The Law Killers (7 page)
Seconds later, her panting assailant had opened the driver’s door and bundled her into the seat after placing one hand round her throat and the other over her mouth. He got into the car with her, at first sitting on his helpless victim then ordering her to move over into the passenger seat. Then he ripped the car keys from her hand. Despite her fear, the 41-year-old victim continued to struggle. She attempted to escape by opening her passenger door but was propelled back into her seat by an arm across her throat. When she tried to shout out, the broad-shouldered man with the pale eyes roughly stifled her call for help. ‘Don’t do that. Stop doing that,’ he instructed, the quietness of his words adding to the menace. But even after he had started the engine, the woman found unexpected courage to continue her fight. She managed to pull the keys from the ignition and, fighting off his attempts to pin her back in her seat, succeeded in switching on the car’s hazard warning lights and sounding the horn. Other shoppers paused in their haste to get out of the cold of the February evening and looked curiously towards the vehicle. But once more they discounted the disturbance as a minor family row where outside interference might not be appreciated.
Perhaps because of the attention her actions were starting to attract in the car park, or maybe thanks to her surprising pluck, the situation suddenly changed. The aggression slipped away from the man in the driver’s seat and he slowly opened his door and began backing out of the vehicle. Then in an urgent, raised voice he pleaded, ‘I really need your help. I’m really desperate. I really need your help.’
The woman who had been his prisoner until a moment before but who had somehow taken control of the situation, asked what help he required.
‘I really need to get to Lochee,’ he said, naming the suburb several miles away at the opposite end of town and where his notoriety had started two decades earlier.
Calmly she replied, ‘I can’t take you there. You’ve really scared me. You know I can’t take you there.’
Her firm response seemed to be all that was required to drain the last traces of aggression from her captor. Without another word he slid out of the vehicle, pushed the door shut and quietly moved off into the shadows of the car park. The trembling woman in the passenger seat quickly locked all the doors, anxiously watching his departure. It was only after he vanished towards a nearby housing estate that she found sufficient courage to leave the car and re-enter the supermarket to ask staff to call the police.
Despite press appeals and the study of the supermarket company’s CCTV recordings, the identity of the man who had appeared from nowhere to transform a woman’s routine shopping expedition into the most frightening experience of her life, remained unknown. The tapes picked up his arrival at the store some 40 minutes before the incident began and he was tracked wandering round the store without attempting to buy anything. He was also pinpointed hanging around outside, apparently watching other shoppers, and then moving towards a cash machine as though to use it. But, however helpful the images were, they were insufficiently clear to establish who the man was.
The breakthrough the police were searching for came when an observant detective reviewed the CCTV footage. Magnification of the images showed distinctive features on the jacket, sufficient to allow the manufacturer to be traced. They in turn advised that it had been part of a batch supplied to a charity second-hand furniture organisation in Dundee.
Within hours of that information being received, the recycling firm were able to tell police that the owner of the jacket was John Cant Smith. They knew him as a released murderer but had been ‘motivated by humanity’ to give him a chance by taking him on as a volunteer. At first he had been employed part-time, then, latterly, full-time. They were able to tell police, too, that on the day of the abduction, Smith had not turned up for work.
Three weeks after the incident, he was arrested. At first he denied having any part in it, but later, before he was due in court, he confessed to what he had done, saying the offence hadn’t been sexually motivated but had been carried out because he had a cocaine habit and owed a dealer £350.
Even after his arrest, Smith’s latest female victim remained unaware of his appalling history. It was only after he had faced justice – again in the High Court in Edinburgh – for the ordeal he had subjected her to, that she learned the full extent of his violent past. Perhaps it was as well she was such an innocent or she might never have found the nerve to confront him in the valiant way she did.
As in the previous incidents, when he forced himself upon unsuspecting women, Smith again sought in court to explain away his actions as having much less sinister motives. His defence counsel said that following his release from his 19 years in Peterhead, Smith had lived alone and had obtained employment. However, just as he had admitted to police, he was a drug addict and required extra money. An examination of blood samples taken from Smith and also of his bank account, confirmed these facts. On the day of the attack, the defence QC went on to explain, Smith had little recollection of events but his intention had been to rob someone at a cash machine. When he had been unable to do so, he turned towards his victim and when that plan went wrong, his next thought was to have her drive him to a less busy machine.
Jailing him for five years, Lord Kinclaven remarked that the term would have been seven years except for the fact that he had owned up to his crime at an early stage and also because he had been returned to prison immediately under the terms of the licence releasing him from his original life sentence.
His words were received unemotionally by the man with the ordinary name but extraordinary history of crime. John Smith, who in his relatively short life had murdered, raped, rioted and abducted, was led away silently to return once more to the place he had said left him feeling desolate and hopeless – the place where those behind the towering walls would be bound to act like animals if that was how they thought they were being treated.
5
A chill wind swept through Dundee Harbour that late January morning in 1889 when the couple from London hurried down the gangway of the steamer
Cambria
. Neither had been in the city before and they gazed for a few moments at the vast hill dominating the northern skyline – which they would later learn was called the Law – before pulling their collars up and quickly moving on to collect their luggage.
Few of the others going about their business on the dockside that day paid them much attention, except to show a little surprise at how skilfully the diminutive 5-foot 3-inch male handled the large packing box that was discharged along with the rest of their baggage. William Henry Bury wasn’t just short of stature, but slightly built and sometimes a shade unsteady on his feet, though that had more to do with the amount of ale he normally consumed than any infirmity. For most of his twenty-nine years he had lived in his native Midlands and the woman who accompanied him was his wife Ellen, four years his senior, whom he had married only nine months before.
Bizarrely, they had met in Kate Spooner’s brothel in London where Ellen worked as a skivvy and where Bury had become a frequent visitor after moving south to live in the capital’s East End the previous November.
Their courtship had been brief – a month – before their Easter Monday wedding and it was difficult to understand how Bury had managed to sweep Ellen, slim and delicately featured, so completely off her feet. He was said by those who knew him to be restless and quarrelsome, fond of drink and whores and without any kind of obvious future. His father, a fishmonger, had died when Bury was only six months old and a short time later his mother was admitted to a lunatic asylum. A prosperous woman in Wolverhampton took over the family of three orphans but, despite being educated above his class, Bury became a drifter soon after entering his teens. He had some training as a horse butcher and had worked in a locksmith’s, but these occupations required a discipline he didn’t have and after his move to the East End he eked out a scanty living as a sawdust- and sand-merchant. Most of his customers were publicans and he also tended to quickly become one of theirs.
It was much easier to understand why Bury was attracted to Ellen. She had inherited £300 in shares from an aunt – the equivalent of three years’ pay for factory workers – and more than one customer at Kate Spooner’s had made overtures in her direction. Unaccountably, she had chosen the small, bearded man who had seemed incapable of offering her any kind of future. It was a decision she probably came quickly to regret. Less than a week after the wedding, their first landlady in Bow hurried to their bedroom because of the amount of noise. She walked in to find Bury straddling his wife with the knife he always kept under his pillow in his hand and Ellen shouting that he was in the act of killing her. Another acquaintance of the unlikely couple twice witnessed the petite newly-wed being assaulted by her husband. On the first occasion, Bury punched her full in the face in a pub in Whitechapel. During the next attack, in the street, Ellen was knocked to the ground after suffering a heavy blow to the mouth. The incident ended only when a man stepped in to hold the drunken Bury back.
When he wasn’t ill-treating his new wife, the under-sized, under-achieving Bury was rapidly devouring the £300 legacy, first with the purchase of a pony and cart for his sawdust business and later on drink and prostitutes. By the time they arrived in Dundee, little remained. Certainly, there wasn’t enough left to fund the purchase of a house or even the rent of fully furnished apartments in the city and when they alighted from the
Cambria
that winter morning, they travelled only a few hundreds yards before finding lodgings at 43 Union Street. Jean Robertson, their landlady, charged them eight shillings per week for the rent of a room but Bury considered this too expensive and, a week later, after unsuccessfully attempting to gain two shillings’ reduction, they moved out. The same day, the couple took up occupancy of a two-roomed basement flat at 113 Princes Street, an area overlooking the harbour and on a busy route into the city centre.
Significantly, the closely built tenements were also well served by public houses and, to the delight of their owners, Bury immediately established himself as a big-drinking customer. Ellen, however, appeared only once with him, on the day after they moved into the flat, when she had a glass of port wine in one of the pubs before going home. The little Englishman would sometimes visit the same bar more than once on the same day and was happy to chat to anyone who would listen. He seemed ‘a man of means’, spoke of selling shares, and said he and his wife had moved north for the sake of Ellen’s health – an ironic comment, given the events soon to unfold. He added that they would probably return to London that August.
The couple made an early visit to a shop operated by Mrs Marjory Smith. After buying some domestic utensils, the conversation turned to their previous life in London. When Mrs Smith asked why it was that the capital’s famous police force allowed Jack the Ripper to go unchecked, Ellen replied, ‘Oh, Jack the Ripper is quiet now.’ Bury remained silent.
Bury also became known to Janet Martin, who ran a general provisions store at 125 Princes Street, and around 1 p.m. on Monday, 4 February, the man who seemed to have no interest in finding a job called at the shop and asked for a length of cord. He gave no explanation why he wanted it but accepted the first piece shown, telling Mrs Martin, ‘This will do nicely.’
Ellen Bury, the Cockney brothel maid who had inexplicably become infatuated with an alcoholic abuser whom she barely knew and who willingly travelled by ship with him to a land utterly alien to her usual way of life, was never seen alive from that day on. It is likely, however, that she was heard. At around three o’clock the following morning, neighbour David Duncan was awake in his bedroom when he heard three screams of ‘desperate distress’ coming from the Bury’s flat thirty yards away. The terrified shrieks ended as abruptly as they began and he heard no more, though he lay in bed listening intently for the next half-hour. Duncan seems to have been the only one who heard anything. Even his landlady, who shared the same bedroom, slept through the quick, anguished screams.
In the following days Bury was seldom out of the local pubs – his favourite, the Prince Regent Bar, in particular – and none of those he shared a drink with detected anything different about the Englishman who never worked but who always had money for ale. As usual, he was more than willing to buy a drink for anyone he struck up a conversation with, although, as always, he unaccountably declined the same offers in return. Sometimes, he made casual references to Ellen, more than once even taking away a bottle of bitter beer which he said was for her, and no one suspected she wasn’t sitting at home nearby as usual.
On Sunday, 10 February, six days after his wife was last seen alive and just twenty-two days after they first had set foot in Dundee, Bury embarked on a course of action that was to guarantee him a notoriety to extend for all of the following century and into the next and see his name echo round the world.
Early that day he called at the home of David Walker, a neighbour who lived round the corner in Crescent Lane, and seemed anxious to talk. They had first met several days earlier in the Prince Regent when Walker, a painter, had been working there. Walker was in bed when Bury called and he tossed a newspaper to his visitor, jokingly saying there might be something in it about Jack the Ripper, whose activities among the whores of Whitechapel had the population gripped in a mixture of fear and fascination in equal measure. Walker added that his new neighbour ‘might know something about him’. Bury was unamused and left a short time afterwards. Unexpectedly, he called back an hour later and the pair went for a walk together. As they strolled the roads surrounding the harbour area and viewed the tied-up vessels in the docks, Bury enquired about the times of boats and trains for London, saying he was of a mind to return south to have a drink with his former acquaintances there. He also spoke about the departure times of vessels sailing to Hull and Liverpool.