28

‘You may wonder if she was as black as was said’

Luton, Bedfordshire, 1943

‘I don’t think her own mother would recognise her,’ commented Chief Inspector William Chapman of Scotland Yard as he looked down at the woman, whose naked, trussed-up body had been found by corporation workmen, wrapped in sacks and dumped in the river Lea at Luton. Indeed such was the extent of the woman’s facial injuries that, when her body was first pulled from the river, it was thought that she had been shot. However, when a post-mortem examination was carried out by Home Office pathologist Dr Keith Simpson, he discovered that she had in fact been beaten with a heavy blunt object. Simpson also spotted fingerprint bruises on the woman’s throat and concluded that someone had attempted to strangle her with his or her right hand. The woman had severe bruising on her back, shoulders, elbows and the back of her hands, suggesting that she was pressed down onto the ground. Yet strangulation had not caused the woman’s death, which Simpson attributed to a violent blow on the left-hand side of her face that had fractured her jaws and caused bleeding and bruising to her brain. There were lesser injuries to the right-hand side of her face, including splits in her scalp, cheek and ear.

Simpson believed that the blow would have rendered the woman unconscious and that whoever hit her had then tied her wrists and ankles and secured her knees to her waist with a cord. There were signs of bruising from the ties on the woman’s legs but no similar bruises on her trunk, indicating that she had died while she was being tied up.

The pathologist estimated the woman’s age at between thirty and thirty-five years old and ascertained that she had given birth to at least one child and was around five and a half months pregnant. Slight chafing of her gums showed that she had worn dentures as, with the exception of three roots, all her teeth had been extracted. The woman’s body was found at 2.15 p.m. on 19 November 1943 and Simpson believed that death had occurred between twelve and twenty-four hours earlier. Since the men who discovered the body in just six inches of water had been working in the same area at 4 p.m. on the previous day, Simpson favoured the late afternoon or evening of 18 November as the time of death.

Because the body was relatively ‘fresh’, the police took photographs of the woman’s face, which were retouched to remove evidence of the extensive swelling and bruising on the right-hand profile. The picture was printed in newspapers and displayed in shops and, for the first time ever, a slide was created and shown in cinemas in the Luton area. It showed a photograph of the victim with the following description:

MURDER. Police are still anxious to establish identity of this unfortunate woman. Here is her picture. If any person can help, please communicate with POLICE IMMEDIATELY. Her description is age 30-35, height 5’3”, hair very dark brown bobbed, eyes brown, heavy dark eyebrows, no teeth, appendix scar, 5½ months advanced in pregnancy.

As the investigating officers had hoped, the publicity brought forth a flurry of information. Thirty-nine people viewed the body, thinking that they might know the dead woman’s identity and no less than nine of them positively identified her, giving four different possible names. However, the police subsequently traced all four of those women, leaving them back at square one.

The investigation was hampered by the fact that the murder took place at the height of the Second World War, when manpower was short and many people could not be satisfactorily accounted for. In their efforts to identify the body, over the next few months the police checked and excluded more than 400 women who had been reported missing. They conducted house-to-house enquiries and searched the second-hand clothes shops, laundries and dry cleaners in the town for any clothing that the victim might have worn or for any unclaimed or bloodstained garments that might have belonged to her killer. Casts were made of the dead woman’s jaws and photographs and X-rays were published in the British Dental Journal and also shown to all dentists in Luton and the surrounding area, none of whom recognised the woman’s dentition. The police traced and interviewed 250 lorry drivers, who had visited the Vauxhall Works close to where the body was found at around the time the body was dumped in the river but no useful information was forthcoming. Thousands of statements were taken, yet after three months the police still had no idea of the dead woman’s identity, yet alone that of her killer.

The body had been wrapped in four sacks, one of which had once contained sugar, one soda and two potatoes. One of these had been distributed by a local potato merchant but there were thousands of identical sacks in circulation and although the company was able to give the police a list of its customers, it proved impossible to trace the origin of any of the sacks, or of the cord with which the woman was bound.

In February 1944, one strand of the investigation finally paid dividends. When the body was first discovered, Chapman ordered a search of dustbins and rubbish dumps and the retrieval of any rags and old clothes. When the police enquiries stalled, Chapman ordered his men to thoroughly examine the dirty garments again and, in a pile of rags removed from a dump, was a shoulder pad from a woman’s coat, which bore a tag handwritten in indelible ink. The tag was traced to a local branch of Sketchley Dye Works and their records confirmed that the coat had been left for dyeing by a Mrs Caroline Manton, of Regent Street, Luton.

There was nothing to connect the unidentified body to Mrs Manton and indeed, the residents of Regent Street had already been spoken to in the course of the house-to-house canvassing. However, Chief Inspector Chapman was not a man to leave any stone unturned and he personally visited the address and knocked on the door. As soon as it was opened, Chapman immediately knew that he had identified his victim, since the little girl that answered his knock was the spitting image of the dead woman.

‘Is your mother at home?’ Chapman asked her, but the child said that her mother had gone away. Chapman asked if the girl had a photograph of her mother and when she fetched one, it confirmed that he was on the right track. He asked for permission to borrow the photograph and took it to show Mrs Manton’s mother. The old lady was partially sighted and told Chapman that, although she had not actually seen her daughter for three months, she had received three or four letters from her. She showed them to Chapman, who noticed that they were peppered with spelling mistakes, including the word ‘Hampstead’ where Caroline, usually known as Rene, claimed to be living, which was regularly written as ‘Hamstead’.

Chapman borrowed the letters and went back to Regent Street, where he interviewed Rene’s husband, a former boxer, who now worked as a driver for the National Fire Service. Forty-year-old Horace William ‘Bertie’ Manton claimed that Rene had left him and their four children on 25 November 1943 – he was absolutely sure of the date because it was the last day of his leave. Manton confirmed that the letters to his mother-in-law were written by his wife and told Chapman that, as far as he was aware, after leaving home his wife had gone to her brother’s house in Grantham and then moved to London.

The Mantons had married in 1926 and, at the time, Rene was already pregnant with their eldest child. According to Bertie Manton, his marriage was unhappy because his wife was persistently unfaithful to him. In 1942, Rene got a job in a tobacco factory in Luton and soon fell in with a bad crowd. She started drinking and wanted to go out dancing and to the cinema, staying out late and leaving her husband to look after the children. The couple separated in November of that year but reconciled in March 1943, although they continued to argue constantly about Rene’s association with soldiers. Manton had doubts about the paternity of the child his wife was carrying but was not displeased about the prospect of a new baby, although Rene was said to be less enthusiastic. When Manton voiced his suspicions about the baby, it led to a terrible argument, which culminated in Rene packing her bags and leaving.

Chapman showed Manton the post-mortem photograph of the woman. ‘No, that’s nothing like my wife,’ he said, after studying the picture for a few moments, then added, ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that … she’s alive.’ The inspector asked Manton if he would write down a sentence containing the word ‘Hampstead’ and Manton was only too pleased to oblige. Chapman immediately spotted that the handwriting looked very similar to the letters sent to Rene’s mother and that Manton’s sentence also featured the spelling mistake ‘Hamstead’. Finally, the policeman asked Manton the name of his wife’s dentist and, having left the Mantons’ house, he went straight to the dentist’s surgery.

Although the dentist had already been shown the dead woman’s photograph, X-rays and the plaster casts of her jaw and failed to identify her, once he was given a possible name, he was able to confirm that she was indeed Mrs Manton. He showed Chapman his records, the diagrams on which exactly matched Mrs Manton’s jaws and clearly recalled advising her to have the three root stumps removed before being fitted for dentures, which she had refused to consider. Later, when police searched the house in Regent Street they found that practically everything had been wiped clean. However, a Scotland Yard fingerprint expert did manage to lift a single print from a jar, which corresponded to that of the dead woman’s left thumb.

With his victim positively and unequivocally identified as Rene Manton, Chapman arrested her husband and charged him with her wilful murder. He was taken to Luton police station, where he initially stuck to his story that his wife left him on 25 November 1943 and was alive and well and living in London. However, once he was advised of the extent of the evidence that the police had amassed against him, Manton began to sob and quickly abandoned all pretence of innocence.

He told the police that he and Rene had eaten lunch with their four children on 18 November 1943. Once they had finished eating, the three eldest children returned to work and the youngest to school, at which time Manton made a cup of tea for himself and his wife. As they sat talking in the living room, he mentioned that he intended to help out at his local pub that night to make some extra money but Rene was angered by this suggestion. According to Manton, she accused him of thinking about nothing but work, work, work and insinuated that his real reason for going to the pub was to ogle the barmaids. Rene Manton underlined her argument by throwing her cup of boiling hot tea in her husband’s face, shouting, ‘I hope it blinds you.’ He in turn picked up a wooden stool and retaliated by battering his wife about her head and face.

Manton claimed to have blacked out, saying that when he came round, he realised that his wife was dead and knew that he had to do something with her body as a matter of urgency before his children came home. He undressed her and wrapped her in sacks, before carrying her down to the cellar, where the body stayed while the children ate their tea. Immediately after eating, Manton’s eldest daughter went to visit a friend and he gave his other three children money to go to the cinema, leaving the coast clear for him to dispose of their mother’s body. Manton told the police that he had balanced the corpse on the handlebars of his bicycle and wheeled her to the river, where he laid her on the grass bank and rolled her gently into the water.

With the body out of the way, he set about destroying the rest of the evidence. He cleaned up the blood from his living room and burned the stool, which had been broken in two by the force of the blows. He also burned his wife’s false teeth and her bloodstained clothing and, when the children asked after their mother, he explained that she had left him and gone to live with their grandmother. He admitted to writing the letters purporting to be from his wife to her mother and to making several trips to London to post them.

‘I am terribly sorry,’ his statement concluded. ‘It was done on the spur of the moment and if it had not been for my children I would have given myself up. I don’t care for myself. Will you please do the best you can for my children.’

Bertie Manton was committed for trial charged with the wilful murder of his wife and appeared before Mr Justice Singleton at the Bedford Assizes, where he repeated his account of retaliating unthinkingly after his wife threw boiling tea in his face. When prosecution counsel Richard O’Sullivan QC pointed out that his statement didn’t tally with the pathologist’s opinion that Rene Manton had been gripped by the throat, Manton conceded that he had taken hold of his wife’s throat and pushed her away from him.

‘The marks showed that the hand was applied with very considerable force,’ O’Sullivan persevered.

‘I may have grabbed her twice in my temper,’ replied Manton.

O’Sullivan pounced. ‘You said nothing about that in your statement to the police,’ he remarked.

In defence of Manton, his counsel stressed to the jury that he was a hard-working man, who was absolutely devoted to his four children. According to the defence, Manton was incapable of premeditated murder and had merely reacted instinctively to the provocation of his wife throwing tea in his face in the midst of an argument, committing a true crime of passion.

In summarising the case for the jury, Mr Justice Singleton stressed that all the evidence that they had heard had been one-sided. They only had Manton’s account of his family life and had no idea what his wife’s viewpoint would have been, had she been alive. ‘You may wonder if she was as black as was said,’ mused the judge, recalling certain aspects of the case, such as the omission of any mention of grabbing his wife’s throat from Manton’s statements and the cool and calculated way in which he disposed of the body and other potentially incriminating evidence. However, he could not deny Manton’s previous good character and advised the jury to consider carefully whether his crime was murder or manslaughter. The acid test, Singleton informed them, was to determine whether or not the provocation received was sufficient to deprive a reasonable man like Manton of his self-control.

The jury deliberated for two hours before finding Manton guilty of wilful murder and he was given the mandatory death sentence. An appeal failed but a public petition for clemency attracted more than 30,000 signatures and his sentence was eventually commuted to one of life imprisonment. He was sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight to serve his time but was not a well man and died just three years into his sentence.

There were a number of ironies about what became known as the Luton Sack Murder. The victim’s seventeen-year-old daughter saw the slide of the victim displayed at the cinema and failed to recognise her own mother. However, Rene Manton’s two teenage sons saw the poster in a shop window and both thought it might be their mother, although their father managed to convince them that it couldn’t possibly be her, as she had been to the house to collect some of her clothes since the body was found. Even so, when the police interviewed both boys during their house-to-house enquiries neither made any mention of the fact that they had seen a resemblance, or told the officers that their mother had left home around the time of the discovery of the body. None of Rene Manton’s neighbours recognised her from the police photograph, although one man did comment to his wife on the likeness and was told, ‘Don’t be such a damned fool.’

However, the supreme irony was Manton’s decision to get rid of his wife’s coat on the grounds that she was unlikely to have left home without it. Had he left it hanging in the wardrobe, he would almost certainly have got away with murder.

Note: The victim is variously named Irene, Caroline and Rene in various accounts of the murder. Official records seem to indicate that her full name was Irene Caroline Seagrove Manton and that she was usually known as Rene.