The Aberdeen Child Murderer
On 20th April, 1934, an eight-year-old girl, Helen Priestly, residing at 61 Urquhart Road, Aberdeen, was sent by her mother to the Co-operative Stores for a loaf of bread. The child reached the stores at about 1.30 p.m. She was served with the bread and given the usual voucher, which bore the number 21567. She was seen to leave the shop and should have reached home some ten or fifteen minutes later.
61 Urquhart Road was a tenement house, consisting of four storeys, with two flats on each floor, eight families being resident.
Mrs. Priestly was waiting for Helen on the landing of the first floor and must have seen the child if she had come up the stairs from the ground floor, but she would not have been able to see her enter the house.
When Helen did not return Mrs. Priestly became alarmed. She went to the Co-operative Stores and learned that the child had been there and left again with the bread. Search was made in all the likely places, without result, and the police were informed.
Enquiry in the area between the shop and the house disclosed that Helen had been seen to pass No. 59, the house next door, after which all trace of her was lost. A boy came forward to say that he had seen Helen being dragged into a car by a rough-looking man, and gave most convincing details, all of which were entirely false and existed only in his imagination. Unfortunately, the boy was at first believed and the police lost a lot of time following up this line of investigation.
The search for the missing girl was continued until midnight, when it was called off until five o’clock the following morning.
On the ground floor were two families, the Topps living on the left side of the entrance passage and the Donalds on the right. The passage ran through the house to a door giving on to a yard common to all the occupants of the eight flats. Close to this rear door was a water-closet, common to the two ground-floor flats, and immediately leading into the W.C. was a recess.
At about 1.30 a.m., Mr. Topp, who had been taking part in the search, had occasion to go to the W.C. At 4.30 a.m. he was up again ready to continue with the search and again went to the W.C. There was nothing unusual there at that time. At five o’clock the child’s body was found in a sack in the recess leading to the W.C., so that it must have been placed there between 4.30 and 5 a.m.
Post-mortem rigidity was fully established when Dr. Richards, the police surgeon, made his preliminary examination at 5.30 a.m. The sack and the child’s clothing were quite dry, but her hat and knickers were missing. It looked, from the external injuries, as if this was a case of savage rape upon the poor little girl.
The body was photographed and later removed to the mortuary, where a post mortem was performed by Dr. Richards and Professor Shennan the same morning.
From about 8 p.m. the previous night it had been raining heavily. There were no footprints on the ground-floor passageway or on the concrete “surround” outside the rear door. The yard was not concreted or paved, but was of bare earth, sodden with rain and very soft. Anyone walking over it must have left footprints, but there was none.
As the police considered the evidence they were forced to discredit the information given by the boy and concluded that this was an inside job. They already had a statement from a slater, working in the backyard, that at 2 p.m. the previous afternoon he had heard a scream which he thought came from No. 61 and sounded like the cry of a frightened child. It had not been repeated and he had done nothing about the matter, thinking that perhaps he had been mistaken.
The body had been found in the recess on the ground floor and had either been carried in from some other place outside the building or had been in the tenement all the time. The extreme improbability that the murderer had entered by the front door, carrying the sack with the dead child’s legs protruding, cut out investigation along these lines. There had been a number of persons in the street and actually passing in and out of No. 61 during the night. Entry to the yard at the rear could only be made through other yards and would have necessitated crossing the soft ground, where he must have left footprints. It was clear that he had not come that way. So the evidence pointed to the murder having been committed in the house.
In view of Mrs. Priestly’s evidence that she had been waiting on the first-floor landing for her daughter’s return, suspicion naturally fell on the Topps and the Donalds, who occupied the ground floor. Helen could have come in at the front door without her mother seeing her, but she could not have come any further than the stairs to the first floor without being seen.
All the occupants of the six flats above the ground floor could provide the police with complete alibis, which were checked and found to be correct. But so could Mr. Topp and Mr. Donald. The only person in the entire building who could not give a reliable statement of her movements between 1.30 and 3 p.m. was Mrs. Donald. She told the police that she had been out of the house and returned home at 2.15 p.m., a statement which was found to be false. This looked very suspicious, but did not necessarily mean that she was guilty of murder. She might well have had some good reason for making a false statement, maybe not wishing her husband to know where she had been. Indeed, the very nature of the horrible crime seemed to exclude the possibility that a woman could have been responsible. It appeared to be a case of rape by a sex maniac.
The result of the post mortem, however, showed the possibility that a woman could have done the murder. This finding on the part of the pathologists altered the whole police outlook on the case, for it was obvious that what had been previously believed to be a case of rape was not, and could have been murder done by a woman. Suspicion hardened against Mrs. Donald, who was regarded as a most unsatisfactory witness.
The cause of death was asphyxia due to manual strangulation, coupled with the inhalation of vomited matter. (The child’s dress was thickly stained with vomit.) All the shocking injuries had been inflicted while the little girl was alive.
The time of death was placed at about 2 p.m., probably a little later, if anything. This made the scream which the slater heard very significant. The state of the stomach contents were a big factor in settling the exact time of death. At 12.30 p.m. Helen had eaten a meal of beef and potatoes, and these were identified with the stomach contents. They showed only the first changes of digestion and the lacteals just beginning to fill, indicating that death had taken place about ninety minutes after the ingestion of the meal.
The examination of the child’s clothing and the sack in which the body had been concealed led to further important discoveries.
The combinations were found to be grossly contaminated with coliform bacilli and other bacteria, including the entero-coccus. Moreover, the coliform bacilli differed in many respects from the common types of this bacilli, which would be additional confirmation.
When the sack was examined, a quantity of washed cinders was found, together with a small quantity of dust and fluff-fibres and a few human hairs. These latter were at first thought to be from the head of the little girl, but on microscopic examination they were found to be of a different colour and very much coarser. They showed, too, that the lumen bulged and narrowed in a remarkable irregularity of contour, due to artificial waving of the hair.
The fluff, under the microscope, was shown to be characteristic of ordinary household fluff, with fibres of wool, cotton, hair and jute from carpets and clothing and other articles. Fibres showing an alternate pattern of red and pink were most numerous.
With all this information in their possession the police arrested Mrs. Donald and charged her with the murder of Helen Priestly. She was the only person who could have committed the crime in the house and at the time it was decided the murder had taken place.
When the Donalds’ flat was searched evidence began to build up fast. The only place in the building where any sacks were found was in this flat, and here seven were discovered, all bearing a characteristic hole in the corner, similar to the sack in which the body had been hidden. In addition, on three of them were found black stains from kitchen pots identical in size and colour-staining with those of the fatal sack.
Attempts to trace the origin of the sacks failed, as has happened in almost every murder case in which a sack has figured. These were ordinary jute sacks with the letters B.O.S.S. painted on them in red. They had originally come from Canada with a wheat shipment, but had passed through the London agents and on to Glasgow agents, who had sent a number of the sacks of wheat to Aberdeen. But when the sacks had been emptied they had been sold to a dealer, who in turn had sold them to other dealers. Similar sacks were found on a farm near the place where Mrs. Donald’s brother worked, but could not be traced any better than the others. But as it transpired the sack itself was not of any great consequence in the evidence. It merely represented many weary hours of routine work for the police.
In their search of the Donald flat the police had several things which they had to look for in particular. The instrument with which the internal injuries had been inflicted was likely to be the handle of a brush, or a stick used for stirring porridge or kneading clothes. From the measurements taken of the tears a reasonable estimate of the diameter of the instrument had been made. These were subsequently found to be remarkably accurate.
In addition, there were the child’s hat and woollen knickers, traces of blood, urine and vomit, the loaf of bread and the Co-operative Stores cheque, together with specimens of hair and household dust.
All these the police found. There were bloodstains on two newspapers, a packet of soap powder, the linoleum of the kitchen, the doorhandle of the sink cupboard and on two washing-cloths and a scrubbing-brush. When these were tested in the laboratory they agreed with the blood group, O, of the child and differed from those of the accused. Serum cultures were made from one of the washing-cloths and revealed the same uncommon form of coliform bacilli as had been found on the torn combinations. The bloodstains were identical in detailed biological characters, fermentation tests, indol reaction and haemolysis. The odds against their not being from a common origin, the child’s body, were enormous.
Hairs taken from Mrs. Donald’s hairbrush were identical in every detail with those found in the sack and there could be no doubt that they were from her head.
The fluff taken from the kitchen floor yielded no less than twenty-five definite points of similarity with the fluff found among the cinders in the sack. Moreover, certain fibres were identified with a strip of carpet by the kitchen sink, the red and pink fibres.
Among the cinders from the fireplace was a piece of paper which was identical in structure and microscopical appearance with the paper used in the Co-operative vouchers and had, too, the same green line printed on the reverse side.
The cinders from the Donald house were submitted to the Department of Mines, where they were examined and X-rayed, ashed and subjected to examination by the spectrograph and micro-chemical analysis. But there was nothing peculiar about them which would have led to their being identified with those from the sack. The only evidence here was that Mrs. Donald was the only person in the building who was in the habit of washing cinders.
On the linoleum beneath the kitchen sink was found the impression of a rectangular mark where the cinder-box was normally kept. This box was missing. A cinder had been found pressed between the lips of the dead child and it was thought that the body had been placed in the recess under the sink for some time, but that the cinder-box had become so contaminated with blood that it had been destroyed. No trace of the box was ever found.
Why the cinders had been deliberately placed in the sack is a mystery, unless it was some sort of crazy burying ritual. It could be that they were thrown in with the idea of absorbing vomit and blood. Whatever the reason, they provided excellent material evidence against the accused because of the fluff which had gone into the sack at the same time.
The scrubbing-brush and washing-cloths had been used to wipe up the blood and vomited matter, but these were not properly cleaned afterwards and so remained vital pieces of evidence.
What actually happened on that fatal afternoon will never be known. What probably happened is this. The woman was either waiting for, or met, Helen Priestly as she came in at the front door. She silently lured the child into her own flat and closed the door. Little Helen, of course, knew Mrs. Donald well and would have no suspicion of her intentions. Mrs. Priestly, waiting on the landing above, could not have seen her small daughter from that position. Probably Mrs. Donald did not speak, but merely beckoned Helen in. She then gripped her by the throat and rendered her unconscious, but thinking that she had killed her, she put the body under the sink and lying on the sack and began to think what she should do next. It was probably at this time that the child passed the urine which soaked into the sack and caused the dye from the lettering to stain her clothes.
Shortly afterwards, the terrible injuries were made. It is possible that Mrs. Donald may have had it in mind to simulate a rape, but, if so, she grossly overdid it.
The child was not dead and the frightful agony of those injuries restored her to full consciousness. She screamed, and this was the scream heard at 2 p.m. Immediately after she vomited. She probably tried to scream again as the awful torture was continued. Scared lest the agonized cries should be heard, the woman seized her by the throat again and strangled her, this time with fatal results.
She then hid the body in the kitchen cupboard and got rid of the vomit and bloodstains, together with the ash-pan. The disposition of the post-mortem stains showed that the body had been lying on its left side for many hours after death.
At some time between 4.30 and 5 a.m. the next morning she had smuggled out the dead child, partly concealed in the sack, and dumped it in the recess along the lower passage where it was found.
When she came up for trial it took a Scottish jury less than twenty minutes to find her guilty of this vile murder.
What the motive for this crime might have been is a mystery.
—T.C.H.J.