Medical Detectives (36 page)

Chief Inspector Chapman decided to widen his search activities to include trawling through street refuse bins and council rubbish tips. This unappealing task finally rewarded searchers with a possible clue in the form of a fragment of clothing bearing a dry-cleaning label. The remnant of a black coat was traced to a dry-cleaning shop whose records showed that the garment belonged to Mrs Caroline Manton who lived in Regent Street, Luton.

DCI Chapman called at the house and his knock on the door was answered by a young girl. He asked if her mother was at home, to which the child’s response was that her mother had gone away. The detective’s instinct told him he was on the right track and, not least, because the girl bore a startling likeness to the dead woman’s photograph. He had also gleaned information about the girl’s grandmother whom he arranged to visit. Elderly Mrs Bavister provided him with evidence which would prove to be significant. The late Mrs Manton’s mother mentioned that she had received four letters from her daughter during the three months that she had been missing. The astute detective noticed various spelling mistakes in the writing and his keen eye was drawn to a missing letter ‘p’ in the word, ‘Hamstead’. His next port of call was to revisit the Manton family home where he intended to question Bertie Manton, the dead woman’s husband. He worked in the National Fire Service and was on duty in Luton when the detective called. Chapman located him at his fire station and learned that he was trapped in an unhappy marriage to Caroline, also known as Rene, and that they had quarrelled, allegedly over her extra-marital affairs. Manton said they parted company on 25 November when Rene left home and went to stay with relatives.

He professed not to recognise her from the police photograph he was shown, but identified as hers the handwriting in the letters received by her mother. The detective then asked Manton to write out a sentence which he indicated in one of the letters supposedly sent by his wife to her mother. This he did and, with Chapman looking over his shoulder, he spelled the word ‘Hampstead’ without its letter ‘p’. The final question the policeman asked Manton was the name of Rene’s dentist, which was readily supplied. When, in due course, the dentist was shown the photograph of Rene Manton, he instantly recognised her as a patient for whom he had fitted a denture in May 1943. Identification was placed beyond doubt when the patient’s dental records were matched to the dentition in the jaw of the dead woman.

When Manton was arrested and charged with murder, he promptly confessed. He apologised for lying when previously questioned and admitted killing his wife, although he explained that he had not intended to do so: ‘I lost my temper,’ he said. He told detectives that there had been a marital argument during lunch on 18 November when Rene threw a cup of hot tea into his face. At this point, he lost his temper and, picking up a heavy wooden stool, smashed it several times against her head. When his anger abated, he realised he had killed her and decided to hide the body and tidy up before his children returned from school. He stripped her clothes off, removed her jewellery and took the body down to the cellar as a temporary hiding place. To earn a little extra money to supplement his fireman’s wages, Manton ran a small greengrocery business from home for which he kept a supply of potato sacks. He now used four of these to conceal the body after tying it up at the knees and ankles. Manton then cleaned up the bloodstains and when his children returned home asking for their mother, he told them she had gone to stay with grandma.

After their evening meal, his eldest daughter went to visit a friend and Manton gave the other three children money to go to the cinema. While they were absent from the house and as darkness fell, he brought the body up from the cellar, balanced the sacked-up bundle over the handlebars of his bicycle and pushed it down the road towards the River Lea where he rolled it down the bank and into the water. In his statement, he said, ‘I then rode home and got the children’s supper ready. They never suspected anything.’ When detectives searched the house they found bloodstains in the living room which tested as Group O, the same as Mrs Manton. The noted fingerprint sleuth, Superintendent Fred Cherrill, did a search for prints and found one on an empty pickle jar. It matched Mrs Manton’s left thumb and, as Keith Simpson put it very succinctly, ‘That clinched the identification.’

While Bertie Manton’s cleaning-up operations had been well organised, they were not quite foolproof. He had been careful to dispose of the murder weapon, the wooden footstool, which he had broken up for firewood, but he had left sufficient blood traces in the house to enable crime technicians to match blood groups. Crucially, he did not burn his wife’s coat when he was clearing her clothes but cut it into pieces for disposal with the household refuse. When part of it turned up during the police fingertip searches and it was identified as belonging to Caroline Manton, his game was up.

Manton was sent for trial at Bedford Assizes in May 1944. His defence was manslaughter, argued along the lines that he was a mild-mannered man provoked by his wife who had strayed into the company of other men and taken to drink. His wife’s death was not premeditated and the extensive cover up he engaged in was for the benefit of his children. Keith Simpson’s evidence was telling, for he said he had found clear indications of an attempt to strangle Mrs Manton. The defendant’s response to this was that he remembered, ‘taking hold of her throat and pushing her against the wall. I may have grabbed her twice, but that was in my temper.’ This was an admission he had not previously made and it went a long way to ensure his conviction. Simpson described the outcome as, ‘a strangling and bashing murder’. He also reserved some scathing remarks, expressed privately, about the police surgeon who had first examined Mrs Manton’s body and could not distinguish blunt force trauma from gunshot wounds. The jury found Manton guilty and Mr Justice Singleton sentenced him to hang.

Despite the brutal nature of his crime, Manton had garnered considerable public sympathy and a petition for mercy collected 30,000 signatures. One of his young sons campaigned on his father’s behalf and sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on appeal. Manton became ill in prison and died at Parkhurst in November 1947. The investigation of this case had, once again, shown the invaluable nature of dental evidence in establishing identity. This was an area of forensic work in which Simpson was a pioneering influence. Credit was also due in the ‘Luton Sack Murder’ to the meticulous attention to detail demonstrated by Detective Inspector Chapman.

Keith Simpson had the dubious privilege of being involved in three of the most infamous post-war murder cases. In the early 1950s, one of the tour guides at St Paul’s Cathedral who conducted visitors around the ‘Whispering Gallery’ in the dome, regaled them with stories of London criminals. ‘’Eath, ’Aigh and Christie,’ he would say, ‘I knew ‘em all!’ It was an idle boast but it captivated his audiences. He was, of course, referring to the notorious trio, Neville Heath, John Haigh and John Christie and, although he did not brag about it, Keith Simpson did know them all in his own inimitable way.

When the chambermaid failed to obtain a response from the occupants of Room Number 4 at the Pembridge Court Hotel in Notting Hill Gate on 21 June 1946, she used a pass key to gain entry. The double room was booked in the names of Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs N.G.C. Heath. The maid saw a woman lying in bed on her back, with the sheet drawn up to her neck. She sensed that something was wrong and sent for the manager. When the sheet was pulled back, they found themselves looking at a mutilated body. The dead woman was the sole occupant of the room; there was no sign of ‘Lt-Col Heath’. The police were called and Superintendent Fred Cherrill lost no time in telephoning Dr Simpson. The pathologist examined the body and found extensive bite marks on the woman’s breasts and her ankles were bound together, effectively hiding a savage injury to her vagina. It was clear from bruises on her wrists that she had been tied hand and foot. Turning the body over, he found that she had been savagely whipped across her back, with seventeen separate lash marks evident. Simpson determined that the injuries had been inflicted while the victim was still alive. Cause of death was suffocation, possibly due to being gagged.

The dead woman was identified as thirty-two-year-old Margery Gardner and hotel staff were well acquainted with her companion, ‘Lt-Col Heath’, who had stayed at the hotel before. Conscious of the need to find the sexual sadist who had committed this savage murder, the police quickly identified their target as Neville Heath and a description of him was issued to the press. Simpson had made a close examination of the whip marks on Gardner’s body and noted the diamond-shaped pattern made on the skin. ‘If you find that whip,’ he told Superintendent Cherrill, ‘you’ve found your man’.

Neville Heath, meanwhile, had booked into the Tollard Royal Hotel at Bournemouth, using the name Group Captain Rupert Brooke. On 5 July, Doreen Marshall who had been staying at the Norfolk Hotel in the town was reported missing. When last seen, she left the hotel in a taxi heading for the Tollard Royal for dinner. Enquiries established that she might have dined with Group Captain Rupert Brooke. When asked about his companion, the Group Captain glossed over the matter by saying he had known the lady for years. Then, in an extraordinary move, he contacted the local police asking to see a photograph of the missing woman. He called in at the police station and identified a photograph of Doreen Marshall, confirming that she had dined with him a few nights before. At this point, ‘Group Captain Brooke’ was identified as Neville Heath. When he was searched, a cloakroom ticket issued at Bournemouth West railway station was found in his coat pocket. The ticket was for a suitcase which was quickly redeemed and opened. In it were a bloodstained scarf and a distinctive leather whip which bore out Dr Simpson’s earlier advice to police.

On 8 July, the body of Doreen Marshall was found in bushes at Branscombe Dene Chine about a mile from central Bournemouth. She had been brutally attacked and mutilated, with her sexual organs particularly targeted. She had died from a cut throat and the worst injuries had been inflicted after death. A local pathologist carried out the post-mortem but Simpson gained possession of the contents of Heath’s suitcase. Speaking of the injuries inflicted on Margery Gardner, the pathologist wrote later, ‘If ever I saw a murderer’s signature on his handiwork it was the imprint … of the riding whip with the diamond patterned weave.’ Justice caught up with Neville Heath and a defence plea of insanity did not save him from the scaffold. He was hanged on 16 October 1946.

By this time, Molly Lefebure had left Simpson’s employment in order to get married. He replaced her with Jean Scott-Dunn whom he would eventually marry. Sadness had earlier intruded in his life with the illness which struck down his first wife, Mary Buchanan, who died of multiple sclerosis in 1955. Personal life apart, the bodies kept on coming and, in 1949, came the Haigh murder case which was another of those ‘once in a lifetime’ episodes. Like Neville Heath, John George Haigh, a self-styled engineer, was regarded as a gentleman charmer. He lived in a Kensington hotel where the residents, mostly rich elderly widows, doted on him. On 18 February, he invited wealthy sixty-nine-year-old Olive Durand-Deacon to visit his factory in Crawley, Sussex, where he manufactured artificial fingernails for the cosmetics trade. In reality, his factory was nothing more than a storeroom and yard.

When Mrs Durand-Deacon failed to return from her trip to Sussex, alarm bells started to sound about her safety. The mention of Haigh’s name as a person with whom she had consorted, led detectives to check the criminal records at Scotland Yard. Officers discovered that Haigh had ‘previous’ with convictions for fraud and shady dealing, although there were no suggestions of violent crimes. Sussex Police decided to search Haigh’s factory premises and they made some interesting discoveries. They found a .38 revolver and ammunition, large quantities of sulphuric acid and an assortment of protective clothing. Also found was a dry-cleaner’s receipt dated 19 February, the day Mrs Durand-Deacon disappeared, for a Persian lamb coat. This created suspicion, for it was known that the missing woman was wearing such a coat when last seen. When her jewellery was reported as having been sold, detectives decided it was time to invite Mr Haigh to answer some questions.

In an extraordinary interview, Haigh volunteered the information that Mrs Durand-Deacon ‘no longer exists. She has disappeared completely and no trace of her can ever be found again’. It was a bold statement but he had reckoned without the pertinacity of Keith Simpson. Haigh admitted destroying Mrs Durand-Deacon with acid and challenged the police with the statement, ‘How can you prove murder if there is no body?’ This was the second pronouncement he had made that would come back to haunt him. Haigh completed his admissions in a lengthy statement in which he confessed to the murders of five other people whose bodies he had destroyed with acid. He claimed in each case to have drunk a glass of his victim’s blood, thereby allowing newspaper editors to include the word ‘vampire’ in their headlines.

At this point, Keith Simpson entered the investigation. With the knowledge that the murder victims had been disposed of in vats of sulphuric acid, he turned over in his mind what might be left after such a corrosive assault. On arrival at Haigh’s factory, his attention was drawn to an area in the yard where one of the acid vats had been emptied onto the ground. Among the debris on the surface, his eagle eye spotted a small faceted stone. He nonchalantly remarked to the police Inspector on hand, ‘I think that’s a gallstone.’ Part of his mental preparation for the visit to Crawley was the knowledge that a person of Mrs Durand-Deacon’s age might well have gallstones lodged in her body which, covered with fatty tissue, would survive the destructive potential of sulphuric acid.

Detailed examination of a mass of greasy sludge resulted in the discovery of several small pieces of bone of human origin and, most significantly, he found a set of acrylic dentures. These too had survived the acid test and the teeth were unquestionably identified as Mrs Durand-Deacon’s by her dentist who had fitted them for her in September 1947. Simpson had without doubt discovered what little remained of the murder victim. Haigh was committed for trial at Lewes Assizes where much of the evidence concerned his state of mind. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Dr Henry Yellowlees, a distinguished psychiatrist, had diagnosed Haigh as paranoic, but said he was fully responsible under the law. In essence, he was not insane, which was the conclusion the jury arrived at. After deliberating for just eighteen minutes, they found Haigh sane and guilty. He was executed at Wandsworth on 10 August 1949.