When a beautiful young woman was charged with a crime, she could be guaranteed lavish coverage of her case in the press. There would be no shortage of salacious prose used to describe her and to analyse her motivation.
In 1857, Madeleine Smith, a young Glasgow beauty, was charged with the murder of a Frenchman, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, with whom she had exchanged many love letters, some of them very explicit for the time. When she tried to end the affair and asked for the letters back, L’Angelier refused and threatened to show them to her father. The case against her was powerful: she had been seen at a chemist’s ordering arsenic and soon afterwards L’Angelier died of arsenic poisoning.
The story enthralled not just Scotland but the whole of Britain. ‘This trial will always rank among the causes célèbres of the world,’ wrote the Observer on 13 July 1857, with some justification as it became a bigger news story than the Indian Mutiny with which it coincided. And from the earliest reports of murder trials, the female killer has frequently been portrayed as in many ways darker, more dangerous and dastardly than the male. By Victorian times, ‘the popular press had, through its sensational treatment of such figures, defined the murderess as a cold-blooded monster who operated by stealth and was particularly attracted to poison as a weapon,’ wrote Judith Knelman in ‘Women Murderers in Victorian Britain’, an article in History Today in 1998.
The women who killed were seen as traitors to their sex. ‘Although the Victorian press was attempting to bridge the gap between the “otherness” of remote events and the everyday world of the reader, to expand reality to include what was seen and heard by others, it tended to treat crime as a fiction while presenting it as a fact.’
Certainly the case of Madeleine Smith had all the ingredients of a good noir novel: the beauty, the exotic foreigner, the passionate forbidden affair, the blackmail, the poison, the arrest, the trial and then – what verdict would the jury reach? The people of Glasgow, as The Times on 4 April reported, had been ‘deeply moved by the report that a gentleman had been poisoned by his sweetheart, the daughter of a highly respectable family which moves in the better classes of society’. Key to many of the reports of women who committed murder were both their looks and their class. The report in The Times was in no doubt as to the shocking nature of the case and a possible motive.
‘The thought that a highly and virtuously bred young lady could destroy her lover is too appalling for belief,’ said the paper while passing on the rumour that ‘a gentleman in a much more promising and prominent position in life than that occupied by L’Angelier had become a suitor for the young lady’s hand’ might provide a motive, while acknowledging that this was just ‘the rumour of the day’. Smith’s defence would argue that she had bought arsenic for use as a cosmetic and that L’Angelier might have poisoned himself.
It was a complex case held in the High Court in Edinburgh. No fewer than 89 witnesses were listed to be called and some 200 of the letters which had passed between the two lovers were to be given in evidence. Unsurprisingly, interest was intense. The press benches were expanded and hundreds waited outside to compete for the seats in the public galleries. The jury took only 25 minutes to reach a verdict of not guilty on one count and ‘not proven’ on the second and third counts. Madeleine Smith was a free woman.
The Ayrshire Express was in full flow: ‘From the first moment to the last, Miss Smith has preserved that undaunted, defiant attitude of perfect repose which has struck every spectator with astonishment. She passes from the cab to the courtroom, or rather to the cell beneath the dock, with the air of a belle entering a ballroom. She ascends . . . with a cool jaunty air, an unveiled countenance, the same perpetual smile – or smirk, rather, for it lacks all the elements of a genuine smile – the same healthy glow of colour, and the same confident ease.’
The Scotsman reported that as they awaited the verdict, five minutes after the jury retired, ‘a deep thrill of anxiety was visible throughout the court’. After the verdict had been delivered, ‘instantly on the announcement of these last words, a vehement burst of cheering came from the audience, especially from the galleries, which was again and again renewed with increasing loudness in spite of efforts of the judges and officers of court . . . Her face broke into a bright and agitated smile . . . outside the announcement of the verdict called forth strong cheering from what seemed a majority of the great multitude collected.’ The Observer of 13 July 1857 explained the ‘not proven’ verdict to its English readers: ‘According to the Scotch law she may be again tried on the latter charges if at any time additional evidence is forthcoming. But this is not likely to be the case, as it must now for ever be locked up in her own breast whether she really did or did not see the deceased on the night of his death.’
The paper concluded that the fact it could not be proved that she actually saw L’Angelier on the night before his death, saved her. ‘Madeleine Smith is, therefore, now free. But what a future must be hers! If she is guilty, conscience will ere long do its office, and her mind will be a perfect hell; and if she is innocent, the remainder of her days are blighted – the dark cloud of suspicion will envelope her; the shadow of a painful death by poison will precede her; she will be avoided as a pestilence; and wherever she goes she will be an object of distrust and dread.’
The Trial of Miss Madeleine Smith, published contemporaneously by D. Mathers, noted how the crowd outside the court devoured every fresh edition of the papers. ‘The demand from news agents in all parts of the country was quite overwhelming and, although the managers of the various papers and the wholesale agents exerted themselves to the utmost, the inexorable railway trains had to depart in most instances without half of the required supply.’ Another contemporary account by the advocate, John Morison, commented that, ‘Whether they [the crowd] were right or wrong in this demonstration of joy we express no opinion; but shall only add in conclusion that the verdict has met with the approbation of nearly the whole press throughout the kingdom.’
Every publication on both sides of the border had an opinion about her. The Spectator wondered, ‘Is she a Lucretia Borgia or is she only a boarding school miss led by a designing and theatrical Frenchman into a copy of Parisian romance?’ The Dundee Advertiser pondered: ‘within that melancholy form who can tell the pent-up woe’. Smith moved to London, married and had children and eventually emigrated to the United States where she died aged ninety-three, still a subject of much media interest.
Women accused of murder were not always treated kindly. Judith Knelman found that in the early nineteenth century the murderess was seen as cold, coarse, defeminised and unnatural. The Victorians were fascinated by the transgressive woman. ‘To this audience,’ writes Knelman, ‘the murderess represented passion unleashed. She had spurned constraints imposed on civilised society, had given in to animal impulses.’
One ‘femme fatale’ who enthralled the press in the last century was Alma Rattenbury. She was a thirty-eight-year-old Canadian-born songwriter known as ‘Lozanne’ who was accused, in 1935, along with her much younger lover and chauffeur, George Stoner, of killing her sixty-seven-year-old architect husband, Francis, with a wooden mallet at their home, Villa Madeira, in Bournemouth. The press duly called it the ‘Villa Murder’ and it had everything: adulterous sex with a servant, the spectre of cocaine use and a touch of show business: while Alma awaited trial in Holloway prison, the Daily Express reported on its front page that she received a visit from Frank Titterton, the tenor, who sang one of her songs to her. The case against the couple was that they had been having an affair and had decided to get rid of Rattenbury.
By 8 a.m. on the opening day of the trial, 27 May 1935, the Daily Mirror reported that 100 people, mainly women, had formed a queue outside the public gallery, and some were offering their places in the line for sale. One unemployed man said that he had been outside the court since midnight because he was hoping to get married and by selling his place in the queue he could get enough money to set up a little business. ‘A man I met yesterday told me he had sold his place for £2, and while I do not like doing this – my girl knows nothing about it – I am quite prepared to wait,’ he told the Mirror. The opening day was covered for the Mirror by Barbara Back, who wrote in the first person and was attending an Old Bailey trial for the first time. She described Mrs Rattenbury as ‘half hidden by her fur, and apparently quite unmoved. She is more than a pretty woman; her face is attractive with its large perfect eyes, short nose and thick-lipped mouth.’
The court heard that Alma had given a number of conflicting, drunken statements to the police, blaming Mr Rattenbury’s son, then herself, then her lover. When the police arrived at the Villa, she supposedly told a Constable Bagwell: ‘I did it with a mallet. “Rats” has lived too long . . . No, my lover did it. But I would like to give you £10. No, I won’t bribe you.’ She then claimed her husband dared her to kill him when they were playing cards, because he wanted to die. Stoner, however, took the blame. His counsel argued that he had been under the influence of cocaine on the fatal night and was thus suffering from temporary insanity. The Mirror reported this under the appropriate headline: ‘Stoner confesses’. The jury took only fifty minutes to convict him and acquit Alma.
The Daily Express reported the summing-up under the headline: ‘Judge’s “regret” for Stoner – Position Due to Domination of That Woman.’ In his summing-up, Mr Justice Humphreys recounted Alma’s views on Francis Rattenbury ‘that he was a very unpleasant character, for which I think we have no suitable English expression, but which the French call a mari complaisant – a man who knew that his wife was committing adultery and had no objection to it; not a nice character in this country or in any other civilised country’.
On Stoner, whose counsel had advised him not to give evidence, the judge brought things back to Alma in words given prominence by the press: ‘It is the case for the prosecution, as I understand it, that this woman is a woman so lost in all sense of decency, so entirely without moral, that she would stop at nothing to gain her end, particularly her sexual gratification.’ And he added: ‘You remember she gave evidence that she was committing adultery with her husband’s servant in her bedroom, and that in that bedroom, in a little bed, there was a child of six.’
The Daily Express dipped its quill pen in the purple inkwell and reported how the pair had sat ‘in the confined glass cage of the Old Bailey dock, looking stolidly before them, never exchanging glances, parted by a warder and a wardress . . . yesterday at four o’clock both the passionate intimacy of the villa and the chilly association of the dock were alike ended as they separated for the last time – she for freedom, he for the death cell.’ The day after her acquittal, Titterton, the loyal tenor, wrote a piece in the Express to try and salvage her soiled reputation. ‘Lozanne wanted to be famous, but not so much for self gratification as for the sake of her two children, to whom she is so passionately devoted.’
Three days later, reported the Daily Mirror, ‘Mrs Alma Victoria Rattenbury came down to Christchurch, within five miles of the scene of the crime of which she had been accused, smoked a final cigarette in a field of buttercups, and then committed suicide by stabbing herself to the heart and throwing herself into fifteen feet of water. This dramatic chapter in the history of the Bournemouth villa murder case was written last night in a lonely field half a mile from Christchurch.’ The coroner’s verdict was of suicide while of an unsound mind. Stoner’s sentence was then commuted to life imprisonment and he served seven years before being released to fight in the Second World War and finally died in 2000. In his book The Woman in the Case, Edgar Lustgarten examined the story. ‘A woman’s uncontrollable lust is nymphomania,’ he concluded. The fact that she was a songwriter was the key, he felt: ‘the artistic temperament has always been curiously subject to that powerful impulse know as la nostalgie de la boue which may be freely translated as a craving – especially a sexual craving – for the dregs . . . she crucified herself on the pathetic altar of romantic love.’
Twenty years after the Villa Murder, ‘Six revolver shots shattered the Easter Sunday calm of Hampstead and a beautiful platinum blonde stood with her back to the wall. In her hand was a revolver.’ So ran the introduction to a spread in the Daily Mail the day after Ruth Ellis was committed for trial at the Old Bailey for shooting dead David Blakely, a 25-year-old ‘dark haired and debonair’ racing driver, as he came out of the Magdala pub. ‘Model shot car ace in the back’ ran the inside story about Ellis who had actually been a club hostess. For most of the five-hour hearing at Hampstead magistrates court, Mrs Ellis ‘in an off-white tweed outfit with black velvet piping, sat in the centre of the crowded court calm and expressionless’.
Ellis, the mother of a three-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son, pleaded not guilty but sealed her fate in what was described by the Daily Mail on 21 June 1955 as ‘the shortest examination on record in any English murder trial’. After giving evidence for one hour and twenty-seven minutes, she was asked just one question in cross-examination by the prosecutor, Christmas Humphreys: what had she intended to do when she had fired the revolver at Blakely?
‘Mrs Ellis, with her elbow resting on the side of the witness box, replied: “It is obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” Mr Humphreys sat down. The cross-examination for the Crown was over.’ Her complicated love life was reported, including Blakely’s violence towards her: ‘He only hit me with his fist or hands. I bruise easily.’ Her description of her recent miscarriage was mentioned in the Guardian’s coverage: ‘A few weeks or days previously, I do not know which, David got very violent. I do not know whether that caused the miscarriage or not. He thumped me in the tummy.’
The case for the defence was, as the Mail explained on 21 June, that ‘the effect of jealousy upon a the feminine mind, upon all feminine minds, can so work as to unseat the reason and can operate to a degree in which in a male mind it is quite incapable of operating.’ The trial lasted just over a day. A quick and unanimous verdict of guilty by the jury saw Mr Justice Havers don the black cap. Her legal advisers considered lodging an appeal on a new point of law – that of provocation brought on by jealousy. It was the only defence offered by her lawyers who asked for a verdict of manslaughter, according to the Mail. ‘The appeal on the grounds that a woman thwarted by love is more irresponsible than a man could be taken to the House of Lords. It is the first time that such a point of law has been offered in a murder trial.’
On 12 July, the Mail deliberated on her plight: ‘Ruth Ellis is a young and beautiful woman. Honest men will admit that this fact weighed heavily with them if they joined in the appeal for her life.’ The article pointed out that the previous year, a Cypriot woman named Christofi was hanged for the murder of her daughter-in-law but ‘there was no wave of sympathy for her . . . It is true that some MPs tried for a reprieve, but on the grounds of possible insanity. Yet it could be argued that the conflict between female in-laws is sometimes so great that either could be excused if in a fit of uncontrollable rage she killed the other. Such pleas have no place in our jurisprudence.’
In 1967, the femme fatale writ large appeared in the press in the shape of, as the Daily Express had it, ‘blonde ex-nurse Valerie “Kim” Newell, aged twenty-three, who is expecting a baby in August’. This was very much from the noir school of murder, with similarities to the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Newell had been having an affair with a married man, Ray Cook, and they decided to murder his older, richer wife so that they would get access to her £10,000 savings. Newell recruited a former lover, Eric Jones, who had performed an abortion on her when she was a teenager and could thus be blackmailed into taking part. The idea was to stage a car crash in which Mrs Cook would die. To this end she was plied with drink in a pub and then set off in her red Mini on a deserted country road where Jones was waiting, pretending that his car had broken down so that the Cooks could stop without alerting Mrs Cook. Jones then battered her to death with a car jack and the Mini was driven into a tree in a ham-fisted attempt to make it look like an accident. The police, led by Ian Forbes, were not convinced but did not have enough evidence to charge Newell. Crime reporters were alerted to the link and were calling so persistently at her home that she decided to come in voluntarily to the police.
At her trial for being an accessory to murder, at Oxfordshire assizes in June 1967, prosecuting counsel Brian Gibbens said that ‘Lady Macbeth got her husband to commit murder while she remained aside. Like Lady Macbeth, this woman was urging her husband to “screw his courage to the sticking place”. He was in her grip. Cook thought it was for marriage and love. She thought of nothing except money . . . In the witness box she presented herself to you with a wide-eyed innocence but did she finish up such an innocent maiden as at first she seemed?’ Although Newell was only charged with being an accessory, while Cook and Jones were charged with murder, it was clear on whom the attention would focus.
After the guilty verdict, the News of the World splashed with an exclusive interview with Newell’s mother, based on a letter Newell had written from prison, in which she professed her innocence. Inside, the story was of ‘Kim, the wicked wanton’, the ‘vivacious villainess’ and her ‘dramatic reign of passion that brought brutal death to a wife and the downfall of two men who came under her spell’.
The paper’s crime reporter, Charles Sandell, wrote a first-person account of his meeting with Newell – ‘big-breasted in a green sweater which shielded the signs of her three-month pregnancy’ – before she had been charged. ‘“I have nothing to hide,” she said with a laugh, pulling firmly at the hem of her sweater and flashing her long legs as her trim grey skirt rose high.’ He assured readers that ‘men have long been putty in Kim Newell’s pretty hands. Her power made them puppets on a string.’ Her co-accused, reckoned Sandell, had clearly been ‘besotted by her generous, nubile body’.
The investigating officer, Ian Forbes, wrote in Squad Man, his memoir, in a chapter entitled ‘Woman of Evil’, that ‘crime reporters had said she was quite a siren, I couldn’t fault that judgment.’ He added: ‘in different circumstances I would have been the first to admit that this twenty-three-year-old girl would have been a very attractive companion but I was looking at the most evil woman it was my misfortune to meet in my thirty-odd years as a copper.’ She gave birth to a son in prison, served thirteen years and died of cancer in 1991.
Myra Hindley, who died in prison where she was serving life for the Moors Murders, was often regarded as the face of pure evil and a psychopath. In December 1995, after she had been described as the latter in an article in the Guardian, she wrote a 5,000 article for the paper, for which she was not paid. In it she said that ‘I was corrupt, I was wicked and evil . . . without me those crimes could probably not have been committed. It was I who was instrumental in procuring the children, children who would more readily accompany strangers if they were a woman and a man than they would a man on their own . . . The Sun has described me, amongst thousands of other things, as “the symbol of the nation’s revulsion at all those who prey on innocent children” in spite of hundreds of other females in the system who have been convicted of quite horrendous crimes . . . the tabloids have turned me into an industry, selecting me as the public icon/evil monster, Medusa-like image which holds the projected hatred, fear and fury of the nation’s psyche.’
In 2014, Joanna Dennehy, aged thirty-one, became the first British woman to receive a whole-life tariff from a judge (it was Home Secretary Jack Straw who deemed that neither Hindley nor Rosemary West should ever be released). Dennehy, from Peterborough, was convicted of fatally stabbing three men and attracted attention by her attitude, posing in a photo with a knife and phoning a friend after one murder and saying, ‘Oops, I did it again!’ At her trial, the judge revealed that Dennehy had told a psychiatrist that she killed ‘to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish and I got a taste for it.’
Barbara Ellen wrote of the case in the Observer: ‘It was as if she saw herself as some kind of fictional outlaw heroine, a Thelma without a Louise, or a cartoon psychopath, along the lines of Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lecter – both of whom could be relied upon to be “witty” as they killed, a cut above the average psychopath . . . There’s a palpable feeling of instant sexualisation about Dennehy’s media profile that you just wouldn’t see with a male murderer. In the same way that mentally-ill women often become eroticised, so, too, do female killers.’
But women didn’t always have to kill to catch the attention of the crime reporter. In 1740, Mary Young, the nifty pickpocket who was better known under her alias of Jenny Diver, was executed. ‘The name of this woman will long be celebrated in the annals of crime, as being that of a person who was the most ingenious of her class,’ said the Newgate Calendar. And while the ‘femmes fatales’ – the murderesses – occupied the attention of crime reporters, there was also a place for the savvy female criminal, whether she was pickpocket, decoy, moll, getaway driver, international shoplifter, love-crazed kidnapper, saucy madam or ‘tart with a heart of gold’.
By the twentieth century, the female thief had become an exotic creature in the press. On 27 November 1927, the News of the World introduced its readers to ‘a Girl in the Toils – Beautiful Decoy of West-End Gang’. This was Josephine Gordon, aged nineteen, who had found herself in court along with a gang of Soho wide boys, not the first young woman from an upper-class family to enjoy the frisson of the underworld. ‘Well bred, educated, and certainly good-looking, she unconsciously drifted from a life of ease and happiness to the society of the most accomplished gang of forgers, swindlers and confidence men in London.’
The case against her was that she worked with a team of con men who, in the gentler days before photo-ID, credit cards and online banking, cut a swathe through the more trusting shops and businesses in London. What was obviously most interesting to reporters was the decoy herself: ‘She has the face of the ingenue – oval regular features, large expressive eyes, a tiny mouth and an abundance of soft brown hair. But the most striking thing about her is her clothes. They are cut in the riding-habit fashion, and she affects the soft collar and long tie generally accepted as the masculine mode.’
Gordon had been born in the Wye Valley and then gone with her family to India. She had married young, in Buenos Aires, where she had a ‘topping time’ before returning to England. The marriage broke up and one day in a Piccadilly cafe she got chatting to a group of smartly dressed chaps, led by ‘an aristocrat by birth but a rogue by profession’. The group were later joined by a ‘villainess’ who had ‘a mania for long jet earrings’ and who persuaded her to use her charms to facilitate the forgeries. She eventually came unstuck when she tried to use a dud cheque for £25 to buy a ‘leopard cat coat’. She was lucky. The magistrate took a lenient view and bound her over for two years on the understanding that a ‘gentleman and his wife’ had agreed to accept her as one of their family. After the case, Josephine told the NoW reporter that ‘since my police-court experience I have been called “the beautiful decoy” but the boys used to say I was their lucky mascot.’
Maggie Hill, who was active at the beginning of the twentieth century, was known as the ‘Queen of the Forty Elephants’ and operated a team of shoplifters. Stanley Firmin, the Daily Telegraph’s crime correspondent, later suggested that the name of the gang came from a combination of a connection with Elephant and Castle and the fact the shoplifters were ‘mainly large women, some nearly six feet tall’. Maggie Hill was a mischievous soul; as it was reported, when she was sent down on one occasion she told the judge, ‘You didn’t say that last night when you were making love to me!’
Maggie was to remain the best-known female shoplifter in the press until the postwar arrival of Shirley Pitts, the ‘Queen of Thieves’, who was credited with introducing ‘team shoplifting’, where a group of eight women would descend on a large shop, with many of them acting as decoys. Having learned her trade at the age of seven from some of Maggie Hill’s old gang, she was an expert at disguise. She also took her teams across Europe and was celebrated in a book, Gone Shopping, by Lorraine Gamman. Her fame guaranteed her a spectacular south London funeral, reported in the Guardian, when she died of cancer, aged fifty-seven, in 1992. The words ‘Gone Shopping’ were spelled out beside her grave in a six-foot-long floral arrangement, alongside a Harrods’ shopping bag made of flowers.
One of the most remarkable members of the small band of female professional criminals was Lilian Goldstein, something of an enigma to the reporters who first came across her in the same year that the ‘beautiful decoy’ had captured their attention. Goldstein came from a middle-class family from Wembley Park in north London, and on 6 June 1927 she was charged with being in unlawful possession of a handbag, a gramophone and a record case. More intriguingly, she was described in court as being wanted in connection with a Birmingham hold-up in which a woman had been killed.
Unlike Gordon, Goldstein was not prepared to retreat from crime at the first sound of gunfire. She would soon act as a getaway driver to the best-known smash-and-grab man of the time, ‘Ruby’ Sparks, who had won his nickname by stealing a maharajah’s rubies and then giving them away under the mistaken belief that they were fakes. Thirteen years after her first press appearance, Lilian Goldstein was back in the news. Sparks, who had escaped from Dartmoor, had been recaptured and was back in court with his lover alongside him. On 19 July 1940, the Daily Mail reported on the jailing of Goldstein and Sparks and described how Sparks – ‘completely unrecognisable from his published photograph . . . he had spent much of his freedom sunbathing and golfing’ – made a gallant plea on behalf of Goldstein, now 37, telling the Old Bailey judge that ‘she is a young woman but has gone grey worrying about me. She begged me again and again not to go near her.’ As the Daily Express reported it, he told the court that she was too frightened to turn him in: ‘I am a dangerous man and would stop at nothing. She knew that.’ The judge, Sir Gerald Dodson, told her: ‘I suppose it is a woman’s nature to protect what she has loved but it is an offence for people to obstruct the law.’
A teenager at this time was the woman who would later become known as Gypsy Hill, so called because her mother’s Gypsy friend decided that she must be of Romany stock. A striking beauty, Gyp initially attracted the attention of Billy Hill, the 1950s ‘Boss of the Underworld’, by belting three women with a high heel after she had seen them mocking a deaf-mute person in the street. When Hill masterminded the famous 1952 Eastcastle Street robbery of £230,000 from a Post Office van, she was one of his getaway drivers. The police were unlikely to suspect a woman in a car in those days and the pair divided up their money in a suite at the Dorchester hotel.
In 1955, the couple tried to move to Australia but, by the time they reached New Zealand via the Pacific, it was clear Australia would not admit them because of Hill’s record. ‘It makes you sick when you think we have come this far – and then for this to happen,’ Gyp told the reporter from the Daily Express, who had been following their progress. ‘If only we had known sooner, we could have got off earlier – in Tahiti.’ She moved to Tangier, where Hill had a club called Churchill’s, kept a chimpanzee as a pet and eventually moved back to Britain and retired from the fray. Her son Justin told the Guardian that he remembered her enjoying a spliff while watching Widows, the 1980s ITV series about gangsters’ wives who carry out a robbery.
Then in the seventies came allegations of a very different kind of crime, involving an American couple in Britain. He was ‘the Manacled Mormon’ and she was, forever, the woman who would have ‘skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose’ to win his love. The man was Kirk Anderson, a bashful Mormon missionary, and the woman Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen with an IQ of 168, a raunchy past in Los Angeles and an unrequited passion for Kirk. The combination made for what was described as the ‘tabloid scoop of the decade’, a tale which saw rival newspapers hurling money and bodies into battle.
McKinney, originally from North Carolina, had come to Britain from California in 1977, apparently intent on winning back Kirk, with whom she had a previous brief liaison in Utah. To this end she recruited a friend, the devoted Keith May, to help her and they grabbed Kirk at gunpoint from outside his church near Kingston-upon-Thames and took him off to Devon where he was, in his version of events, tied to a bed and spread-seagled while sex took place. McKinney would later claim that all the sex was consensual and it was only after brainwashing by the Mormons that Kirk changed his tune.
When McKinney and May appeared at Epsom magistrates court ten days later, McKinney managed to pass a note to reporters saying: ‘I am innocent. Please help me.’ As anyone who ever watches television news will know, whenever a high-profile prisoner arrives at or leaves a court hearing in a prison van, hopeful photographers pursue the vehicle, snapping furiously in the hope of catching that one vital haunted image from behind the tiny windows. Why, people sometimes wonder, do they bother? At her next court appearance, McKinney showed that all that effort was sometimes worthwhile. Behind the bars in her van she held up a Bible, open at the Book of Job, on which was scribbled: ‘Please tell the truth. My reputation is at stake.’
Anthony Delano, in his book on the saga, Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon, recounted the scene in court: ‘The reporters were utterly engrossed. People simply did not behave in English courts like this self-possessed pink-blonde stranger determined to bare the most intimate details of her life.’ The story was too big to leave to crime and court reporters alone. When McKinney made her naked, carnation-enhanced skiing pledge in court, Jean Rook, doyenne of the Daily Express, weighed in, suggesting that ‘in 12 poetic words, Miss McKinney snatches your icicled breath and paints your perfumed world a passionate pink’.
McKinney was remanded to stand trial at the Old Bailey and the newspaper cheque books were at the ready. The Sun was supposedly offering £70,000 for a nude picture plus skis plus carnation. Strangely, McKinney and May were granted bail and, during this pretrial period, the Daily Express entered the field, with their dashing reporter Peter Tory squiring McKinney to the West End premiere of The Stud, a soft-porn film starring Joan Collins, who was duly upstaged by the arrival of the defendant in a low-cut dress.
But, within two days, McKinney and May had vanished, blagging their way onto a flight to Canada with false passports and a claim that they were part of a deaf-mute theatre company. With her were no fewer than 13 suitcases crammed with press clippings. It was that big a story. Scotland Yard did not seek to extradite the couple, no doubt dreading the circus of an Old Bailey trial, and she was eventually sentenced in absentia to a year’s jail. But the story did not end there.
Both the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express were still on the case. For the Mirror, their veteran photographer Kent Gavin had acquired a trove of nude and bondage pictures of McKinney from a former friend of hers in Los Angeles. The ‘friend’ was swiftly smuggled across the border to Mexico to keep him safe from rival papers. McKinney, unaware of the fact that she had been betrayed in this way, had meanwhile negotiated a £40,000 deal for her story with the Express, who flew out Tory and a photographer for a clandestine meeting with her and May in Atlanta. There they found the fugitive couple disguised, first as Indians and then as nuns, and set about writing the gospel according to McKinney: essentially a romantic story of an innocent beauty queen who had loved and lost a young Mormon and tried to win him back.
On 22 May 1978, the two papers produced their competing front page stories. While the Express had McKinney, dressed as a nun, begging ‘Please God Help’, the Mirror had her lying naked on a rug under the headline ‘The Real McKinney’. There was much more from both sides over the next week under such headlines as ‘Temptress in the Garden of Evil’. Tory was with McKinney when the Mirror story broke and it was relayed to her by phone from London. In Tabloid, the 2010 Errol Morris documentary about the whole affair, Tory recounts how ‘she just went absolutely crazy. She clung on to the curtains and then she went for the balcony and I grabbed her by the ankles. I didn’t know if she was going to jump off. It would have been very embarrassing to say the least.’
Even then, the story was not over. After her beloved pit-bull ‘Booger’ died, she spent a small fortune having him successfully cloned into five puppies in a South Korean lab in 2008. In the documentary, McKinney explained to Morris than any suggestions of her raping Kirk were nonsense and impossible – ‘like putting a marshmallow in a parking meter’ – and concluded that ‘there are tabloids in England that are filth’.
Sex of a rather different but also unconventional variety was behind one of the biggest stories the same year that McKinney did a runner. In 1978, police raided the Streatham, south London, ‘disorderly house’ run by Cynthia Payne to provide ‘personal services’ for her mainly elderly clients. By the time she was convicted at her trial in 1980 she had become a household name thanks, once again, to the wide coverage she was granted both during and after her court appearances.
The reason that her case attracted so much attention was twofold: her clients and the method of payment. The former were said to have included a peer, vicars, barristers, ex-police officers, politicians and bank managers, not to mention a cross-dressing former RAF squadron leader who remained loyal to the end. She charged punters £25, which included a ‘luncheon voucher’ – a token that entitled the bearer to have sex with any of the women in the house who agreed. ‘Madam Sin’, as she had become by now, was sentenced to eighteen months, later reduced to six on appeal. Her barrister, Geoffrey Robertson, asked for a non-custodial sentence, assuring the court that no ‘beardless youngsters [were] initiated into the fleshpots’. This did not prevent much speculation in the press as to which rumoured politician and senior copper had been part of her ‘naughty but nice’ activities. On the day she started her sentence, the press were given a conducted tour of her premises by the former squadron leader, and had their attention drawn to a sign in the kitchen that read: ‘My house is clean enough to be healthy . . . and dirty enough to be happy.’
When she emerged from prison, she was met by a Rolls-Royce and a battalion of the press whom she obliged by posing for photos. She later wrote to her friends that, ‘The reporters were all surprised that I stopped the car to allow my photo to be taken, as I could have put a coat over my head but, as I thought the press had been so good to me, plus the fact that they had waited for four hours for a glimpse, I thought I’d make their wait worthwhile. They all cheered when I posed for them, blowing kisses.’ When she met journalists she gave them her business card, a laminated luncheon voucher on the back of which she would write, for men: ‘to [reporter’s first name], thank you for past custom!’ and for women: ‘sorry to lose one of my best girls!’
In 1987, she was back in court again. This time she was acquitted, a verdict widely welcomed by the press. The Guardian ran a front page story: ‘When she arrived at the court yesterday, Mrs Payne was already in good spirits. She posed for photographers holding a policeman doll which laughed when she pulled a string hidden in its bottom.’ A Guardian leader captured the mood: ‘Is there anybody out there who isn’t, even itsy-bitsy secretly under covers, pleased at the acquittal of Mrs Cynthia Payne? It’s not just that the chirpy concierge of Ambleside Avenue has charmed her way into the nation’s hearts over the years . . . It’s not just that the local police, dressed to kill in rouge and sequins for the raid, have been made to look wonderfully silly . . . Good for her. Good for the jury. And what a shame it had to come to an end.’
Women famous for their criminal partners were also a subject of fascination for the press although few of them might actually describe themselves as ‘gangster’s molls’. One who was happy to was Marilyn Wisbey, daughter of the great train robber Tommy Wisbey, and partner for a number of years of ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser about whom she wrote in her memoir, Gangster’s Moll. In 1998, she explained in the Independent series, ‘How We Met’: ‘I’ve been out with nine-to-five people, electricians, turf accountants, accountants, you name it. Once they find out whose daughter I am, they don’t like that sort of thing. So I feel more comfortable with guys who’ve been out of prison, they understand me.’
Kate Kray, who married Ronnie Kray in 1989, was very media-friendly and very quotable. She talked about Ron as ‘him inside’ – as opposed to ‘her indoors’ – and the ‘Smiling Viper’. She parlayed her fame as a ‘Kray-by-marriage’ into a successful writing career, with true crime books like Ultimate Hard Bastards and Lifers and novels like The Betrayed, the story of a beautiful young actress who falls in love with a gangster. Asked in 2000 by the Independent what made her want to be the wife of a bisexual paranoid schizophrenic murderer serving life in Broadmoor, she replied: ‘Maybe it was a mid-life crisis. Men buy Harley Davidsons and get a young bird – I married a Kray.’
Roberta Kray, who married Reg Kray in Maidstone prison in 1997, when he was still hoping for parole, was hardly the typical gangster’s moll. Her parents were both teachers, she studied classics at North London Polytechnic and worked in academic publishing and media research. When I met her in her home in Norfolk, I noticed that the main books on her shelves were those of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Primo Levi, Saul Bellow and Dorothy Parker. The Women’s Press imprint was the most obvious. She was conscious of the fact that, by marrying a Kray, she had entered the media spotlight: ‘It scares me. You are always aware that you might say something wrong.’ She objected to the way she was portrayed in the press as someone who had ‘sacrificed’ herself and suggestions that, because her father had died when she was eleven, ‘her husband’s twenty-five years older than her so that must mean she’s looking for a father figure’. Like Kate, she has made a successful writing career under the Kray name, with eleven crime novels with titles like Bad Girl and Villain’s Daughter.
In the twenty-first century, ‘gangster’s moll’ would remain a handy term to describe anyone associated with a professional villain, just one of the many time-honoured clichés in the crime reporter’s lexicon that has developed over the years.