CHAPTER 26

The Body in a Sack

1913

Ball was an ‘unlucky’ murderer

hristina Bradfield, forty years old and manageress of a tarpaulin company on Old Hall Street, went missing from her lodgings. Her landlady, after a day had elapsed with no sign of her lodger, went to ask around the office and the warehouse. She was told that Christina had last been seen at 6.40 at the office, with two employees, George Ball and Samuel Eltoft. These two were questioned, and suspicions were aroused by the owner of the business, Mr Bradfield, when Ball told him that the firm’s keys had been entrusted to him by Christina. Not only was this highly unlikely – there was something else. Ball had scratches on his face, as if he had been involved in a struggle.

The two men were only packers at the company, they were not in any managerial position, and in fact Eltoft had only worked there for a year. Fate was against George Ball, though. He was, in the words of Robert Jackson, the biographer of Lord Hewart who led the prosecution, ‘an unlucky murderer.’ This was because, on the day of the killing, a seaman called Walter Eaves stopped by the shop and as it was a windy day, a blind crashed down and ruined his new hat. When George Ball came outside to tend to the blind, Eaves insisted that he should be compensated for the hat. Eaves was given two shillings, but he was still around the area a little later and he saw Ball and Eltoft pushing a barrow with a heap of tarpaulin on it. They were really struggling, so it was something the seaman noticed and remembered later.

Later on, at a lock gate on the Leeds and Liverpool canal, a certain Francis Robinson saw a sack jamming the gate and when he dragged this free, he saw that there were two human feet sticking out. This was the body of Christina Bradfield. There was an umbrella with the initials CCB on it and also there was a necklace which helped to confirm her identity. She had been beaten to death. Ball had attacked her with a marline spike and stolen the takings. The body had been sewn into the sack.