25

‘I love him so’

Knightsbridge, London, 1932

Twenty-seven-year-old socialite Elvira Dolores Barney was an attractive woman, although she looked much older than her years, due to her fast-living, hard-drinking, hedonistic lifestyle that was rumoured to include cocaine sniffing and indulging in all manner of kinky sexual practices. Wealthy and privileged, she was the daughter of Sir John and Lady Evelyne Mullens of Belgravia and her younger sister had been married to a Russian prince. Against her parents’ wishes, Elvira married an American singer, John Sterling Barney, in August 1928. The marriage was abusive and the couple lived together for only six months before Barney left his wife and returned to America. After the end of her marriage, Mrs Barney moved into an opulent flat in Williams Mews, Knightsbridge, which was arranged over two floors and featured a built-in cocktail bar.

In due course, Mrs Barney added an allegedly bisexual drug dealer, Thomas William Scott Stephen, to her wide circle of friends and eventually fell in love with him. Twenty-four-year-old Stephen, who usually went by the name Michael Stephen, was a dress designer, although by 1932, he had not worked for almost a year and had been living on handouts from his parents and brother. Elvira, who had her own private income, quickly became Stephen’s main financial support.

On Monday, 30 May 1932, Elvira hosted a cocktail party at her flat, which was attended by about thirty people. The party wound down at around 10 p.m., when Elvira and Stephen went to one of their regular haunts, the Café de Paris in Coventry Street. From there they went on to the Blue Angel Club in Dean Street, where they stayed until around 2 a.m. on 31 May, before returning to the flat on Williams Mews.

Around three hours later, neighbours heard screaming and shouting coming from the first floor of the flat, where Stephen and Elvira were obviously engaged in a heated argument. Elvira was heard to shout, ‘Get out, get out, I will shoot, I will shoot,’ to which Stephen replied, ‘I am going.’ However, no sooner had he spoken those words than the sound of a gunshot rang out.

‘Good God. What have you done?’ Stephen asked.

‘Chicken, chicken, come back to me. I will do anything you want,’ Elvira responded frantically.

Moments later, Elvira made a desperate telephone call to Dr Thomas Arnold Durrant, who she had known for many years. She told Durrant that there had been a terrible accident, explaining that a man had shot himself. The doctor rushed to Elvira’s flat, arriving within ten minutes to find her waiting for him on the doorstep, while Stephen lay on the landing at the top of the stairs, a small revolver nearby. Elvira was hysterical, refusing to believe that Stephen was dead and pleading with the doctor to do something for him. ‘I love him so,’ she repeated over and over again, telling Durrant, ‘I cannot live,’ and begging him to let her kill herself. When the doctor told her that he must send for the police, she implored him not to, saying that her mother was ill and the shock would kill her. She explained that she and Stephen had quarrelled and when he said that he was leaving her, she threatened to commit suicide. To prevent her shooting herself, Stephen picked up a loaded revolver, which was lying underneath a cushion and tried to leave the flat. Desperate for possession of the gun, Elvira told the doctor that she and Stephen wrestled and the revolver went off. According to Elvira, Stephen then went into the bathroom and she had no idea that he had been shot until he shouted to her to send for a doctor.

When Detective Inspector William Winter arrived at the house in response to Durrant’s telephone call, he found that the revolver’s five chambers were all loaded with cartridges, two of which had been discharged. When Winter asked, ‘Can you tell me about the tragedy?’, Elvira flew into a rage and ordered him out of the house and when Inspector Campion asked her to put on her hat and coat ready to go to the police station to make a statement, she slapped him hard across the face saying, ‘I will teach you to say you will put me in the cells, you vile swine.’

As Elvira was being restrained, the telephone rang and Winter answered it. It was Elvira’s mother, Lady Mullens, and Elvira told the policemen haughtily, ‘Now you know who my mother is, you will be a little more careful in what you say and do to me. I will teach you to say you will take me to a police station.’

It was only when Elvira’s parents arrived at her flat later that morning that she calmed down and agreed to go to the police station. She made a statement saying that she and Stephen had quarrelled about a woman he was supposedly ‘fond of’. Elvira told the police that she had kept a revolver in her flat for some years for self-protection but was afraid of it and usually kept it hidden. Believing that she might commit suicide, Stephen took the gun and Elvira tried to get it back. ‘Our hands were together, his hands and mine, for a few minutes but I didn’t think anything had happened.’ Elvira continued, claiming that when the gun went off she hadn’t realised that Stephen was hurt until he asked her to summon a doctor. She ran downstairs to the telephone but the doctor didn’t answer, so she went back to try and help Stephen, who had by now made his way to the top of the stairs before collapsing. ‘It was not your fault,’ Stephen repeated, as she tried to stem the bleeding from his chest with towels and pillows before going back downstairs to try calling the doctor again. This time, she managed to speak to Dr Durrant but after terminating the call, she realised that Stephen had died. ‘I don’t know what I did afterwards. I was just frantic. I just waited,’ she told the police.

Unfortunately for Elvira, the forensic evidence simply did not support her account of the tragedy. There were no signs of any struggle having taken place anywhere in the flat, nor was there any sign that anyone had lost any blood in the bathroom. Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury was called in to conduct a post-mortem examination and first examined Stephen’s body where it lay on the landing. He confirmed the cause of death as heart failure, following the passage of a bullet through the left lung and concluded that Stephen could have lived for up to ten minutes after being shot, although he would most probably have lost consciousness. Spilsbury’s report suggested that had the gun been fired in the way that Elvira Barney maintained, there would most probably have been blackening or scorching of Stephen’s hands and wrists, which was absent. According to Spilsbury, the revolver was fired from a distance of between three and six inches away from Stephen’s chest, the bullet travelling in a horizontal direction and, had two people been struggling for possession of the gun, it would have been highly unlikely for the bullet to have passed backwards in such a straight line – it was far more likely to have travelled at an angle. Additionally, the gun itself was so small that, in Spilsbury’s opinion, if two people were grasping it, it was highly likely that one of them would be gripping the barrel, thus preventing it from rotating and discharging. Not only that, but the revolver’s trigger guard was only big enough to admit one finger.

Once the police received the post-mortem report, they lost no time in charging Elvira with Stephen’s murder and she was arrested on 3 June, appearing before magistrates at Westminster Police Court the following day. After hearing that she was to be remanded for a week, Elvira collapsed into the arms of a policewoman and had to be revived with smelling salts, before being taken by car to Holloway Prison Hospital.

When she appeared in court for the second time a week later, Elvira had also been charged with shooting at Stephen with intent to do him grievous bodily harm on 19 May 1932. Mrs Dorothy Hall, who lived opposite Elvira’s flat, had told the police that at three o’clock that morning, she was awakened by a noisy argument between the couple and heard Elvira tell Stephen that she would not have him in the house again and if he came near her she would shoot him. A little later, Mrs Hall saw Stephen ringing the doorbell of the flat but the door remained locked against him and he eventually walked away. He returned a little later and rang the doorbell again but this time, as he was walking away, Elvira opened an upstairs window and leaned out. ‘Laugh, baby, for the last time,’ she screamed at Stephen before firing at him with a small revolver. Fortunately the shot missed and within hours the couple were seen out together, laughing and joking as if nothing untoward had happened.

Magistrates eventually committed Elvira Barney for trial at the assizes, which opened on 4 July 1932 at the Old Bailey, London. The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Humphreys and Elvira’s parents and sister were present in court to hear her plead not guilty to the charge of wilful murder against her. No mention was made of the second charge of shooting with intent, although it was later brought up in evidence by the prosecution, in an effort to show that Mrs Barney was in the habit of using a gun.

Counsel for the Prosecution, Sir Percival Clarke outlined the events of 30/31 May for the jury, taking pains to emphasize that, at the time of the fatal shooting, only the victim and Mrs Barney were at the flat in Williams Mews. ‘Was it Mrs Barney who caused his death?’ asked Clarke, adding that the medical evidence would show that it was virtually impossible for Michael Stephen to have caused the injury himself.

Clarke was particularly meticulous in his examination of Dr Durrant, who stated that Stephen could have been dead for anything up to an hour when he arrived on the scene. Mrs Barney was ‘babbling’ and repeatedly told Durrant, ‘He wanted to see you and tell you it was an accident.’ Durrant told the court that he held his foot over the revolver as a precaution when Elvira begged to be allowed to commit suicide, although his foot never actually touched the gun. He also revealed that Elvira had told him that she and Stephen often quarrelled and that, at times, she was absolutely terrified of him. She talked of having previously called for assistance to have him removed from the property and said that he had once broken the kitchen window to try and get in. Letters found in the flat after the shooting seemed to support Elvira’s explanations, since one written to her by Stephen included the words: ‘Forgive me all the dreadful, horrible things I have done. I promise to be better and kinder, so you won’t be frightened any more. I love you, only you, in all the world, little one.’ Another letter written to Stephen by Elvira stated: ‘I have not had a lot of happiness in my life as you have had, so you see it means a great deal and I feel like suicide when you are angry.’ Referring to her abusive marriage, Elvira wrote: ‘Sometimes when you are feeling furious do try and think of the hell I had to endure with J.B.’

In cross-examination by Sir Patrick Hastings KC for the defence, Durrant was asked if Elvira appeared to be ‘passionately devoted’ to the dead man. When Durrant replied that she did, Hastings asked if Elvira kissed Stephen after he was dead.

‘Several times,’ replied the doctor.

‘And did her actions appear to you, so far as you could judge, to be absolutely sincere and genuine?’ continued Hastings.

‘Certainly.’

‘In your opinion,’ Hastings continued, ‘was she in a mental condition when you saw her that she could possibly have invented a story that was not true?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Durrant emphatically. ‘She was in such a crazy state of mind that I could not see how anyone with such disjointed sentences could string them together and make a collective history of the case.’

‘Whether you are right or wrong, had you the slightest doubt in your mind that she was telling you anything other than what she thought was true?’

‘No,’ answered the doctor, who also went on to dispute the medical evidence put forward by Spilsbury, saying that he personally didn’t believe that Stephen had died within ten minutes of being shot.

As the court waited for the appearance of the next witness, Elvira Barney suddenly collapsed into the arms of a warder sitting next to her and was again revived with smelling salts and sips of water.

On the following day, gunsmith Robert Churchill gave evidence, testifying that the American revolver with which Stephen was shot was one of the safest makes available. Although he agreed with Spilsbury that if the cylinder were to be gripped and prevented from revolving the gun could not be fired, Churchill was also adamant that, if two people were struggling for possession of the gun it was extremely likely that it would go off. Sir Patrick Hastings and Walter Frampton for the defence demonstrated such a tussle for the benefit of the jury but the judge pointed out that their enactment of the supposed struggled presupposed two things – that the hand holding the revolver was not the hand of the person killed and the finger of the person not killed was on the trigger. A second firearms expert, Major Hugh Pollard, testified that there would be an escape of gas between the cylinder and the base of the barrel of gun when it was fired. He told the court that he had fired an identical revolver to that exhibited, while wearing a white glove and holding his hand over the barrel, resulting in substantial blackening of the glove.

Pollard’s evidence concluded the case for the prosecution and it was left to Sir Patrick Hastings to present the case for the defence. His first witness was prison surgeon Dr Morton, who told the court that on arrival at Holloway Prison after her arrest, Mrs Barney had bruising consistent with having been involved in a recent struggle. The next witness was the defendant herself.

Giving her answers in a voice that was little louder than a whisper, Elvira first testified to the physical violence she had endured at the hands of her husband, John Barney. She explained that having first become friends with Stephen, she then became his mistress and also supported him financially. She was devoted to him and very keen to marry him but was prevented from doing so because her current husband was an American citizen, making it difficult for her to obtain a divorce.

However, Stephen was not always kind to her and she was occasionally frightened of him. She revealed that on at least one occasion before the fatal shooting, she had called the police to eject him from her flat, which was confirmed by Inspector Winter.

Elvira stated that on 30 May, Stephen had ‘not been nice’. He was talking about another woman, named in court as ‘Miss C.’ and wanting to go out and gamble with her. Realising that she wasn’t happy, Elvira said that Stephen eventually apologised and they were on much friendlier terms during the cocktail party, dinner at the Café de Paris and the subsequent visit to a club. However, on their return to the flat the couple made love and, according to Elvira, Stephen became angry because he thought that she was unresponsive. Elvira argued that she was unable to forget the way he had treated her earlier that day, which made Stephen even angrier. He threatened to leave her and she told him that, if he did, she would commit suicide.

‘Well, anyway, you won’t do it with this,’ Stephen told her, snatching up the revolver from beneath a cushion on the armchair. Elvira insisted that she and Stephen were struggling for possession of the gun when she heard a shot.

‘Have you ever in your life desired to shoot Michael Stephen?’ Hastings asked her.

‘No,’ she whispered.

‘Has there ever been in your life anybody you were fonder of than Michael Stephen?’

‘No, never,’ replied Elvira.

‘Did you shoot him that night?’

‘No.’

‘Had you any motive for shooting him?’

‘None.’

Elvira Barney, who had been drinking heavily for several hours prior to the shooting, claimed to have little memory of what she had said to Dr Durrant and could not recall having slapped Inspector Campion, saying that she was ‘frantic’ at the time and adding that she had apologised to Campion when she was later told what she had done. She claimed that every word of the statement she made at the police station was true, although she admitted that, since her parents were present while she was being interviewed, she had ‘toned down’ some aspects of her statement that she didn’t wish them to find out, such as neglecting to tell the police that she and Stephen had made love immediately before the shooting.

‘I was thinking of my loved one lying dead. That was all I could think of,’ she sobbed in the witness box.

Sir Percival Clarke questioned Elvira about the events of 19 May and she explained that she had given all the money she had on her to Stephen that evening, only realising when she got home that she didn’t even have enough cash to pay her taxi driver, who agreed to come back for his money the next day. Shortly afterwards, Stephen arrived in another taxi demanding money for the fare but when she said she had none and told him, ‘Go and fish for it,’ he got back in the taxi and left.

He came walking back minutes later and she angrily told him to leave or she would call the police. Stephen insisted that he was not going anywhere and Elvira fetched the revolver, saying that she was going to kill herself. She admitted to firing the gun, as seen by witness Mrs Hall, but claimed that rather than firing through the window at Stephen, she had actually fired the gun inside the room, to frighten him and make him think that she had killed herself.

Referring to the fatal shooting, Clarke asked Elvira directly, ‘Whose finger was it that was on the trigger when the shot was fired?’

‘I have no idea,’ she answered, adding that during the struggle for the gun she and Stephen were continuously moving and changing position.

It remained only for the prosecution and defence to deliver their closing speeches and for the judge to sum up the case for the jury. For the defence, Sir Patrick Hastings gave what the judge later referred to as ‘a remarkable forensic effort’ and ‘one of the finest speeches I myself ever heard at the Bar.’ Speaking for ninety minutes, he first poured cold water on the prosecution counsel’s assertions that Elvira Barney was unable to control her temper, to the extent that she even slapped a police officer. Hastings maintained that being a young woman alone in a flat with her dead lover just a few yards away, surrounded by police officers who were proposing to take her away to a police station, was more than the ‘slight provocation’ alluded to in prosecution counsel Clarke’s speech. Hastings emphasised that nobody had actually testified in court to hearing the defendant say the words ‘I will shoot you’ on the night of the shooting.

‘I am not going to urge you to give her the benefit of the doubt. I am going to satisfy you that there is no doubt and there is no evidence of any sort or kind upon which this lady can be convicted of any offence whatsoever,’ Hastings assured the jury.

Referring to the night of 19 May, Hastings recalled the testimony of three witnesses living near to Mrs Barney. Mrs Stevens saw nothing and heard nothing, he reminded the jury. Mr Kiff‘s window was only a few feet away but he too saw nothing. Mrs Hall said that Mrs Barney had something bright in her left hand, yet the revolver was matte black and, when Mrs Barney was asked in court to pick it up, she instinctively used her right hand. Not only that, but Mrs Hall saw smoke and the revolver did not make smoke. And what did those three people do after the incident? They all went back to bed and not one living soul among them made any report of a shooting to the police.

All Spilsbury’s evidence suggested was that Michael Stephen’s death was not suicide but nobody had ever claimed that it was. If the prosecution’s story is to be believed, said Hastings, a strong muscular man allowed a small, fragile woman to come within three inches of him and shoot him dead, without attempting to seize the revolver. ‘There is no evidence upon which you could be asked to hang a cat,’ Hastings concluded, adding that his client was a young woman with the rest of her life before her and it was a matter of right and justice for the jury to set her free.

Mr Justice Humphreys began his summary by asking the jury to put anything that they might have read in the newspapers completely out of their minds. You have three questions to consider, he instructed them. First, you have to be satisfied that she fired that shot, which does not necessarily mean that her finger was on the trigger. It might mean that her finger was on the trigger but could also mean that the victim’s finger was on the trigger and she somehow forced him to pull it. Secondly, if she fired the shot, did she do it intentionally or accidentally and thirdly did she intend to kill Stephen.

According to Humphreys, there was little doubt that Elvira Barney fired the shot. By pointing the revolver at his own chest, Sir Bernard Spilsbury had demonstrated in court that it was practically impossible that the dead man could have been holding the gun. Humphreys instructed the jury if you are satisfied that it is proved ‘... that the defendant intentionally fired the revolver, pointing it at Stephen and so caused the bullet wound that killed him’, she is guilty of murder.

The judge continued by urging the jury not to shirk their duty. The picture that has been painted in court is not a pleasant one, he told them. It is a story of two rather useless lives, where the undoubted passion between them was based rather on sexual matters than upon any real abiding love based on mutual esteem. You might expect there to be violent, passionate quarrels between them and this was indeed the case.

However, problems arose when considering the evidence of the earlier witnesses to the fatal shooting. Mrs Hall had not heard the words ‘I will shoot you’ or ‘I will shoot myself’ but clearly recalled hearing Mrs Barney shouting, ‘Get out, I will shoot!’ Common sense alone might suggest that a person awakened in the middle of the night, hearing loud voices at some distance might be mistaken and indeed, the fact that Mrs Hall had heard the defendant calling, ‘Chicken, chicke …,’ suggested that she had confused the word ‘chicken’ with the similar sounding ‘Mickey’, which was what Mrs Barney always called the victim. Yet another earlier witness insisted that she had heard five shots, which was clearly not the case.

There were no clear fingerprints on the gun, with the exception of one belonging to Inspector Winter, which gave credence to the suggestion that different hands touched the revolver fleetingly in a struggle, rather than there being just one person holding it steady. As far as Dr Durrant’s evidence was concerned, he had admitted that the account of the shooting the defendant had given him at the time wasn’t a cool, collected story but something he had pieced together from her disjointed and incoherent remarks. The judge also referred to the man who Mrs Barney said had given her the gun and ammunition some years earlier, when she was then under twenty-one years old, who was said to be ‘an officer in His Majesty’s service’. Humphreys remarked that, if the defendant’s story was true, it was astonishing that a person in a responsible position should be guilty of such negligence and he must be feeling very unhappy today.

Mrs Barney’s story had changed very little since her very first statement to the police and, according to the judge, had a ring of truth. Admittedly, it was a story told by someone who had every motive for giving a favourable account of herself but, according to Dr Durrant, such was Mrs Barney’s state in the aftermath of the shooting that she was quite incapable of making up a story that had no foundation in facts.

After clarifying that a person killing another in the commission of an unlawful and dangerous act would be guilty of manslaughter, whereas someone who fired the revolver with the intention to kill would be guilty of murder, Humphreys dismissed the jury. They eliberated for almost two hours before returning to pronounce Elvira Barney ‘not guilty’ of either murder or manslaughter. She immediately fainted and was carried out of the dock insensible. Her mother also swooned.

Outside the court, the waiting crowds greeted the news of her acquittal with loud cheers and broke through the barriers that had been erected to restrain them in the hope of catching a glimpse of her as she was whisked away to her parents’ home in a taxi. Later that month, she was charged with illegally possessing a firearm and, after being convicted, was fined £50.

Once the court case was over, Westminster Coroner Mr Ingleby Oddie resumed the inquest, which he had opened on 3 June then adjourned. In a sitting without a jury, that took less than a minute, Oddie ruled:

I have been officially informed that as a result of the trial of Elvira Dolores Barney for the wilful murder of this man Stephen, Mrs Barney was acquitted and I therefore see no good reason for continuing my inquest. I shall therefore close the inquiry and record the fact that Mrs Barney has been acquitted at the Old Bailey of the wilful murder of Stephen. That concludes my inquiry.

During the following year, John Barney obtained a divorce from his wife, who is said to have fled the country, taking up residence in either America or Paris, depending on which source is to be believed. What is certain is that she spent Christmas 1936 at a fashionable hotel just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris, arriving on 15 December and checking in under the name Elvira Ashley.

During the early hours of Christmas morning, she arrived back after an evening out and was assisted to her room by the hotel’s hall porter, who described her as being in a very weak condition. She was found dead later that day, still wearing her evening clothes, the cause of her death being a massive brain haemorrhage, probably brought on by her years of overindulgence in drink and drugs. She was thirty-one years old.