CHAPTER 27

Murder of a Nurse

1919

Two gun shots were fired and a woman was heard screaming …

ome kinds of love can be like handling explosives. What some call love can be no more than manic possession. One man in the criminal history of Liverpool had huge problems with his definition of love, and in the end, he had to do what Shakespeare made his tragic hero Othello do, kill his one beloved. Like Othello, this man was a victim of the ‘greeneyed goddess’.

Joseph Hutty, when he came to the Northern Hospital in 1918 with severe injuries to his legs, was definitely a hero; he had shell-shock as well, and he had performed the amazing feat of carrying another soldier out of the battle zone to safety, shells bursting around him as he staggered clear. He was just twenty-three when he came into the care of nurse Alice Kate Jones (known as Kitty), a woman of his age who had come to Liverpool from Newhey, Lancashire, to complete her professional training. She was strikingly attractive and the patients all thought her to be a wonderful nurse.

Hutty was from Detriot, but he had enrolled with a Canadian regiment. Some of the most daring and dashing acts of rash heroism had been done by Canadians, including one officer who actually caught grenades and threw them back at the enemy. Hutty was in this class, a man in need of something grand and passionate in his life. In this case it was the familiar scenario of the wounded soldier being smitten with affection for his nurse. They developed a close relationship as his health improved. They met as Joseph was getting in some walking practice, his crutches scraping the floor of the long hall between wards. The friendship did not end when he was taken to another hospital and they corresponded. The turning point came when Joseph went to visit Kate at her family home, and there he asked her father for her hand in marriage. The response to that was indicative of the course of his true love never running smoothly – Kitty’s father told him that he approved of the match, but that he wanted his daughter to qualify first. That meant waiting, and Hutty was not good at waiting for anything.

A campaign of increasingly fulsome, emotional and insistent letters began to pour from Hutty’s hospital bed when he went back across the Atlantic to Toronto. The general tone of these is about possession. It was a classic example of the lover who moves too quickly and intensely towards that kind of one-sided relationship that imparts a degree of fear. He wrote such things as: ‘In one letter you cannot come over too soon and the next you don’t give a damn how long it is before you come to me. You are a puzzle …’

For some time the affection was mutual, though, and Kitty wrote about wanting to see him and ruffle his hair. When their emotions were equally matched and there was a rapport between them she wrote and used the word marriage. But she stopped writing early in March 1919. Her silence was the lull before the inevitable ‘Dear John’ letter which was such a cliché for the thousands of soldiers who had had liaisons in the climate of world war. Kate wrote:

I have come to a great decision, one which hurts me very much and also one which is quite final. I shall never marry you. Please don’t ask me the reason why. I can tell you this: there is certainly no-one else …

It was certainly not a sugar-coated message, but in this brutal honesty, it was clear that the young woman had good intentions, trying to follow the ‘cruel to be kind’ rule in such matters. For Hutty it was only the beginning of his long losing battle against keeping on a struggle to have her, to win her back, and by any means. In July he was back in Liverpool, and ready to begin a season of sheer nuisance-making obsession. He clearly had the make-up of a dangerous stalker. He wrote to her, even threatening suicide, and he pestered people who knew her. Kitty must have sensed that there was still a deep menace in this man, even though he wrote to say: ‘If my mother writes to you, or your people, let her know what happened to me. I will say goodbyes now, Joe.’

Kitty felt that this was not goodbye at all, and she was so nervous when she planned to come back to Liverpool after some ‘time out’ of this dreadful harassment back home in Newhey, that she arranged for a friend to meet her train. This was Frank Schoo, a man she had spent some time with. He was chief officer of the USS Andalucia docked in the city. On 24 July she did arrive at the Exchange Station and there was Schoo. But Hutty was a man full of the wit and cunning of a deranged and obsessive mind. He was there, like a shadow, waiting for the moment to pounce, by the hospital steps, as if he had an instinct about where the couple would walk when they came from the station. He just said, ‘Nurse Jones?’ As Kitty turned, four shots were fired into her and she fell. Hutty had been drinking with a friend, McMahon, who said that the two of them had been loitering around the hospital, waiting for Kitty to come onto her night shift. Then Hutty had taken off on his evil, murderous mission.