The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (2 page)

The connoisseur of real-life crime is affronted by this comfortable and threadbare format. He knows that in the real world, not every crime mystery is solved by the arrival of the detective, the knitting of brows and the application of improbable powers of deduction. Murder is always mysterious. Even if (as the American murder scholar Wendy Lesser suggests) we know all the who-what-when facts, “the distance between our own lives and the act of murder leaves a space where mystery creeps in. We seem able, though, to accept the full subtlety, the full complexity of the mystery only in a work of fiction, which can give us other satisfactions than The Definite Answer.”
²
There is no fiction in the stories that follow; but neither is there a full tally of Definite Answers. Far from it. Here are crimes so puzzling, sometimes clueless, often motiveless, that we can only guess at the truth of them.

The history of unsolved crime is as old as the history of crime itself, but it has only been documented in any coherent form for the last 200 years or so. One of the earliest recorded cases of unsolved murder in London dates from 1678 when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, politician, magistrate and woodmonger, was found dead in a ditch. The crime remains one of the most celebrated of historical British mysteries. Sir Edmund was the magistrate before whom Titus Oates swore the existence of a Popish Plot, by which English Protestants would be massacred, the King assassinated and a Catholic ministry installed in his place. The “plot” was Oates’s invention, but Godfrey’s murder ensured that the tale gained widespread currency. Whoever did the murder was supposed to have dripped blobs of wax on to the body, possibly in an effort to throw suspicion on to the priests from the Popish Queen’s Chapel. Three Catholic suspects were duly arrested, tried and hanged for the murder, but the trial was a travesty and the part played by this wretched trio in Godfrey’s demise (if any) remains hidden. The great essayist in black humour Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), applying the principles of aesthetic criticism to murder (“as one of the fine arts”), judged Sir Edmund’s assassination “the finest work of the seventeenth century” precisely because no one knew who had done it. “In the grand feature of
mystery
, which in some shape or other ought to colour every judicious attempt at murder, it is excellent,” de Quincey declared, “for the mystery is not yet dispersed.”
³

Another early unsolved case occurred in Bristol in the middle of the eighteenth century, de Quincey’s Augustan age of murder, a double killing he applauded for its “originality of design, boldness and depth of style”. This was the shocking case of a Mrs Ruscombe, who lived in College Green with a single maidservant. Some suspicion arising, neighbours broke into the house and found Mrs Ruscombe murdered in her bedroom and the servant murdered on the stairs. The case was never officially solved, although suspicion fell on several local tradesmen including a baker and a chimney sweep. Some fifty years later, de Quincey himself claimed to have learned the real murderer’s identity during a visit to the home of a celebrated surgeon. The surgeon kept a private museum, in which de Quincey was shown a cast or deathmask taken from a notorious Lancashire highwayman. This villain concealed his profession from his neighbours by drawing woollen stockings over his horse’s legs to muffle the clatter of its hooves as he rode up a flagged alley to his stable. The surgeon had dissected the highwayman’s body under curious circumstances. “At the time of his execution for highway robbery,” he explained, “I was studying under Cruickshank and the man’s figure was so uncommonly fine that no money or exertion was spared to get into possession of him with the least possible delay. By the connivance of the under-sheriff, he was cut down within the legal time and instantly put into a chaise-and-four; so that when he reached Cruickshank’s he was positively not dead. Mr ——, a young student at that time, had the honour of giving him the
coup
de
grace
, and finishing the sentence of the law.” De Quincey was sceptical at first, but two pieces of information from a Lancashire woman who knew the highwayman convinced him. “One was the fact of his absence for a whole fortnight at the period of that murder; the other that, within a very little time after, the neighbourhood of this highwayman was deluged with dollars—now, Mrs Ruscombe was known to have hoarded about 2,000 of that coin. Be the artist, however, who he might, the affair remains a durable monument of his genius; for such was the impression of awe and the sense of power left behind by the strength of the conception manifested in this murder, that no tenant (as I was told in 1810) had been found up to that time for Mrs Ruscombe’s house.”
⁴

Such exceptional murders aside, crime chronicles from Biblical times until the eighteenth century disclose few cases that were unresolved or that proved insoluble; indeed, there was an underlying assumption that although the mills of justice may have ground slow and exceeding small, at least they ground passably straight. Justice always got it right. Forces of law and order, including those predating the modern police, were deemed incorruptible and all-knowing, incapable of making mistakes. Virtually every suspect fed into the machinery of the courts emerged at the other end bearing the brand of guilt and was often doomed to die. Acquittals were rare. A more brutal public appetite demanded vengeance. It would not do to have crimes left unsolved, loose ends trailing. Fortunately, when cases fell short of a conviction, few people came to hear about it.

The spread of literacy in the early nineteenth century put a brake on such ignorance. In Britain, a series of sensational murders (the Thurtell–Hunt case, the crimes of the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, and the murder by William Corder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn) excited the interest of an embryonic popular press, and the die was cast. Indeed, in 1824 the trial of Thurtell and Hunt, a couple of Regency conmen who bludgeoned their victim, shot him and finally slit his throat, was the first “trial by newspaper”. But these cases all ended with a snap of the hangman’s trap that was richly deserved, and the day of the unsolved crime as an identifiable genre had not yet dawned.

Murder was a favourite topic of popular literature in England as early as Elizabethan times, and accounts of occasional homicides “pathetic or merely horrifying” appeared in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsheets. Shakespeare read about real-life murder, and so, in a later age, did Dickens. In his day, an eager reading public drawn from the literate (and, by definition, “respectable”) section of the population devoured the accounts of crimes and criminals pulled together and published by the hacks of Grub Street. Detective fiction was also putting down roots, with Edgar Allen Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” of the 1840s establishing a format that would reach its apotheosis nearly a century later. Fashionable ladies despatched their servants to purchase the most celebrated of Grub Street compilations, the
Newgate
Calendar
; their daughters and granddaughters thronged the Old Bailey half a century later for the trial of the Stauntons, the family accused in the so-called Penge Mystery: “well-dressed women, favoured occupants of the choicest seats [who] stared through lorgnettes and opera-glasses at the four pale and weary creatures . . . in the dock”, latter-day
tricoteuses
over-dressed, over-jewelled and over-victualled on champagne who lapped up every detail of the evidence “and [who] skimmed the pages of
Punch
when the interest flagged.”
⁵

The lower orders, meanwhile, devoured their news of crimes and criminals from cheap broadsheets printed and hawked about the streets by entrepreneurs such as James “Jemmy” Catnach (1792–1841). At the time of the Thurtell–Hunt case, Catnach alone, operating four presses day and night, produced a quarter of a million such broadsheets; when the trial began he hired two extra printers and turned out half a million copies of the proceedings. They were crude and flimsy productions, but they had an immediate mass appeal. Few survive. Like those observed in London as early as the 1680s by the poet John Dryden, these sordid and often scandalous sheets were not designed for posterity. Most were passed roughly from hand to hand, or pasted to walls before becoming, in Dryden’s lapidary phrase, “martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum”.
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But it was the yellow press, launched in the middle of the nineteenth century, that offered its army of semi-literate readers a large weekly helping of crime that became as much an essential ingredient of the dreary British Sunday as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. By the 1830s, the
Observer
was proclaiming twenty columns of crime a week, a level of coverage only matched by the
News
of
the
World
, making its debut in 1843. By the 1870s, the
Daily
Telegraph
, founded in 1855 as the first penny daily, was able to boast the biggest circulation in the world (200,000 copies a day), and to attribute its success chiefly to its comprehensive coverage of crime. At last, the British middle classes were becoming (respectably) crime-conscious.

Murder was also a staple of Victorian popular fiction. The Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century had spawned a low-life offspring, the crude genre known as the penny dreadful (and its collateral, the shilling shocker). On a higher plane altogether, Charles Dickens also helped to raise Victorian awareness of criminality, since most of his novels featured murder, robbery, rape, incest, arson or some assorted villainy. Dickens, an experienced journalist, published his early works in weekly parts and recognized the cliffhanging possibilities of crime-based plots. After his death in 1870, other writers like Wilkie Collins seized the flame and carried it forward. Collins’s novel
The
Moonstone
contains echoes of real-life Victorian cases, while the now-forgotten
Chetwynd
Calverley
by William Harrison Ainsworth contains a poisoning case squarely based on the notorious Bravo mystery at Balham in 1876, one of the earliest “unsolved” crimes in the age of mass literacy.

I have surveyed the territory with a wide-angle lens. Every crime included in this collection is (or was) “unsolved” in one way or another, but in staking out the limits of my territory I have stretched the definition of that word in order to accommodate as wide a range of cases as possible. At the core of these cases are those real-life mysteries that are as perplexing now as they ever were — they encompass murders by person or persons unknown, crimes that resulted in no criminal charge, or where (demonstrably) the wrong person was accused or (again, demonstrably) the right person was not. Pre-eminent among these puzzlements are the crimes of Jack the Ripper in the East End of London in the so-called autumn of terror in 1888.

The Ripper killings remain shrouded in a fog of absurd claims and improbable culprits. No one will ever know the Ripper’s identity for certain, which is why the mystery still supports an annual crop of new books, articles, films, videos and websites, not to mention an entire society of Ripperologists, complete with official newsletter and merchandise. Among these seekers after truth are numbered some of the true crime industry’s most distinguished and talented, along with the daftest and most dismal. Happily and harmlessly, each keeps the other entertained. In 1998 Colin Wilson calculated that no fewer than fifty books had appeared on the case since Leonard Matters first proposed a certain Dr Stanley as the Ripper in a book published in 1929. And yet behind the terrifying and unstoppable juggernaut of Ripper writing, there is little that encapsulates the facts, the theories and the evidence in the digestible, if not bite-sized, form sought by the anthologist. Here, for the first time, Philip Sugden, historian, teacher and Yorkshireman, fills that void while keeping the coolest of heads.

The Victorian Ripper was the progenitor of the modern Mr X, that shadowy wraith responsible for countless unsolved crimes of the twentieth century. He and his kind were the people who killed Elizabeth Short, the American floozy known as the Black Dahlia; who murdered and mutilated heaven-knows-who in the Brighton Trunk Crime Number One; who spirited Shergar away in the mists of an Irish dawn. There is the Mr X who snuffed out Mary Rogers in Edgar Allen Poe’s New York, and the one who plugged Jake Lingle in the Chicago of booze and bullets. There is his more contemporary counterpart, the Mr X who masqueraded as the Zodiac killer in 1960s California, and another who brutally murdered Janet Brown in a peaceful English village as recently as 1995. We meet them all here, through a glass darkly, but not yet face to face. Irving Wallace, Colin Wilson and Jonathan Goodman are among those making the introductions.

This collection conducts us through the ranks of the acquitted, men and women who have placed themselves on a jury of their peers and received deliverance, but who have left a thousand questions unanswered. Eric Ambler ponders the case of Dr John Bodkin Adams in an essay seeing the light of day for the first time in nearly forty years. The American humourist James Thurber wryly recalls the classic Hall–Mills affair from the 1920s. Then there are classic puzzles from Britain between the wars, such as the case of the spinsterly wan Annie Hearn and her salmon sandwiches — retold by the ebullient Daniel Farson — and that of Ronald Light and his infamously abandoned green bicycle, related by the American master, Edmund Pearson.

These were cases in which the jury were agreed that the evidence against the accused was wanting. There are others where juries have returned guilty verdicts, only to have those verdicts overturned by a higher court. Of these, the case of William Herbert Wallace from 1931 remains pre-eminent, the
ne
plus
ultra
of murder mysteries. The trial jury’s verdict of guilty was speedily reversed on appeal, and Wallace went free, only to die within two years of a chronic kidney ailment. It was a nightmare of a case, straight from the pages of Kafka or Poe. Raymond Chandler reckoned it would “always be unbeatable”. In 1940, the
doyenne
of criminologists, Fryn Tennyson Jesse, drove around Liverpool on a crime-crawl. “We found the little house,” she wrote to her friend and fellow murder-fancier Alexander Woollcott, “and it was occupied.” Without knocking, Miss Jesse peered in from the street. “The windows were so thickly shrouded with swathings of Nottingham lace curtains that it was impossible to get a glimpse of the rooms within,” she reported. Her view may have been obscured, but not her insight. Miss Jesse’s estimation of the Wallace case, dating from the early 1950s, differs from mine, but here it is, appearing in print for the first time.