At the time, the press attributed the murder of three prostitutes in London between August 1935 and May of the following year to a single killer, the ‘Soho strangler’. No one had forgotten the media frenzy that surrounded the Whitechapel murders of 1888, when newspaper sales had rocketed out of all proportion. There were certainly similarities in the 1930s cases – all the victims were prostitutes, with accompanying ‘street’ names. Paulette Estelle was ‘French Marie’; Josephine Martin was ‘French Fifi’; Constance Hinds was ‘Dutch Leah’. And the MO was similar too – strangulation, even if hands, a silk scarf, a silk handkerchief and piano wire were the actual weapons involved.
‘Dutch Leah’, also known as ‘Stilts’ because of her love of high heels, was found dead in bed by her husband, Stanley King, on 9 May 1936. She had been garrotted with wire and her head smashed in, probably by an iron. She was lying with her clothes disarranged, as though ready for sex. But pathology determined that no sex had taken place, any more than it had for Bella, whose slip was not torn, whose knickers were complete.
In the case of ‘French Fifi’, the Russian girl was found in her flat in Archer Street, Piccadilly by her maid, the elegantly named Felicité Plaisant. Like ‘Leah’, ‘Fifi’ was heavily in debt. She was found to owe 40 guineas to one person (over £3,000 today), £20 to someone else. But the fact that she had a maid spoke volumes. These women were not domestics in the conventional sense; they worked for pimps and reported on the girls to ensure that they were not keeping their earnings dark. I believe that Bella would have had one too, hovering around the Princess Court address. The maid would have noticed everything – the regulars who liked the girl with the Birmingham Roma accent and the funny teeth that made her look cute and fresh-faced as opposed to the usual Soho drabs. Mary McLeod, a prostitute murdered in Stepney in 1952 was 50, but years of alcoholism made her look much older; and without wishing to be unkind to the dead, was far from an oil painting. Bella’s maid would have seen the ‘one-offs’ come and go, men given the slang term ‘Steamers’. Robert Fabian knew these men too. As head of the Met’s Vice Squad, he met many of them, caught literally with their trousers down in raids all over the West End. ‘The great majority,’ Fabian wrote, ‘are soft-hearted men. Nine out of ten … are looking for romance. They have a few drinks, and wander out into the streets, hoping to discover under some lamp post a young creature who has been driven by hunger or despair into proffering her body.’
Stefan Slater, a professional criminal psychologist writing many years after the hard-bitten London copper, comes to much the same conclusion. The average prostitute (although he concedes that there is really no such thing) hails ‘from a poor background’, a background like that of a gypsy girl, living hand to mouth in a community regarded as outcasts by the rest of society. ‘She is probably in her mid-to-late twenties’ – Bella was 26 or 27. She ‘has a criminal record’. Bella/Lavonia did; she was arrested for soliciting along with her French oppos and Fernand Modena.
And her maid would have reported it all to the next Fernand Modena, the next pimp, the lowest of the low who offered his girls ‘protection’ at a price and took a huge cut of their income. Bob Fabian said there were two ‘highly experienced’ institutions scouring the London streets looking for likely lasses. One was the Met itself, especially the ‘Zombies’, the women police officers who drove the ‘Children’s Waggon’ that parked outside a different central park every night. The other group was made up of the pimps, the ‘Johnsons’, who picked up girls lost, on the run, looking for romance and adventure just as their future ‘Steamers’ were. Lavonia Stratford had been one of these at some time in the early to mid-1930s. Her circumstances after 1935 cut her adrift again. And the only organized people-trafficking gang in London then were the newly arrived Messinas. She was hired – still a fresh-looking country girl. Perhaps she did use the name Bella, continuing the exotic-sounding, chic ambience of the French connection. And if she was now working for the Italians, who was to know?
But the rates had gone up. While she probably paid Fernand half her wages, she had to pay the Messinas 80 per cent. They secured the flat for her in Princess Court and they collected the money she earned on a regular basis. Fifteen years after Bella died and when the power of the Messinas was broken, it was still going on. Conservative MP Arthur Baxter wrote in 1956:
I have some friends living in Bayswater, just off Hyde Park and they tell me that practically every night – and I have seen it myself – up comes a car with a couple of men who take money from the prostitutes in that area … These women are drawn up like a guard of honour – or dishonour – three yards apart. We love London, but its streets are the most disgraceful in the world.1
What happened in the case of Lavonia? I believe that her particular pimp was Eugenio Messina, known as Gino, who styled himself Edward Marshall. The last ‘client’ seen in the company of ‘Dutch Leah’ was described as ‘tall, slim, clean shaven, long hair, slouching gait, foreign’. Was that Gino too? Was ‘Dutch Lena’ one of his girls and was she short-changing him, as I believe Bella was? Fabian knew these pimps, the riff-raff the Victorians had called ‘bullies’ for a good reason. A ‘pimp’s only pride,’ Fabian wrote, ‘is in his ability to intimidate a woman. He will shred her face unforgettably. A slender phial of acid dropped inside her clothing and then shattered with a blow from his fist. Or he can set fire to her hair …’
Or he can take out her teeth one by one. That is why a tooth had been extracted from Bella within a year before she died. That was why no dentist could be found who had done the work. The travelling community, especially in the days before a national health service, never went within a country mile of a dentist’s surgery. Bella was keeping money back; her maid had a quiet word in Gino’s ear and Gino went to work on her, taking out a tooth this time, as a warning. But next time …
She was terrified. Caught out in a lie, her pimp had worked her over already. Back in the Hagley area were her people and probably her child. She ran. She caught the next train to Birmingham, fighting her way through the crowded platform, jostling in the corridor with servicemen with kitbags and gas masks. She would have been carrying one too and an identity card; you could not be too careful.
If she caught the GWR’s train from Paddington, she would have got off at Birmingham Snow Hill, and made her way on the stopping service to Worcester to Hagley, into the country, passing through Halesowen and Bromsgrove, past the buildings where the haunting question would appear about her three years later – ‘Who put Bella in the wych elm?’ She found her people, perhaps on the Nimmings, but more probably elsewhere and she told them she was on the run. Perhaps she found her child again and cuddled him or her on the steps of a Vardo wagon in some country clearing as the night sky glowed red with the bombing raids over Birmingham. She ditched her clothes. She gave away the smart, fashionable ‘uniform’ of the London prostitute and took whatever people gave her in return; a shapeless slip made from a coat lining, an old khaki skirt stitched together in panels. Even her frilly lace panties went, exchanged for a plain blue pair, like respectable women wore. Her top was stitched together with old wool that a gypsy woman had knitted together by the firelight. She had got rid of her bra – travellers did not use them. And anything else that betrayed her past vanished too – her handbag, her identity card, even the gas mask. She tried to lose herself again in the anonymity of the travelling people, people whose names were unknown but who called themselves ‘Smith’ and kept their heads down.
Outside that tight-knit community, which had probably not seen her for ten years, no one knew who she was. The name Lavonia, the possible nickname Bella – it meant nothing to anybody. She was safe here.
Perhaps she lived like this for days or weeks; it cannot have been longer. It was the summer of 1941 and the papers she never read carried brief, cryptic stories about the arrival of a mysterious German airman calling himself Hauptman Horn. But all that was eclipsed by news from the east – Hitler had turned on his former ally Stalin and had invaded Russia. So it was true – the man was mad, after all.
Then, Gino found her. It was probably not difficult. She may have told him months before about her people, the great settlement of Black Patch which was still a vibrant folk memory for her. And Gino was not a stupid man. He sniffed out likely girls in London, grooming them for work. He knew what Lavonia looked like and where her haunts were. He may have driven from hotel to hotel for a couple of days, eking out his petrol allowance so that no one asked too many questions. He signed himself in as Edward Marshall and had a ready identity card to match. He had a story ready too – explaining what he was doing in the Midlands in the first place, should any nosy copper ask awkward questions.
When he found her, why did she go with him? Why not scream, run, bring her menfolk to her defence? We have no idea. Perhaps she had no menfolk to hand. If her father was dead or had never been on the scene, if she had no brothers, that would have left her isolated. And then there was Gino. Yes, she was afraid of him. And, yes, he had hurt her. But he could be charming, kind even and they may have had a certain rapport. He was in his mid-thirties, perhaps mercurial, perhaps dazzling; the Heathcliff to his Cathy.
She kissed her child, promising to come back soon. Yes, Gino would have said, that would be fine, but he needed her in London. Then they drove away, south perhaps, towards the capital, making for the bright lights. Except that they never got there. Somewhere along Hagley Wood Lane, he stopped the car. She was not afraid. She knew this road well, had told him all about the wood she had known as a child, where she had picked bluebells and danced around that funny old tree, the one she could just make out from the road, the dying one with its curious hollow trunk.
He may have suggested they have one last look at it, one last glimpsed memory of childhood before going back to the Blitz and the Steamers, the life she hated but which made money. Lavonia never quite got to the tree because Gino stopped her. He grabbed her from behind, pulling her striped cardigan up over her face and ramming it into her mouth, pressing her nostrils closed with her hand. There was a razor in his pocket, and he would fall back on its use if he had to. It was dark now, the car silent on the road with its headlights off. She struggled because she could not scream, the shoes she could not bear to be parted from scraping in the undergrowth as her breath ran out and her heaving lungs gave up. He felt her slump in his iron grip and let her fall. He checked her pulse. Nothing.
And he looked around him. Night in the middle of nowhere. He had known the slums of Cairo and every dark corner of Fabian’s London. But here, he was all but lost and in wartime, a car in darkness caused suspicion. He would find a hotel, sign in as Edward Marshall and decide what to do in the morning.
Where did he stay? The Lyttleton Arms perhaps or the Gypsy’s Tent, if either of them took paying guests at the time. Travellers in wartime were not as common as they had been before 1939, but a man with nerve and a plausible story could get away with it. Still, the body bothered him. He had left it lying in the open, the woman he had had to shut up. Nobody walked away from Gino Messina, trying to take his money. Nobody. Perhaps the finding of her body would leave the necessary message to other girls in his stable, as it might have done already in the case of ‘Dutch Leah’. But that had been a risk and he had a feeling he had been seen with her in the hour or two before he killed her. What if someone had seen him with Lavonia? What if one of the gypsies talked? That was not likely; the travelling people kept to themselves and they did not like policemen any more than Gino did. No, this body would have to be hidden and he knew just the place.
He had seen corpses before and had created a couple too, but even so, he had to steel himself to the task in hand. He did not know that Constable Jack Pound walked his beat along Hagley Wood Lane, that Sergeant Richard Skerratt might have been watching him from the Clent Hills. He did not know that the Home Guard patrolled the area regularly and that terrified people from Birmingham drove out this far to find shelter from the bombs. Still less did he know that gypsies camped at the Nimmings, yards from where he had left Lavonia and that courting couples might trip over the body. So the next day, he went back.
Mechanically, he checked the corpse. The stiffness of rigor mortis had all but gone. She was not carrying a handbag, a purse or a wallet. She had no identification on her at all. He hauled her up and felt his heart thump. Some animal had ripped off her right hand and he could not see it anywhere. A badger? A fox? He knew nothing about English woodlands, but he knew exactly where to hide the evidence. The old wych elm that Lavonia had talked about, with its gnarled bark and writhing roots, its branches stretching to the sky like the rays of the sun. She was only 5 feet tall and not heavy, for all her dead weight, to a man like him. He lifted her, balanced her awkwardly on the opening of the trunk and let her fall, her own weight pulling her down, her knees buckling as her feet hit the internal base of the trunk. Her head lolled back and she looked at him through sightless eyes, her arms thrust upwards, wedged in the wych elm, like a parachutist suddenly cut from her harness and her silk.
Gino looked around. There was no sign she had ever been there. Nor had he. He wandered back through the bracken to his car. Then, he was gone.
Is this – or something like it – what happened to Bella? Was she really Lavonia Stratford, the little gypsy girl who had got in with the wrong crowd and had she paid the ultimate price? I cannot prove it; not any of it. The men who could, the men who had that job back in 1943, the police and the pathologists, signally failed her. There are reasons why and, with the passage of time perhaps we should be tolerant.
In 1988, Bob Hoskins, himself of Romany descent, made a film called The Raggedy Rawney. Rawney is often spelt Rani, Roma for woman. Bella was most assuredly a ragged woman as she was found in the wych elm. But that is not how she started out. She was a flesh and blood human being, like the rest of us. And she deserved an altogether better end.