Sitting on the Old Bailey press benches for the trial in 1933 of a young man accused of murdering his father-in-law was a remarkable bohemian character called Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who was a pioneer for women crime reporters. Crime was then regarded – and still is to a lesser extent – as something that was carried out by men, investigated by men, prosecuted by men and reported by men, so the sight of a young, free-spirited woman covering the trial would have been remarkable to say the least.
‘He is the only prisoner whom I have ever seen who wore a black tie and a black mourning-band round his arm as a sign of sorrow for the person he was accused of killing,’ wrote Jesse of Reginald Hinks, a door-to-door salesman from Bath who had killed his father-in-law and tried to cover it up as a suicide by shoving his victim’s head in the oven. It is one of many such observations she would make as she became a specialist in writing about murder cases.
Jesse cut her journalistic teeth at The Times where the editor, who employed her for a doomed ‘feminine supplement’, described her as the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had started taking morphine to treat the severe pain from an accident in which her hand was caught in a plane’s propeller, and it became an addiction. She was also involved in compiling six volumes of Notable British Trials.
She was a fearless soul and, in 1914, aged twenty-six, persuaded the Daily Mail to send her to cover the early days of what would become the First World War. As Joanna Colenbrander describes it in her biography, A Portrait of Fryn, Jesse reported under such headlines as ‘Girl in the Firing Line – the Advantage of Being Small’ and left Antwerp only the day before the German army arrived.
Murder fascinated her and she wrote Murder and Its Motives in 1924, in which she suggested that the woman criminal was ‘the panther of the underworld. She can follow relentlessly through the jungle day after day, she can wait her time, she can play with her victim and torture him in sheer wantonness, and she can pile cruelty upon the act of killing as does the panther, but never the lion.’ This led to her being taken on by the publisher Harry Hodge for his Notable British Trials series and she developed an excellent relationship with the police as a result.
In 1939, the Daily Mail sent her to France to cover the trial, in Versailles, of serial killer Eugen Weidmann. Weidmann, a German career criminal who kidnapped and killed for money, was the last person publicly executed in France. During the case she met the novelist Colette, who, unusually for a novelist, was covering it for Paris Soir. Jesse, who had a troubled life punctuated by many suicide attempts, went on to write regularly for the Manchester Guardian and died in 1958.
She was indeed a rare sight on the press benches at the Old Bailey – it would take many years before women reporters were regularly covering murder cases. Nevertheless, there were some notable examples – and these were women who had to fight many preconceptions. In his novel The Street of Adventure, published in 1919, Philip Gibbs has a lively female reporter, Katherine Halstead, who turns down an offer of marriage by saying, ‘I dare say it would be amusing for a little while, but afterwards the woman gets so tired of it all – women like me, I mean . . . selfish, restless creatures, who have got the poison of Fleet Street in their blood.’ This remained the image, for many years, of the tough woman reporter.
Hilde Marchant, who wrote the memorable piece on the ‘Murder Gang’ for Picture Post, was also reporting trials from the Old Bailey during that period. One that she covered was that of Florence Ransom, sentenced to death in November 1940 for murdering her lover’s wife, daughter and maid with a shotgun at their home in Kent; her sentence was commuted and she was sent to Broadmoor secure hospital. Marchant reported in the Daily Express that the trial was interrupted by an air raid siren and noted that there seemed little public interest in a case which would normally have been front page news, because there was already so much death around. One of her former editors, Arthur Christiansen, called her ‘the best woman reporter that ever worked in Fleet Street’. In his memoir Scoops and Swindles another crime reporter, Alfred Draper, wrote sadly that Marchant, like too many of her colleagues, succumbed to the bottle and was found dying on the pavement, ‘The lovely features that had turned many a reporter’s heart ravaged by the demon that stalked The Street.’
Harry Procter, in his memoir The Street of Disillusion, talks about his coverage of the Craig and Bentley case and how he was helped by his colleague, Madeline MacLoughlin, who played a key role in gaining the confidence of the Craig family, befriending the killer’s mother and sister. Procter said of MacLoughlin that she had ‘a quality extremely rare in women; that of being liked by other women’. Her other function was keeping rival reporters at bay as they also sought interviews with the Craigs. In many ways, that reflected the period for both female reporters and police officers, the latter, still called ‘WPCs’ or even, disparagingly by some of their colleagues, ‘burglar’s dogs’; they were meant to stick to domestic subjects and leave the bloody murders to the chaps.
The first woman to become a daily newspaper crime correspondent in Fleet Street and the chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association was Sylvia Jones. She had arrived in London from Shropshire to start her journalistic career in the sixties with the Hampstead and Highgate Express and found her way to the old broadsheet Sun by upping her age from twenty-one to twenty-three – the minimum age at that time for a job in Fleet Street.
‘I just wanted to be a reporter but initially I was on the Sun’s women’s page, which was called Pacesetters,’ said Jones. ‘I hated it, having to take down copy from fashion shows in Paris. And they didn’t like me going to the pub where the printers went, didn’t think a young lady should be doing that.’
She left and became a general reporter with the Press Association: ‘You covered fires and robberies. I started doing investigations there, including student sit-ins in 1968 at the LSE. It was the first time I was allowed to wear trousers to work! Women in those days were not even allowed to wear smart trouser-suits to work but I was allowed to so I would blend in more with the students. That was my first undercover investigation and I grew to love them.’
After her first child was born, she worked nights. ‘That was when all the IRA bombs were going off in London and most of them were at night, so I probably covered more bombs in London than anyone else and they were always splashes.’ She joined the Daily Star, working on the news-desk and also doing investigations into a ‘Frankenstein Farm’ where experiments were carried out on animals, and the ‘Hostel Hovels’, where homeless people lived and where some of the women were raped by the men who ran them. She moved from the Star after two years to the Mirror, again on the news-desk.
‘I had a network of contacts and I was getting more stories than the two men who were doing crime. Then in 1983, I had a call from a contact at two in the morning saying, ‘You had better get up to Cranley Gardens – it’s another Christie.’ I thought that they were talking about Stuart Christie [the young Scottish anarchist who had tried to blow up Franco in Spain]. I said, ‘How many?’ ‘We think seven or eight and going up.’ And I thought – whoops, it’s mass murder!’ This was the first news about Dennis Nilsen, subsequently jailed for life for the murders of young men whom he had taken to his home in Muswell Hill, north London, and killed.
She was persuaded by a senior Mirror executive, the late Richard Stott, who often edited the paper, to become Fleet Street’s first female crime correspondent. The news of the appointment of a woman to the post sent shockwaves around the paper and the industry. ‘There was huge anger, huge ructions inside the Daily Mirror. Some people gave me a really hard time. One of them later said, “I thought you’d sink but, by Jesus, you swam.” That was the nearest he got to an apology.’
Some members of the Crime Reporters’ Association did their best to exclude her from the organisation. ‘They tried to find a rule in their constitution that would keep me out. Eventually Richard Stott wrote a legal letter saying they would take it to court. Even then they would try and exclude me from briefings.’ When she got exclusive stories, rumours would be spread that she must have slept with a police officer to get them. ‘Every time I got a front page story, there would be anonymous phone calls to my then husband saying, “She’s over the side with him.” It was really nasty. My marriage was falling apart anyway but you could do without that.’
When she became chairman of the CRA, some of the other members suggested that the chain of office – a large masonic-looking item – was not designed for a woman to wear. ‘One of them even said that the chain was “made for a man with a constitution” and I said, “Don’t worry, I don’t have a beer belly but I do have quite a good cleavage.” I had the chain shortened and wore it all the time with as low a neckline as I could get away with. The police were fine, the criminals were fine, the journalists were horrendous. Any time I was seen drinking with a police contact I would be very anxious about their reputation. Kenneth Newman, the then Met Commissioner, even asked me on one occasion if I was having “an improper relationship” with somebody and I never did. I made it a rule that I would only have lunch with people not a dinner – if I had got drunk like the men did, can you imagine the stories that would have floated round?’
There was, at the time, a huge drinking culture within both the press and the police, particularly noticeable at the seaside conferences of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the Superintendents’ Association and the Police Federation. ‘At a Federation conference in Blackpool one year one crime reporter got really drunk and was banging on my hotel door in the middle of the night because he wanted to come in and screw me; he thought I was screwing everybody else so it was only fair. I had to have the hotel remove him to the staff annexe. It was just awful. It never occurred to them that I might have been a better journalist than them and that was why I was getting the stories.’
The Flying Squad used to have a boozy charity boxing night in which police boxers fought London boxing club members. The tradition was that the chairman of the CRA presented some of the prizes, so Jones was puzzled when she heard about the event but received no invitation. Roy Penrose was the commander of the squad at the time. ‘I rang him up and said, “Roy, I haven’t had my invitation.” He was very embarrassed and apologetic and said, “I didn’t think you’d want to come, it’s a pretty all-male event” and I said, “the CRA chairman always comes” so he offered to send a car to pick me up which I didn’t accept. I bought a slinky black evening dress and arrived at the top of the stairs (into the basement where the boxing was taking place) at this hotel in Kensington and there were hundreds of men and I could see them going “Wooo!” which was just the reaction I wanted. I sat at the top table with Roy – I had to dodge the blood from some of the boxers – and a lot of the cast from The Bill were there. I remember saying I just wanted to be treated as one of the lads.’
She found dealing with villains easier than dealing with some of the other reporters. ‘I used to go out on drinking jags in the Great Western Hotel in Paddington with the Richardson crew after Charlie came out of prison. At first I was never allowed to buy a round so I would give the barman £25, quite a lot of money in those days, and say, “Give them a bottle of champagne when I’ve gone.” Charlie described me as a “classy broad” and then let me pay my way.’
She also had what would have been rather unique experiences for a crime reporter at the time. In the wake of the big 1987 Knightsbridge Safety Deposit robbery, she went undercover using the name Sally Jones in Harrods because one of the women connected to the mastermind, Valerio Viccei, had allegedly operated as a hooker from there. ‘I was there for about a month and I was still having to make a check call [to Scotland Yard’s press bureau] in the coffee breaks. I had to get up really early to put on lots of make-up because I was about twenty years older than most of the girls. The fashion editor of the Mirror used to get clothes in and I swear she always got them a size too small for me. There was one black dress with a little frill at the bottom, like a tutu. I had a mini-cab to take me down to the pick-up joints near Harrods and he clearly thought I was a hooker and when I asked him for a receipt, he said he didn’t have a book on him but “I’ll bring it round to your house tomorrow”!’
After leaving the Mirror she worked as an investigative journalist for ITV’s Cook Report, including one programme on Freddie Scappaticci, or ‘Stakeknife’, the IRA double agent. She also worked for the BBC and for independent television companies carrying out major investigations. She won a Royal Television Society award for a Panorama programme on Baby P.
Another pioneering woman reporter who specialised in crime was Shan Davies, who died in 2008. In an affectionate obituary for the website Gentlemen Ranters, Liz Hodgkinson described her as ‘quite simply, the toughest female reporter ever known in the Sunday People’s long history. From the time she started working for the paper in 1976, she would enthusiastically undertake assignments that would make even the most hardened male reporters wince and shake their heads.’
A bank manager’s daughter from Sheen, south-west London, she had always wanted to work in Fleet Street and made her way there after leaving school at 16, going to secretarial college and working at the Kilburn Times. When she joined the Sunday People, she was one of four women reporters out of around 150. She hung out with criminals and became friendly with Charlie Kray, the twins’ older brother. On one occasion she was knocked out by the girlfriend of a criminal who had spotted Davies interviewing her boyfriend in a pub and had not realised she was a reporter.
Pretending to be a prostitute for an exposé of the porn industry, Davies was offered a part in a raunchy film. ‘This time her cover was almost blown when she dropped her notebook on her way to the ladies’, and it was picked up by the lighting cameraman,’ wrote Hodgkinson, the author of Ladies of the Street, which celebrates women journalists. ‘After leafing though the book, he handed it back to Shan, saying: “There can’t be many prostitutes with perfect Pitman’s shorthand.” She quickly replied: “Oh, I used to be a secretary. But I couldn’t make enough money at it.”’ She was also sent to walk in the footsteps of the Yorkshire Ripper, when he was still at large and she cheerfully regaled other crime reporters with what she got up to in the back of taxis with drunk detectives before her marriage. She died aged only fifty-five, one of many crime reporters to slip off early to the newsroom in the skies.
Jones and Davies were succeeded by others: Barbara McMahon at the Evening Standard, Lucy Panton at the News of the World, Andrea Perry at the Sunday Express, Rosie Cowan and Sandra Laville at the Guardian, Rebecca Camber at the Daily Mail, Fiona Hamilton at The Times and ITV’s Ronke Phillips. Life had changed by the new millennium, although even in September 2015, when the Hatton Garden burglars pleaded guilty at Woolwich Crown Court, of the eighteen reporters on the press benches, only three were women.
Sandra Laville became crime correspondent at the Guardian in 2004. She started her career as general reporter with the Northampton Chronicle and Echo in 1991, then joined the Telegraph where she covered the case of Harold Shipman, the doctor convicted in 2000 of fifteen murders but suspected of many, many more.
‘I was put onto it when they started exhuming the bodies so I was sent up to dig around in his life for a couple of weeks. It was hours in the library and trying to find his schoolmates – pre-internet! Going through microfiches of his old school rugby team photographs, I was one step behind the Daily Mail so I was quite pleased with myself when I found one of his friends who gave me the photographs from his school. Bingo! Also I found out that at his previous surgery he had been disciplined for stealing drugs.’
She covered his trial at Preston Crown Court. ‘It was great fun, they don’t seem to do trials like that now . . . On the day after he was convicted I went to the graveyard where lots of his victims were buried and there were relatives there re-laying flowers, it was really quite moving.’
Laville, whose partner Sean O’Neill was The Times’ crime editor, also covered the case of Damilola Taylor, the ten-year-old boy murdered by a gang in London in 2000. ‘It was horrific. I had to go and shake the news-desk because they weren’t particularly interested at first. I eventually got the first interview with his parents, Richard and Gloria. It was the first time there had been two black people on the front page of the Telegraph. I found it a very emotional case to do. His father is lovely and I kept in touch with them for years.’
Had her gender made any difference to her life as a crime correspondent? ‘As a woman, the police were a bit scared of me, partly because I was from the Guardian but I had known some of them for a long time, from the Ham and High and Standard days. I found on issues like rape and domestic violence they took me more seriously than the male reporters.
‘For ages it was just me and Lucy Panton and then Rebecca Camber on the Mail. If we went to ACPO conferences, we would be the only women round the dinner table. The other crime reporters treated me perfectly normally although if they swore they would apologise which used to annoy me. I couldn’t keep up with their drinking. There was a camaraderie but sometimes it would annoy me that everyone talked to everyone too much. There would be the “line” which everyone would agree on. I always chose to go a different way. Most of the ones I know – much as I love them – would always believe that the bloke in the dock was guilty. I think you always have to lift the stone and see what’s there.’
The 2012 report on police-media relations carried out by Elizabeth Filkin for the Metropolitan Police warned police to watch out for crime reporters ‘flirting’ in order to get information. ‘Lucy and I felt really offended because we were the only women and she [Filkin] said that crime correspondents ‘cajoled and flirted’. It was all very sexist.
‘Compared to some of the gnarled crime hacks I think I have a different way of approaching a family but I was off for six weeks because covering the child abuse cases all became too much. I did the Baby P case [the seventeen-month-old boy who died after suffering horrific injuries at his home in north London in 2007] and the Oxford trafficking case [a gang of abusers who subjected vulnerable girls in Oxford to years of rape, torture and extreme sexual violence and who were convicted at the Old Bailey in May 2013]. That was the worst evidence I have ever heard, it was animalistic. You couldn’t write most of it, it was self-censorship.
‘I also did the Tia Sharp case [the twelve-year-old raped and murdered by Stuart Hazell in 2012; Hazell was jailed for a minimum of thirty-eight years]. They had this photo of her that he had taken on his phone that was shown blown-up in court . . . It was physically shocking, lots of us felt that it was too much. I felt I had had enough darkness so I took a break and I had some counselling and the counsellor said to me, “You know, if you were a police officer or social worker you wouldn’t have done this for six or seven years without having some time out,” which is probably true. Crime correspondents see a lot of nasty stuff.’
So what is the attraction of covering crime?
‘You see all of life. It’s the only reporting, other than going into a war zone, where you see people in extremis and how they respond to tragedy and violence. Extraordinary stories come out of a murder, people’s lives get turned upside down.’ And over the centuries, some of the most extraordinary stories have involved women as the accused.