Pierrepoint (28 page)

Crosby would normally have been hanged at Leeds, but the execution suite at Armley Gaol was being refurbished and he was sent over the Pennines for execution. Assisting Albert was Syd Dernley, but there were also two trainee observers in attendance, one of whom was Robert Leslie Stewart.

Scotsman Stewart was known, predictably enough, as ‘Jock’, and was a good friend of Albert – initially on account of Stewart’s wife being employed as a barmaid at his public house. When Mrs Stewart had discovered her husband’s desire to become a hangman she had introduced her husband to Albert, who advised him of the correct procedure for applying. Following a successful interview and training he had come to Manchester to gain experience and to test his nerve.

Crosby was in a highly agitated state in the hours leading up to his execution and it was decided that the two trainees would not go into the execution chamber, where they could get in the way if the man began to resist violently, but would carry out the observation from the doorway. As Albert entered the cell, Crosby leapt to his feet and stared at him in sheer terror. He shrieked as they put the straps on, protesting that he didn’t want them, but the men ignored him and proceeded with the pinioning. As two burly warders closed in, Crosby followed the hangman onto the drop where his legs were quickly secured and the lever was pushed, releasing the heavy trapdoors. Not the smoothest of executions for the new men to witness, but it was still a quick and efficient job.

On 9 October 1950, the battered body of a man was found in a trackside hut near Rossendale, Lancashire. He was identified as Radomir Djorovic, a Yugoslavian refugee who
lived in Blackburn, and investigations soon revealed that Nenad Kovasevic, another Yugoslavian refugee, had disappeared from his lodging. He was arrested on the following day.

At his trial at Manchester Assizes in December, it was revealed that the two men had quarrelled as they made their way across the moors. As it began to rain they took shelter in the hut, where Djorovic had teased his friend when he became upset as he talked about how his family had been killed by the Germans. Djorovic said that he had sided with the Germans and in a rage Kovasevic picked up an axe and struck his friend over the head. Any chance of getting the jury to accept a lesser charge of manslaughter, on the grounds of provocation, was lost when it was found that after the killing he had stolen some personal items, which he had then sold. Last-minute pleas for clemency by the King of Yugoslavia also failed to prevent the law taking its course. When Albert entered the cell on the morning of 26 January 1951, the prisoner put up a fierce fight, having to be dragged kicking and screaming across to the drop.

In April, Albert and assistant Harry Allen travelled down together to Birmingham to hang William Arthur Watkins, who was profoundly deaf. Many years later Albert was asked to comment on the execution when a book was written on the case. Admitting that he had felt sorry for the man he had had to hang, Albert recalled the events following the time he arrived at the prison. He said that after the hangmen had been shown to their quarters, the chief officer escorted them to the condemned cell, where they peered into the cell through the ‘Judas hole’. Watkins was seated in such a way that they could not get a proper look at him, and after waiting for several minutes they realised he was not going to move, so they went on to the execution chamber to check the
apparatus was all in order. After rigging a sandbag to an approximate drop based on the prisoner’s details, they tested the scaffold.

Returning to their quarters, Albert took another look into the death cell. By now Watkins had moved from his chair and they had a clear view of him. Albert was taken aback. The slip of paper the governor had given him stated the prisoner’s age to be 49. The man inside the condemned cell sat silently between two guards looked at least twenty years older, causing Albert to ask the governor if he was sure the age was correct – grey haired, slightly stooped, he wore a dejected air as if he had already lost the will to live. The governor confirmed that the age was indeed correct. Albert recorded later that he felt upset seeing a man looking so sorry and waiting to die.

Knowing nothing about the crime, Albert said he had to keep an open mind, but later over their evening meal, guards told them the whole sad story. Watkins had been sentenced to death at Birmingham Assizes for the murder of his unnamed baby, who had drowned in a bath. His defence was that the child’s death was an accident, and that it had slipped out of his hands into the bathtub. The prosecution had claimed it was a premeditated crime and that Watkins and the woman he lived with hadn’t planned for the child, had failed to notify anyone when it died, and had killed it to be rid of the unwanted burden of responsibility.

At a few seconds before nine o’clock on the morning of 3 April Watkins was sitting with his back to the door. He was sobbing as he spoke to the chaplain, thanking the prison staff for all their kindness. He was alerted to the hangman’s presence when he saw the chaplain rise to his feet and indicate their presence with his eyes. Albert spoke to him in a kindly voice as he pinioned his arms and, with an officer on
either side, Watkins was escorted through to the scaffold. As Allen strapped his ankles, Albert gently lifted his drooping chin, placed the white cap and noose, stepped back and pulled the lever. The execution took just 12 seconds.

Watkins was the first of four men Albert hanged that month, the remaining three being at Wandsworth. Joseph Brown and Edward Smith were two 30-year-old crooks convicted of the murder of Frederick Gosling, a Chertsey shopkeeper, who was found dead inside his premises. He had been tied to the bed and beaten, and had died from suffocation caused by an old duster being forced into his mouth. On 25 April they were hanged side-by-side, having been convicted largely on the testimony of Smith’s brother, who had initially been a suspect.

Albert stayed in London and along with assistant Dernley he went to a Soho gym to obtain tickets for an upcoming championship fight. Not averse to getting his own way, he teased the promoter that if he didn’t find him a pair of tickets he would be ‘next for the drop’. The inference was jocular but at the same time backed up with a determination to get what he wanted. Leaving the gym they travelled across London to Scotland Yard, where they met up with Detective Superintendent Daws, a long-time friend of the hangman.

Returning to Wandsworth later that afternoon, they rigged the gallows for 56-year-old James Virrels, who had killed his landlady with an axe following a lovers’ tiff. Virrels was terrified when they went for him on the following morning and walked slowly and falteringly to the drop.

On 8 May, Albert and Syd Dernley hanged James Inglis at Manchester. Inglis had killed a woman in Hull and, like Crosby the previous December, had been brought over to Manchester while Leeds Prison was being modernised. Unlike Albert’s previous ‘customer’, Inglis had been on his feet ready
for the hangmen when they entered the cell and with his arms pinioned he began to run to the drop, almost treading on Albert’s heels in a hurry to put his head in the noose. The execution was timed at seven seconds, and Syd Dernley, a veteran of over a score of executions, later said he could not think how anyone could have been hanged in a faster time, so eager was Inglis to reach the gallows.

Leaving Manchester after stowing away the execution equipment, Albert hurried to London Road station, where he had booked a ticket on the 10.30 a.m. express to Winchester via London. At Winchester Gaol he had an engagement on the following morning to hang William Shaughnessy, who had strangled his wife and daughter in an apparently motiveless murder in Portsmouth.

Over the summer Albert made two more trips to Manchester, and also carried out a double execution at Norwich. In September he hanged Robert Dobie Smith at Edinburgh for the murder of a Dumfries policeman, and in October he was at Pentonville, where John O’Conner paid the penalty for the murder of his elderly landlady at his home in Kensington.

The final execution of 1951 was also one of the most dramatic. On 9 August, Herbert Mills, a 19-year-old unemployed clerk, had telephoned the
News of the World
newspaper in London, sensationally claiming he had discovered the body of a strangled woman in Nottingham. Mills told the reporter that he had yet to inform the police and offered them an exclusive story if they paid him £250. Mills was phoning from a call box and while the reporter kept him talking, another called the police, who hurried to the scene and questioned Mills. He led them to an orchard at nearby Sherwood Vale, where they found the body of 48-year-old Mrs Mabel Tattershaw, who had been reported as missing from
home six days earlier. It appeared that she had been battered to death. Mills was treated as a witness and, with police being unable to establish any link between him and the victim, he was allowed to leave custody after being questioned.

A few days later, his account of the discovery was published in the Sunday newspaper, along with photographs of Mills posing where the body was discovered. Re-reading through his account, detectives picked up on the fact that Mills had mentioned strangulation, something that had only came to light at the recent inquest and which had been impossible to tell from the state of the body when first discovered. Mills had also claimed that the victim’s face was white when he found her; after six days of decomposition this had certainly not been the case. In a follow-up interview by newspaper reporters, Mills changed his story, now admitting that he had, in fact, found the body a few days before making the telephone call, when the face had indeed been white. Now convinced that Mills was the real killer, detectives invited him to make further statements, until finally, two weeks after making the original phone call, he slipped up, contradicting himself once too often. Realising he could lie no more, Mills eventually confessed to the crime.

At his two-day trial before Mr Justice Byrne at Nottingham Assizes, Mills was described as a desperately lonely boy, cruel, boastful and vain, who wrote bad poetry. It was alleged Mills had met Mrs Tattershaw when she had sat next to him in a cinema. Around this time he had become obsessed with committing ‘the perfect murder’ and after luring her to the orchard on some pretext he had killed her. Frustrated that his crime had not been discovered, and wishing to gloat over the police’s failure to solve it, he made the call to the Sunday newspaper. The prosecution alleged that the main reason for the murder was exhibitionism.

Mills was hanged at Lincoln Gaol on 11 December, and Albert may have made a rare blunder at this execution. With Mills weighing a slight 126 pounds and standing just 5 feet 5 inches, Albert worked out a long drop of 8 feet 6 inches. Mills was hanged at 9.00 a.m., but it was reported that it took over twenty minutes for his heart to stop beating after the drop fell. Did Albert get his sums wrong? Medical evidence suggests that in a small number of cases although the hanging had been carried out correctly, the heart could continue to go on beating long after a man is by all accounts clinically dead. Whether Albert did or did not get his calculations slightly wrong that chilly December morning, it seems nothing was ever made official and apparently no blemish appeared against his name.

One of the drawbacks with being engaged as a hangman, with no control over the scheduling of the engagements, was that there were occasions when executions were fixed to take place at inconvenient times. This was in part due to the way that the assize courts functioned. There were specific term times that the court sat, and with the three-week rule between sentence and execution – longer, if the condemned appealed – it often meant that people convicted at the autumn assizes awaited their fate in the condemned cell over the festive season.

On New Year’s Eve, Albert and assistant Syd Dernley found themselves occupying the hangman’s quarters at Birmingham, having accepted the invitation to execute Horace Carter. Carter, a Birmingham labourer, had lured a young girl into his home after promising her some sweets. He took her upstairs, raped her, and then, frightened that she would report him to the police, he strangled her. At nightfall he carried her body outside and dumped it in the corporation yard, close to his own back garden. A neighbour discovered
the body the next day and Carter was arrested after he confessed to the crime during a routine police interview.

On New Year’s Day 1952, the hangmen shook hands and wished each other a happy new year. Then, at nine o’clock, they hanged the brutal child killer in brisk fashion. Carter didn’t say a word as he was led to the drop.

1952 was to be one of the busiest years for executions in almost half a century. Albert carried out the execution of Alfred Bradley at Manchester in January. He was assisted by Jock Stewart, who recorded later that Bradley seemed so unconcerned as he waited for the hangmen to enter the cell on the morning of the execution that anyone would think he was waiting to go to the cinema rather than to the gallows. Bradley had killed a night watchman in what was thought to be a homosexual quarrel.

A month later Albert and Jock were again on duty at Manchester when Herbert Roy Harris was hanged for the murder of his wife. Harris had committed the murder near his home in Flint, North Wales, but was brought to Manchester as executions had been discontinued in North Wales during Albert’s father’s time as chief executioner.

Probably the most infamous execution of that year took place at Liverpool on 25 April, when two Manchester criminals were hanged for the murder of an old lady at Wavertree, Liverpool. Mrs Beatrice Rimmer had been a recluse for a number of years, since the death of her husband. This secretive life led to local rumours of her having large amounts of money and on more than one occasion her house had been burgled. She had last been seen alive on the night of Sunday, 19 August 1951. On the following evening her son found her lying in a pool of blood on the hall floor. Two
different weapons had been used, suggesting two killers. In October, Alfred Burns and Edward Devlin were arrested in Manchester, following a tip-off from a soldier held in Walton Prison, Liverpool.