The Brighton Trunk Murder: Another Perfect Murder?

 

To murder someone and conceal their body in a trunk is an extraordinary thing to do, simply because detection is certain. Sometimes the identity of the victim is obvious, and sometimes it has to be deduced as a result of forensic investigation. Usually there are enough clues on or in the body to point to a killer. The trunk itself may furnish clues to the killer’s identity. A trunk murder is therefore one of the oddest crimes, almost a self-advertizing crime, an exhibitionist crime.

The senior police officer in Brighton was optimistic of success when on 17 June 1934 he went to the left-luggage office at Brighton station to look at the naked torso of a woman. The remains had just been discovered in a plywood trunk. The clerks could remember nothing about the man who had left the trunk there on Derby Day, which was ten days earlier, on 6 June. It had been the busiest day of the year.

Even so there seemed to be lots of clues. The renowned pathologist and forensic expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury looked at the human remains, which were incomplete. She had been a young woman, probably in her early twenties. Her general physical condition suggested that she belonged to the middle or upper classes; she was well nourished, with a good figure, no slack flesh, and well-toned muscles that implied plenty of exercise. The golden brown of the skin also suggested that she could afford to spend a good deal of time in lower latitudes; that suggested wealth. At the time of her death she had been pregnant.

The Brighton police sent out an alert to all other left-luggage offices in England to search for mysterious abandoned packages. At King’s Cross station in London, the young woman’s legs were found in a suitcase. Each leg had been severed at the thigh and the knee, and they were the legs of a well-proportioned and athletic young woman. Some clues were emerging as significant. The body had been wrapped in brown paper and on one sheet was the suffix ‘-ford’. It looked as if it was the second half of a place-name, perhaps Guildford. In the trunk, there were two newspapers, copies of the Daily Mail for 31 May and 2 June. They were of an edition only circulated within fifty miles of London.

Then a porter remembered helping a man to carry the trunk on Derby Day. The man had travelled from Dartford to Brighton. Dartford was a place name ending in ‘ford’ and it was a place where the London edition of the Daily Mail might be bought. It began to look as though the murderer was a Dartford man. It also began to look as though the case was about to be solved. A girl who had sat in the same train compartment as the man from Dartford was able to give a general description of him. Five cheap day returns had been bought that day, and the ones that could be traced were eliminated by the police. The makers of the trunk and the suitcase were traced, but they were unable to connect the items with particular purchasers. Suddenly the trail had gone stone cold. There were no more leads.

The pathologist said the young woman had died on about 30 May, a week before the trunk was left at Brighton station. The man who killed her must have had plenty of spare time, and presumably a home where he could safely conceal a body for a whole week without detection; this would have to be a man with a large property or a single man who had (and expected) no visitors. The fact that a whole week went by before the body was dumped suggested that the murder was not premeditated; the disposal of the body had not been planned, and it had taken several days for the murderer to work out how to do it. A certain amount of reconstruction was possible.

A fairly well-off, strong and athletic man had a secret love affair with a rather similar girl – also well-off, strong and athletic. He lived in Dartford, in the stockbroker belt. The girl became pregnant. On 30 May she called on him to ask him what to do about it. His reactions perhaps revealed that he had no serious intention of marrying her. There was a quarrel, perhaps developing into a fight, and he hit her over the head with something heavy that happened to be to hand. The young woman’s head was never found, but there were no injuries to the rest of the body, so it can be assumed that she died of some head injury.

The man was severely shaken by the girl’s death, which he never intended or wished – he probably loved her and was very distressed at what had happened, but could not face the exposure of the affair or the accusation that he had murdered the girl. He needed time to decide how to dispose of the body. He decided to dismember it. He deposited the trunk in Brighton, travelling on a third-class ticket so as to lose himself in the crowd and not be remembered by witnesses. He deposited the suitcase containing the girls’ legs at King’s Cross. Probably after that, he left the country, knowing that it was only a matter of days before the body parts would be discovered.

In theory, the crime should have been solved by finding out which Dartford resident emigrated immediately after Derby Day. The sports clubs and riding stables of the Dartford area would almost certainly reveal both the missing man and the missing woman. In reality, the police investigation revealed nothing whatever that led to the Brighton trunk murderer. None of the obvious leads led anywhere at all. Careful searching of left-luggage offices did not reveal the whereabouts of the young woman’s head, which was never found – though they did uncover the bodies of three children, opening up other murder enquiries. From that day to this, the Brighton trunk murder has never been solved. There is not even so much as the name of a suspect or the name of the victim.