BY 1927, ROBERT Churchill was an established firearms expert and conducted further experiments about the penetration of bullets in another milestone ballistics case. He used a pig’s skin to test how far bullets fired from a particular weapon penetrated, and used this method of calculating the distance from which the gun would have been fired to murder a police officer. The case was also important because of a distinctive mark on a cartridge case, which then became the centre of ballistics evidence that, for the first time in British legal history, proved one particular firearm had been used in a murder.
On 27 September 1927, PC Gutteridge, an Essex officer, was found dead in a lonely lane at Howe Green. He had been shot four times in the face, including through both eyes. This may have been because of a belief that the last image of a dying person is retained on their retina. The officer’s pencil was clenched in his hand and his pocketbook was nearby, as if he had been questioning a suspect, but there were few other immediate clues.
Detective Chief Inspector James Berrett from Scotland Yard was appointed to investigate. A Morris Cowley motorcar, stolen 10 miles from the murder scene, was recovered in Brixton, South London, with bloodstains on one of the running boards. There was tree bark stuck to the springs, which was consistent with a mark in the bank of the road at the scene, and tests showed that the 42 extra miles recorded on the car’s milometer was consistent with a route that would have taken in PC Gutteridge’s beat, so the car seemed to be linked to the murder. Also found in the car was an unusual cartridge case.
The cartridge case found was marked ‘RLIV’, indicating a type of soft ammunition produced at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, for soldiers in the First World War. But the most significant feature was a small raised pimple that appeared to have been created by a corresponding small scar in the smooth face of the breech shield of the gun that had fired the bullet; officers speculated at the time that the gun had been damaged by a cleaning rod. Robert Churchill examined the bullets from the crime scene and concluded, because of their rifling marks, that the murder weapon had been a Webley revolver. Months of intensive inquiries followed, during which a number of Webley revolvers were found, but these were all systematically excluded because they did not create that exact mark on the cartridge cases of the bullets they fired.
Eventually, an appeal in January 1928 in the News of the World, and a doubling of its reward to £2,000 for information, created a breakthrough. The Sheffield police reported that one of Berrett’s suspects, an elusive car thief named Frederick Browne, had resumed his old habits. Mrs Hutton from Tooting had recently travelled to Sheffield to identify her car that had been stolen from her garage in Tooting two months earlier, for which Browne was a prime suspect. Berrett then heard that Browne had been visiting a prisoner at Dartmoor and arranged for the police to be waiting for his likely return to his garage at Clapham Junction. When Browne did return, he was promptly arrested. The police found four guns, two of which were Webleys and one of which made precisely the same mark on a cartridge case when it was fired. Items from the stolen car’s owner were found in Browne’s garage, thus completing a chain of evidence. The murder weapon is on loan from Essex police museum.
Later, a Sheffield informant identified Patrick Kennedy as Browne’s accomplice. Kennedy was arrested in dramatic fashion in Liverpool. In a poorly lit street, Sergeant William Mattinson of Liverpool City police approached Kennedy, whom he knew, and was arresting him when Kennedy took a pistol from his pocket, held it to the officer’s ribs and said, ‘Stand back or I’ll kill you.’ As Kennedy pulled the trigger, the officer heard a click, but grappled with the prisoner until assistance arrived. The bullet in the gun had jammed part way up the gun’s barrel because the safety catch was on. The sergeant was later awarded the King’s Police Medal for his bravery. At the police station, Kennedy made a long statement about how PC Gutteridge had stopped them in the stolen car in the early hours of the morning and how Browne had shot the officer. The two men were convicted of murder and executed on 31 May 1928. The Sunday Dispatch newspaper summarised the case with the headline ‘Hanged by a Microscope’, reflecting the nature of the ballistics evidence that proved Browne and Kennedy’s involvement in the murder.
Ballistics is the science of comparing firearms with ammunition that might have been fired from them, determining the trajectory and distance from which ammunition has been fired, and judging whether firearms could have been fired accidentally. The rifling grooves, machined into the barrels of handguns and rifles to make the bullets spin, create a pattern on the lead bullet as it is pushed through the barrel by the explosive force of the gun being fired. As well as the marks of these easily visible grooves and lands (the spaces between the grooves) there are also much smaller striation marks that transfer themselves on to the bullet. Viewed through a microscope, no gun barrel is completely smooth; they all have a unique pattern of minute marks created by the manufacturing process. These create their own much less visible pattern on the bullet, resembling a barcode. Robert Churchill commissioned Messrs Watson of High Holborn to make a comparison microscope to a specification he had devised with Hugh Pollard (who had experimented with two microscopes linked together) to enable a bullet from a crime scene to be compared with a second bullet test-fired from a suspect firearm. One bullet would be rotated to clarify whether the rifling marks matched each other.
1884
Poster seeking information about the Annie Yates murder