THE BURNT CHAIR was in a fire in a large shed that had been set ablaze shortly before 8 p.m. on 3 January 1933. The fire service was called to the fire in a yard in Hawley Crescent, Camden, that was rented by builder and decorator Samuel Furnace. Seated on the chair was a dead body, with most of the facial features burnt away. The police searched an adjacent room and found a note that read ‘Goodbye to all. No work. No money. Samuel James Furnace’. Furnace was a 42-year-old married man with considerable financial debts, who could not support his wife and children or pay off his creditors. Furnace’s home was about 500yds away in Crogsland Road, and a tenant of his, a Mr Abbot, identified the body as that of Samuel Furnace.
The case was duly reported to the coroner, Sir Bentley Purchase, who was sceptical that a man would set himself on fire and remain seated on a chair. He went to the mortuary to examine the body and found a bullet wound in his back. The teeth appeared to be of a man younger than Furnace’s 42 years and the post-mortem examination found a second bullet wound. The dead man’s clothing was examined, some of which had laundry marks and the initials ‘W S’. A wallet and other charred and waterlogged items were found bearing the name of Walter Spatchett. Walter Spatchett was a 25-year-old debt collector who had been missing since the day before and who had been a regular visitor to the Furnace premises. He was believed to have been in possession of £30–£40 when he had last been seen. Dental records completed the identification, which contradicted the ‘suicide note’ that had originally suggested the body was that of Samuel Furnace.
It was now vital to trace the real Samuel Furnace. A radio appeal, the first ever made through the BBC (which had been established a decade earlier) was broadcast on 9 January 1933 seeking information about Furnace’s whereabouts and stating that he was wanted for murder. This resulted in many reports of sightings, but the most important message to the police came from Furnace’s brother-in-law, Charlie Tuckfield. Tuckfield reported that Furnace had sent him a letter asking him to bring a change of clothing on the 10.35 a.m. train from Harringay to Southend, where, if he walked down the road opposite the station, he would receive more detailed instructions. There was no address shown on the letter, as Furnace was worried about his brother-in-law being followed by the police. As Charlie Tuckfield walked along Whitegate Road, he saw a sign with the word ‘Sam’ written on it in a ground-floor window and went into the house. Detectives under the leadership of Detective Superintendent George Cornish had been observing and, after Charlie Tuckfield had left the premises, they entered the same house from the rear, where they found Furnace smoking a cigarette and reading about his case in a newspaper. After his arrest and on the journey back to London, Furnace confessed to killing Walter Spatchett, claiming that his gun had gone off accidentally. He later gave detectives details to enable them to recover the gun from a building site where he had hidden the weapon in a wall. It later came into the museum. Furnace told the police that after having killed Walter Spatchett he had wrapped the body in a tarpaulin. He then formed a plan to set fire to the premises after the others had left there at the end of the day’s work, and to fake his own suicide by using Walter Spatchett’s body.
When he was being held in a cell at Kentish Town police station he was allowed to keep his coat on because he felt cold at night. He had, however, concealed a bottle of hydrochloric acid in the lining of the coat and swallowed this. He was rushed to hospital in immense pain but died on 18 January 1933.
The scene of a fire is invariably a dirty and wet environment for an investigation, but the ashes often contain useful clues. The prospect of fire destroying all traces of a person’s identity and the means by which a victim may have died is sometimes a temptation for fraud, particularly when news of a similar crime has been publicised in the media. In this case, Furnace may have been influenced by two cases that happened in the previous years.
The ‘Blazing Car’ murder occurred in the early hours of 6 November 1930 near Hardingstone, Northamptonshire, when two young men found a Morris Minor car ablaze. They had passed a respectably dressed man a few minutes earlier who had commented that it looked as if someone had been having a bonfire. When the fire was extinguished, a dead body, burnt beyond recognition, was found inside, but the car’s number plate was intact. The registered owner was 37-year-old Alfred Arthur Rouse, a commercial traveller from North London who had a large number of girlfriends in various parts of the country. When he was interviewed by detectives he said, ‘I am responsible. I am glad it is over,’ and gave an account of how he had given a lift to a hitchhiker on his way to Leicester. Rouse had stopped the car near Hardingstone to relieve himself and claimed that he had given the hitchhiker a cigar before asking him to fill the car with petrol from a can he kept in the boot. Rouse claimed that whilst he was otherwise engaged with his trousers down, he saw a light, returned to find his car engulfed in a mass of flames and then panicked. The car’s carburettor had been tampered with, which contradicted his story.
Rouse was tried for the murder of the unknown hitchhiker at Northampton Assizes in January 1931, convicted and executed at Bedford prison on 10 March 1931. He had apparently seduced as many as eighty women, had several children and had also committed bigamy. Rouse’s confession and account of the incident may well have concealed his true motive in seeking a completely fresh start and an escape from his complicated life with so many women. In 2014, a DNA analysis was undertaken on samples from the hitchhiker’s body from Bernard Spilsbury’s original slides to try to establish whether the victim had in fact been William Briggs, a man who had been reported missing at the time. Northamptonshire Police had been keen to help Briggs’ family to establish the truth, but the DNA sample did not match those of family members and the identity of Rouse’s victim remains a mystery.
A year earlier, when the German police were called to a green Opel car that had caught fire after a traffic accident in Regensburg, they thought that the registered owner from Leipzig, Erich Tetzner, had been burnt to death in the driving seat. Frau Tetzner identified the driver as her husband and claimed on insurance policies that had recently been taken out. The policies were for a large amount for a couple of modest means and the insurance company became suspicious. This suspicion may have been aroused because Tetzner had previously claimed an insurance payout on his mother-in-law’s life, having persuaded her to delay an operation for cancer until he had taken out the policy.
The post-mortem examination on the Opel driver was carried out by Richard Kockel, who noted that the accident victim was smaller than Tetzner. The dead man was about 23 years of age, younger than Tetzner’s 26 years. His air passages contained no particles of soot, and blood samples were negative for carbon monoxide, indicating that he would have been dead before the fire started. The ‘accident’ had occurred on 27 November 1929, and damage to the car was not consistent with injuries to the driver’s skull. Part of the victim’s brain was found on the road 2yds from the car itself.
The police, under Chief Superintendent Kriegern, decided to keep Frau Tetzner under surveillance, on the basis that her husband was still alive somewhere. She used her neighbour’s telephone frequently and a detective was able to recruit the co-operation of the neighbours to intercept a call for Frau Tetzner. He asked the man to call back at 6 p.m., but kept the line open and had it traced to a call box in Strasbourg. When the man telephoned again, police went to the telephone box and found the caller to be an alive and well Erich Tetzner. Tetzner confessed, and it appears that he had murdered the unknown man, probably a hitchhiker, as part of an insurance fraud.