When a lodger called Grant was asked to go around and enter the room by the outside window, a shock was coming to the residents of 14 Brownlow Street. The man at the window saw a woman’s legs on the floor – he felt certain that there was a body under the bed. The lodger, Grant, rammed the window open

and it was then that he experienced a rank smell – from a body which had been there for some time. He wasted no time in calling for the police.

The first detective on the scene noted that the body was cut to pieces and that there was only one garment on the corpse – a chemise. She was lying in a pool of blood, and the most repulsive detail on the scene of horror was a little heap of flesh by the body. ‘I thought it was rats’ urine, as it dries like a little hill …’ he said. But it turned out to be the genital organs, neatly taken out. Her throat had been cut. But there were several other cuts on the jaw, chin and neck. A forensic report of the time notes that ‘The wounds were putrefying and were covered with mould … On the left side of the wound and upon the left thigh were some abrasions as if scraped by a sharp instrument.’

Miss Pannell identified the body as that of the person introduced to her as Brown’s sister. It was a strong and vicious attack, but the wounds were mostly done after death, and with a clean instrument. The person the police were looking for was some kind of obsessed or perverted fetishist, it seemed. A clean instrument had been used to take out the genitals. It was a macabre business cleaning up the room. The mattress was soaked in blood and there were clothes littered around, mostly bloodied.

Some little objects found in some of the clothes provided some leads, though. One of the most interesting, bearing in mind Brown’s foreign accent, was the name ‘E. Braem’ with a Liverpool address. There was also a false lead, to a seaman called Nicholson, but the turning-point in the first enquiries came when the identity of the dead woman was confirmed. She was Mary Sarah McKenzie Clarke, apparently not ‘on the game’, but a known heavy drinker, and objects found in her lodgings made it certain that she was living by doing thefts from motor vehicles. Then, from markings on collars in the room at Brownlow Street, details of another place used by Brown were found. This was at 40 Guelph Street. The man of mystery was indeed a puzzle for the law.

But the lead that led to Brown being traced was found, courtesy of the paperwork required by the Aliens Act of 1905. ‘Brown’ had had to fill in a form. This revealed that he was really Mr Braem of Courtrai in Belgium. He had given his date of birth, an Antwerp address and a note that he had served in the Belgian army as a lancer. Not only did the form lead to useful information; there was a central register of aliens in London. The Home Office then stated that Braem had a record. In Sheffield he had been arrested for living by false pretences. Then the police even had a photograph of him, held at the Criminal Records Office – he had served a short gaol sentence.

The chase was on in earnest now. A detective went to the Antwerp address and he was tracked down; in his possession were press cuttings about the Liverpool murder. Of course, on arrest, he told a story – that a man called Fisher from Manchester had done the murder. With the Belgian authorities insisting on a proper extradition order, DCS McCoy was desperate for his superiors in Liverpool to have a warrant and extradition papers from home. Finally these came, and were signed by the Prosecuting Solicitor back home.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the supposed ‘Fisher’ went on and at first there was no result, even after a methodical search for all people named Fisher in Manchester. Eventually, by sheer persistence, officers came across a sailor called Harry Fisher, and a thorough questioning made it clear that this man had indeed been a drinking acquaintance of Braem; but there it ended. There was no more to it. Braem had said that Fisher was Australian, and this sailor worked for a steamship company operating between Liverpool and Australia. It was soon obvious that Braem had fabricated a personality from the actual Harry Fisher, the genial drinker and talker. In fact, in Antwerp, Braem could not identify Fisher from a picture shown him in a sequence of images. Detective McCoy had earned his pay with all his hard work on the case.

After more testing at the scene of crime, and with Belgian officers present, it was found that any noise in the killing would not have been heard, as the next room was lived in by a man who was deaf and very ill. It was all over for Braem. It was in 1922 that he was finally sentenced, but he escaped the noose, despite the verdict of guilty of wilful murder. Medical circumstances saved his neck and he was given penal servitude for life.