Pierrepoint (21 page)

Another Yorkshireman, Gordon Cummins, a 28-year-old leading aircraftsman and RAF cadet, was responsible for a wave of terror in war-torn London in the early war years that earned him the name of ‘the Black-out Ripper’, and which led him to a 9 a.m. appointment with Albert Pierrepoint. On 9 February, schoolteacher Evelyn Hamilton was found strangled in a Marylebone air-raid shelter. She had been travelling alone across London to her home in Newcastle. A scarf had been tied across her throat and nose, but fingermarks on the neck suggested that she had been
manually strangled and that the killer was left handed. Her handbag containing £80 was stolen but she hadn’t been sexually assaulted.

On the following night, Mrs Evelyn Oatley, a prostitute, was found strangled in her Soho flat. Her naked body had then been mutilated with a tin opener and fingerprints recovered again suggested a left-handed killer, though the prints didn’t match any on file. On 13 February, the naked body of prostitute Margaret Florence Lowe was found in her flat close to Tottenham Court Road. This attack was even more horrific than that on the previous victims: the lower part of her body had been subjected to a frenzied attack from a knife and razor. While detectives were at the scene investigating, news came through of another murder. Mrs Doris Jouannet, the wife of an elderly hotel manager, had been found strangled and mutilated in her flat near Paddington. Later that day a young woman was accosted in a public house near Piccadilly. As she left, a man followed her outside, pushed her into a doorway and tried to strangle her. The attack was thwarted by a passer-by and the attacker fled, leaving behind a belt and gas mask. The number on the mask was traced to Cummins, stationed at St John’s Wood. Police interviewed him and although he gave them an alibi for the times of the murders he was found to be missing a belt from his uniform. Taken into custody he made a detailed statement and when he was asked to sign it, Cummins picked up the pen with his left hand.

At his two-day trial at the Old Bailey he was indicted on just the murder of Evelyn Oatley. It was shown in court that although he was clearly a sexual deviant, Cummins had also committed the murders for gain. He was hanged during an air raid and was given a drop of 7 feet 1 inch.

Albert was back at Wandsworth within the month to carry
out his first double execution as a chief. José Estelle Key was a 34-year-old British subject, born in Gibraltar, and charged under the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act. He had been arrested on suspicion of espionage, and detained trying to leave Gibraltar for central Spain – allegedly to see his brothers, who worked in the dockyards. He was searched, and found to have in his possession information on the movements of the British forces, warships and aircraft in and around Gibraltar. As Key had been arrested in a British territory, it was decided to take him to London for trial. Hanged alongside him was Alphons Louis Eugene Timmerman, a Belgian arrested as a spy after arriving at Glasgow from Portugal, posing as a Belgian refugee.

Travelling home by train later that morning with assistant Steve Wade, Albert shared a carriage with a couple of pompous city gentlemen who scoffed at the announcement in their newspaper that two spies had been hanged at Wandsworth that morning, declaring loudly they had been shot in the Tower. Pursuing his claim that they had been shot, one of them addressed Wade, telling him they had actually been shot, just like the ones who had been executed in the First World War. Wade stayed noncommittal and as the train reached its destination, he whispered to Albert that he should present him with a business card to show who he was. Unlike many of his predecessors, Albert had no cards, nor did he have customised headed notepaper like James Berry and John Ellis, among others.

On Easter Sunday 1942, an RUC patrol, patrolling the Kashmir district of Belfast, had been ambushed by members of an IRA gang. They gave chase and later stormed a house at nearby Clonard. The first officer to approach the house was PC Murphy. As he entered, via the back door, a shot rang out and he fell fatally wounded. Six
men were arrested, including 19-year-old Thomas Joseph Williams, who had himself received three gunshot wounds during the incident. The six, all aged between eighteen and twenty-one, stood trial at Antrim and were each sentenced to death. Tom Pierrepoint was engaged to carry out the executions and recruited his nephew to assist him. Discussions were held as to the best way to carry out the executions and they came to the conclusion that proceedings should mirror those that Ellis had arranged 20 years earlier when faced with six men condemned to die on the same day. At Dublin’s Mountjoy Gaol, Ellis and his assistants had carried out three double executions, timed at 6.00 a.m., 7.00 a.m. and 8.00 a.m.

In Belfast the condemned men were housed in pairs in the condemned cells; just four days before the scheduled executions, however, they were taken out of their cells and escorted to an interview with their solicitor. ‘I have good news for you all, with one exception,’ he told them. Five were to be reprieved, though for reasons not disclosed – but presumably because his hand had fired the fatal shot that killed the policeman, Williams was not to be spared. The others bade him a tearful goodbye before being transferred to another part of the gaol. Tom was wired immediately that his trip across the water was not to be as lucrative as first planned. Williams was hanged on 2 September: he went to his death bravely and was given one of the longest drops administered in modern times. He weighed 127 ½ pounds and stood just 5 feet 6 inches; the aged Pierrepoint had decided that 8 foot 9 inches was the drop required for instant death.

By this time the temperament, reaction, agility and conduct of the 72-year-old hangman was being questioned and when he travelled to Wandsworth to hang Herbert Bounds in November an official complaint was made about him. Bounds
was a hawker who lived with his wife in Croydon. He suffered with nerves and the two had a violent, unhappy relationship. Earlier that year, following an argument, he accused her of trying to poison him. In August, during a row she picked up a bread knife and threatened to kill him. Bounds picked up his razor, in self-defence he claimed, and during the struggle she received wounds to her neck from which she later died.

Assisted by Harry Critchell, Tom carried out the execution at Wandsworth on 6 November. Within a week the governor sent a letter to the Prison Commission outlining his concerns as to the hangman’s conduct:

It was neither the first nor the last time that official correspondence on Mr Pierrepoint passed between official channels, and it was no coincidence that once his young nephew had graduated to the role of senior executioner, more and more governors were opting for the younger Pierrepoint.

The majority of wartime executions took place in London, with most of them taking place at Wandsworth and, following the unsavoury incident in November, Tom was overlooked on the next engagements there. On New Year’s Eve, Albert and Steve Wade hanged Johannes Dronkers, a Dutch spy, and less than a month later Fransiscus Winter, another spy, this time a Belgian, convicted like all other enemy agents under the Treachery Act.

Winter was hanged on 26 January 1943. Albert left the prison before lunch but returned later that afternoon as he had another appointment, this time to hang a murderer whose crime had heralded the career of brilliant Home Office pathologist Professor Keith Simpson, whose painstaking forensic work helped bring to justice a brutal wife murderer.

In the summer of 1942, workmen clearing a bombed chapel in Lambeth unearthed the remains of a mummified body. Keith Simpson was able to tell detectives they were investigating a murder: the body was that of a woman who had been strangled approximately 18 months before.
Through dental records, they were soon able to identify the corpse as that of Rachel Dobkin, who had disappeared in April 1941. Her estranged husband, Harry Dobkin, a 45-year-old Jewish firewatcher, was contacted and his arrogant and dismissive behaviour immediately made him a suspect. He said he had last seen his wife alive in the previous year and they had parted on friendly terms. He also denied any knowledge of the Lambeth chapel, though it was known to the police that he had been recently employed there as a firewatcher. Tried before Mr Justice Wrottesley at the Old Bailey in November, Dobkin was alleged to have killed his wife after a dispute over maintenance payments. Weighing over 200 pounds, and standing a few inches over 5 feet tall, he was given a relatively short drop of 5 feet 9 inches. At the autopsy, Simpson’s secretary, Molly Lefebure, noted that Dobkin had a peaceful demeanour about him and that he had died quietly and bravely, praying ardently.

On 27 December 1942, David Cobb, a 21-year-old black soldier from Alabama, USA, was serving in the 827th Engineer Battalion (Aviation), at Desborough, Northamptonshire. Leaving his post at the guard hut he approached Lieutenant Robert Cobner to complain about the length of time he had been on duty. The lieutenant reprimanded Cobb for carrying his rifle in an improper manner and told him to stand to attention when addressing an officer. Cobb said that as he was already confined to barracks for an earlier offence he did not care about this, at which Cobner called for a sergeant to arrest Cobb. As the sergeant approached, Cobb pulled down his rifle and refused to hand it over. Lieutenant Cobner stepped forward to take it and received a fatal shot to the heart. He died instantly. David Cobb was tried by General Court Martial at Cambridge in January 1943. His defence was that he did not
recognise the officer and had refused to hand over the rifle until proper identification procedure had been followed. It was a weak defence, though, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The American military were allowed to retain most of the traditional formalities of an American execution, apart from the actual method of execution, which had to conform to British practice. Standard American practice was to use a ‘cowboy coil’ knot and a standard drop of around five feet. This rarely caused instant death, more often causing the prisoner to suffer death by asphyxia in a slow, painful process.

Cobb was the first American serviceman to be sentenced to death in Britain and his execution was scheduled to take place at Shepton Mallet Gaol on 12 March. There hadn’t been an execution here since Bombardier John Lincoln had been hanged 17 years before. Tom Pierrepoint, who had carried out that execution, was contacted by the American authorities and his nephew was engaged to act as assistant.

Arriving at the prison on the afternoon before the execution, the hangmen were informed that in line with American custom the execution was to take place on the first hour of the scheduled date. A few things differed from the procedure at a British execution. In those days of rationings and shortages, an American execution was one of the rare occasions at which food and drink were served in abundance. Another difference, and the one that Albert found the most disturbing, was the length of time the condemned man spent in the company of his executioners. In a routine execution in a British prison, the condemned was usually hanging dead on the end of the rope between ten and sixty seconds. For this, and each subsequent execution carried out at Shepton Mallet, the prisoner was escorted to the drop, and once placed upon the trap he had to wait for around five minutes while the
charge was re-read, spelt out and the prisoner was asked if he had any last statement. Cobb, the first of three men that Tom hanged at Shepton Mallet that year, marched erectly from the death cell to the execution chamber and stood calm and cool as he listened to the words of the chaplain, which were spoken in tandem with those of the military official who read out the sentence of the court-martial.

Three weeks after the execution of David Cobb, Albert carried out a job at Wandsworth, assisted by Steve Wade. His task was to execute Dudley Raynor, a Burmese sergeant in the Pioneer Corps convicted of the murder of his new teenage bride Josephine, whom he had kicked to death following a jealous quarrel. He pleaded guilty at his trial at the Old Bailey, and the trial lasted just nine minutes. Following the execution, the hangmen left the prison and Wade told Albert that they had been summoned to the inquest. Reluctantly Albert accompanied him to the mortuary, where they were introduced to pathologist Keith Simpson, who was about to commence the autopsy. After getting over the initial shock of finding Miss Lefebure sitting beside the body of the recently executed man typing up the report as Professor Simpson dictated his findings, Albert became absorbed as he was shown where the knot had separated the spine between the second and third vertebrae, which was deemed the ideal spot for the break.

In June, Albert accompanied his uncle to Dublin, where they hanged Bernard Kirwan, who had been awaiting execution when Irish playwright Brendan Behan had been imprisoned at Mountjoy. Behan later wrote a bestselling play about his experiences in gaol, The Quare Fellow, based around the atmosphere in the gaol while an inmate awaits execution. The hangman is depicted as a northern working-class man who sings Irish songs on the boat across the Irish Sea.

A month later Tom was back at Wandsworth when he carried out the execution of Charles Arthur Raymond, who had battered about the head WAAF Marguerite Burge with a blunt instrument. She had also been sexually assaulted. Raymond, a French Canadian soldier, was charged with the murder after he talked too much and aroused the suspicious of his colleagues. At the Old Bailey in May, after a five-day trial, he was sentenced to death, through an interpreter.