Ghosts & Gallows (17 page)

In March 1948, Frank Harrison married Doris Purkiss, the sister of a friend from the RAF, but the marriage became an unhappy one that was marred by frequent quarrelling and rows, often over money but also due to Doris’s decision not to have children, which Harrison resented. The couple moved into a small terraced house at 11 Dagmar Gardens, Kensel Rise, which was divided into two flats; the Harrisons lived upstairs and sub-let the ground floor. Doris Harrison found a job as a meter tester at Arrons and worked there until November 1956. Early on she became friendly with a factory colleague, Myrtle Hughes, and she and her husband subsequently moved into the ground floor flat at Dagmar Gardens, where they stayed for seven years before eventually moving to West Sussex. Another worker at the Arron factory who knew the Harrisons well was Miss Mavis Welch, who lived nearby in Gordon Road, Kilburn. The two women often went shopping and to West End shows together and after Doris Harrison resigned from Arrons in November 1956, Mavis visited her at Dagmar Gardens regularly every Thursday. All three became close but none of them could have envisaged the future events that lay ahead.

In 1955, the Harrisons’ stormy marriage took a turn for the worse. Doris threatened suicide and move temporarily to her parents’ house in Southampton, where she was treated for depression by the family doctor. The couple eventually agreed to a reconciliation and Frank Harrison arranged to join his wife and in-laws for a holiday. However, shortly after arriving in Southampton, Harrison appeared to have a breakdown of his own and went missing for six days, eventually returning with amnesia and totally unable to explain where he had been or what he had been doing. Back home in north-west London, Harrison’s own doctor was inclined to believe that he had lapsed into a dissociative state or hysterical fugue as a reaction to the stress of his wife’s illness; the reality was that Harrison had earlier began an affair with a work colleague, Margaret Daly, and the two had spent the time touring Devon as man and wife.

Harrison, a budding poet and short story writer, was able to use his clerical position at Arrons to spend lunch hours in Margaret Daly’s company, as office rules dictated that factory workers like Doris and Myrtle Hughes were required to take their breaks in the works’ canteen on the other side of the building. Whether Harrison wrote poetry for Margaret is unclear, but at some point he spent time writing a murder mystery thriller which he felt enough of to show to Myrtle Hughes when they first moved to Kensel Rise, asking for her opinion as he intended to try and get the manuscript published. The surviving text of ‘The Mad Killer of Vermin Alley’, a clumsy cross between
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
and Mickey Spillane’s
The Death Dealers
, as held on microfilm at the National Archives, runs to twelve pages of double-spaced typescript and describes the crimes of a hook-handed killer who stalks the seedy alleyway of the title. The following extract gives a fair example of Harrison’s literary style, as the tragic hero, Paul Garnet, defends himself and his wife against a night-time attack by the deranged murderer:

… Creeping into a recess at the head of the stairway, Paul stood waiting with his gun gripped firmly in his hand. As the figure grew [
sic
] level with him, he rapped out, ‘Stick em up, whoever you are!’

The intruder’s only reply was to raise an arm and Paul saw a cruel hook start to descend! He tried to leap out of the way but the hook caught his shoulder and threw him heavily onto the stairs. Before he could stop himself he was rolling down them with the sound of horrible laughter above! It was the killer!

As Paul crashed into the hall, he heard his wife screaming upstairs! Picking himself up, he rushed madly upstairs, praying and hoping that he would get there in time to save her!

On entering the bedroom, he heard the smash of broken glass. He raced to the window and saw the attacker tearing down the street. Paul emptied his gun at the creature but it got clean away.

He walked over to the door and switched on the light. Looking towards the bed he swore vengeance!

His wife was lying on the tangled bedclothes ripped wide open! Her nightdress was torn from her body and her blood ran freely on to the carpet! Paul’s lips set in a thin line and he silently reloaded his gun! He went downstairs and out into the street, straight to where Steve Carter lived! Knocking on the door, he stood there waiting. He didn’t have to wait long for Steve was awake already. He opened the door and saw Paul standing there with the revolver in his hand.

‘What’s wrong Paul?’ he asked.

‘Molly’s dead!’

‘Dead!’ Steve’s eyes opened wide. ‘You don’t mean that the monster – ’.

‘Yes, Steve,’ replied Paul hollowly. ‘The fiend killed her in cold blood! It isn’t a monster; it’s a man, a madman!’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Carter.

‘Quite sure!’ answered Paul. ‘I can’t explain the hooks where his hands should be, though. But we’re wasting time standing here, anyway. Let us call the people and track the swine down!’

‘You’re right Paul,’ said Steve. ‘We must destroy the devil before anyone else dies.’

Soon a vigilante mob roused by the two men have cornered the killer in a local haunted house and the hero is happy to join his wife in the afterlife as he and the claw-handed ‘demon’ fall to their deaths down a stairwell. Unfortunately for the author, Myrtle Hughes was nonplussed by the story, which was consigned to obscurity in Harrison’s desk drawer at Arrons and where it was subsequently recovered by the police. On at least one occasion during a lunch hour, Myrtle Hughes unexpectedly came across Harrison and Margaret Daly in a compromising situation that made it quite clear there was some intimacy between them, something she may or may not have confided to Doris Harrison.

In February 1957, Myrtle Hughes gave notice at the Arrons factory and she and her husband Jack left Dagmar Gardens and relocated to Chelwood Gate, near Haywards Heath. The three women – Harrison, Hughes and Mavis Welch – kept in touch by letter. Now with complete vacant possession of the downstairs flat, the Harrisons decided to sell the house with the intention of moving into a more modern property and made arrangement with a local estate agent to put the house on the market.

Mavis Welch continued to visit Doris Harrison at Dagmar Gardens and spent the evening of 21 March in her company. The following Thursday she went to Kensal Rise as arranged but, unusually on this occasion, the house was in darkness and there appeared to be no one at home. Early in April she wrote to Doris but the only response was on 6 April, when Frank Harrison came round to Gordon Road to tell her that he had seen the letter but his wife was not there; they had had a row, and she had walked out and had gone to stay with her parents in Southampton. The following week the Harrisons’ estate agent, Clive Woods, visited Dagmar Gardens to take down sales particulars of the house but was unable to get into the upstairs bedrooms, both of which were locked. Over the next few weeks through April and into May, Woods made several visits to show prospective buyers over the house and on each occasion noticed a particularly bad smell in the downstairs flat, which seemed strongest in the vicinity of the stairway. When this was mentioned to Frank Harrison, he put it down to problems with the drains and said they were in the process of getting them cleared. In an effort to alleviate the problem, Harrison set out air fresheners around the ground-floor flat.

In the early part of the week before Easter, Mavis Welch saw Harrison leaving the Arrons factory in Salusbury Road and asked after his wife. Harrison told her he hadn’t heard from Doris and said he was going to spend the holiday with an old friend from the RAF. This ‘old friend’ was actually Margaret Daly and the couple spent the Easter weekend together at Matlock Baths.

The following month, Harrison received a worried letter from his father-in-law, William Purkiss; neither he nor his wife had heard from their daughter for some time and an Easter egg present they had sent to her at Dagmar Gardens had been returned after three weeks by the Post Office undelivered. On 18 May, Harrison went down to Southampton and admitted that he and Doris had had a terrific row, that she had walked out on him and he had not seen her for some time, although he felt she had been back to the house on one or two occasions while he had been out at work. In the hope of encouraging Doris to get in touch with them, Harrison agreed to the Purkiss’s writing a letter, which he promised to leave on the hall mat so that his wife would recognise the handwriting and postmark. Soon afterwards he wrote: ‘You don’t know how worried I have been … Please try to look for the silver lining in our dark clouds, as I am really trying to do, although it is not easy’, and also placated them by agreeing to contact the Salvation Army, who helped locate missing persons.

Two days after going to Southampton, Harrison again saw Mavis Welch in Salusbury Road; on this occasion he told her that he had been to Southampton but Doris had walked out after rowing with her parents and he had no idea where she was, although he would contact her as soon as he had any news. After a fortnight, during which time she neither saw or heard anything from Frank Harrison, and now understandably concerned, Miss Welch wrote to the Purkiss family on 3 June 1957 asking if they had any news of their daughter.

Around the same time, the beginning of June, in Haywards Heath, sixty miles away from their former home in Kensel Rise, Myrtle Hughes began to be troubled by a series of distressing nightmares. On each occasion she woke up crying. In the dreams she saw a vision of a red fireplace, which she recognised as being the one in the front room of their old flat at Dagmar Gardens. Chillingly, beyond the fireplace, in a bricked-up alcove, was her friend Doris Harrison, who was calling out to her in a soft, whispering voice: ‘
Come and find me … come and find me
.’ The nightmares continued regularly for two weeks and in every one, Myrtle Hughes was haunted by the echo of the sad and pleading, whispering voice. Jack Hughes was dismissive but his wife became convinced, as the dream returned night after night, that something dreadful had happened and this seemed to be confirmed when, in the second week of June, she received a letter from Mavis Welch asking if Doris Harrison was staying with her in Sussex. Myrtle Hughes wrote back immediately (on 14 June) but by this time she had already made up her mind to take the train to London and see Mavis herself.

Arriving at Mavis Welch’s house in Kilburn, the two women discussed their missing friend and were stunned when it soon became clear that they had both shared the same eerie dream. Already distressed by Doris Harrison’s disappearance, Mavis Welch had herself in the previous week experienced a nightmare in which she heard a voice calling out to her from some dark unknown place:
‘Come and find me, Mavis … come and find me. You know I’d do it for you … ’
It seemed too much of a coincidence and, although not inclined to any great beliefs in ghosts or the supernatural, they went the same day, 19 June, to Harrow Road police station. How much credence the duty officer gave to the two women’s strange story is debateable; however, when their statement was passed through to detectives of the ‘X’ Division at the same station, the mention of the name Doris Harrison twice within the space of less than a week was enough for officers to want to speak with the missing woman’s husband, and Detective Inspector Henry Cox went that afternoon to Arrons factory in Salusbury Road.

Three days before, on 16 June, the police in Southampton had passed on a letter they had received from William Purkiss, who had written expressing his concerns for the safety of his daughter as well as the seeming lack of urgency on the part of his son-in-law in making enquiries as to her whereabouts. The same day, WPC Joy Plane called at Dagmar Gardens and Frank Harrison accompanied her back to the Harrow Road station, where he gave an interview about his missing wife, with a promise that should he obtain any information he would contact her parents immediately. Now at Salusbury Road, Detective Inspector Cox saw Harrison for the first time and, after some perfunctory questions about Doris’s disappearance, told him he intended to go with him to Kensel Rise where he would search the house, after which Harrison was to make a full statement about the reasons for his wife leaving. ‘I’ll do whatever you think is right,’ was Harrison’s response.

Just before five o’clock in the afternoon, Harrison let Cox into 11 Dagmar Gardens and watched as the policeman looked around the first-floor flat before taking him downstairs. As they walked along the hallway, Cox commented on the peculiar smell, which was immediately apparent. Again Harrison blamed the drainage system but the Detective Inspector was not convinced and told him bluntly, ‘We are going to trace the source of that smell even if I have to take the floorboards up.’ Harrison made no reply. Cox realised that the smell was strongest by the door leading to the cupboard under the stairs. Inside, wrapped in a blanket and hidden by bed linen and a stack of timber boarding, he found the rotting body of Doris Harrison. ‘What is it? How did it get in there?’ Harrison asked with some amazement. ‘We shall have to go to Harrow Road police station now, I have a lot of enquiries to make before I can answer that,’ Cox replied. The house was locked up and Harrison was taken into custody.

Dr Robert Teare, a Harley Street physician, along with Professor Francis Camps of the London Hospital Medical College and Keith Simpson from Guy’s Hospital, made up a trio of celebrated post-war forensic pathologists known to the medical and police professions of the day as ‘The Three Musketeers’. In 1951, Teare had presented the forensic evidence at the enquiry into the Harrow and Wealdstone train crash and would later carry out an autopsy on the body of celebrated musician and guitarist Jimi Hendrix. The three men had all been involved in the 1953 exhumation of Beryl Evans, the former tenant of 10 Rillington Place, in the aftermath of the revelations brought about by the Christie trial. At 6.30 p.m., Teare accompanied Detective Inspector Cox and Superintendant Davis to Dagmar Gardens, where he supervised the removal of the body of Doris Harrison to Kilburn Mortuary and, later the same evening, carried out a post-mortem. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition but Teare was able to state the cause of death as being due to multiple fractures of the skull carried out in ‘a frenzy of violence’; the murder weapon was most likely an axe which had been found in an upstairs cupboard in the house and which bore signs of having been recently cleaned. Subsequently, a bloodstained mattress was discovered in the first floor back bedroom in the Harrisons’ flat and the police found clear evidence of one of the bedroom walls having been recently wallpapered to cover up splashes of blood. ‘It is all like a dream – it seems utterly fantastic,’ Frank Harrison told Detective Inspector Cox. On 20 June 1957 he was charged with murder and the following day was remanded in custody in the hospital wing at Brixton Prison.