen’s ropes, it would have been the only artefact in the Black Museum which crosses over into the strange twilight world of crime and the paranormal through which we are currently journeying. Its author, his crime and the eerie circumstances surrounding its discovery are now almost completely forgotten.

Francis Charles Alfred Harrison (known as Frank) was born on 7 November 1920 in Hampstead. A spoilt child, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked as an office boy before being employed as a stores assistant at the Arrons Electricity Meter factory in Salusbury Road, Kilburn. In 1941, Harrison enlisted in the RAF and served until 1946, rising to the rank of Corporal. Most of the war years were spent uneventfully guarding aerodromes although at one point he received twelve weeks’ detention for fighting with civilians and, in March 1944, was unconscious for a period of twelve hours after falling down an escalator in an Underground station and, as a result, was hospitalized for a month. After de-mob, Harrison returned to Arrons and took up an office job as a progress chaser.