The two detectives were waiting for me in the living room of my home in Kempston, a first-time-buyers’ suburb of Bedford. My first impression was that the strangers were a pair of cold-call salesmen, probably flogging life insurance or double-glazing. They were too smart to be Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not smart enough to be clean-cut Mormon cheerleaders.
I was annoyed that my wife, Pearl, had allowed them over the threshold. When hustlers came calling, she was normally quick at hoisting the drawbridge: ‘Not today, thank you; I’m afraid one of my husband’s hungry pet pythons has just got loose.’
Pearl was in the room, head lowered disconsolately, standing uncomfortably in front of an armchair by the fireplace, her back to the small fence-enclosed garden, where our toddler daughter, Joanne, was playing on her tricycle. Pearl seemed to be deliberately eschewing eye contact with me, which signalled a faint alarm.
The men had stood up in unison from the settee as I entered the room. It was just after lunchtime on a Saturday and I’d been into town to place a wager on a horse, having had a strong tip from racehorse trainer John Bartholomew, who was based in Kent. We’d become close friends since I’d started an investigation on his behalf to establish that a charlatan solicitor had defrauded him of a sizeable inheritance from his late father’s estate. Bartholomew Snr had been the mentor of Fred Winter, who rode – and later trained – horses for the Queen Mother, with several Grand National winners to his name.
‘We’re detectives from Bedford police station, but we’re acting on behalf of Scotland Yard, on a very serious matter,’ said the obvious senior of the two men. ‘You are Mr Michael Litchfield?’
If Scotland Yard hadn’t been mentioned, I might have replied facetiously, ‘Well, I’m not the milkman. He only calls after I’ve gone to work.’ Instead, I just said, ‘Yes’, simultaneously throwing my wife daggers that pleaded, What the hell’s going on here? But still she had her eyes focused on her slippers.
‘And you do live at this address?’
Again a flippant reply was invited, No, I’m just the burglar, but wisely I refrained. I was picking up bad vibes. Two detectives in my house on a mission for Scotland Yard; this was no trivial matter like a motoring offence or an unpaid parking fine. This had to be heavy-duty stuff, something endorsed by Pearl’s edginess.
‘I do,’ I said simply, answering the second question, as if repeating my wedding vows.
‘I’m afraid it’s necessary for you to come with us to the police station in order to clarify the situation,’ said the spokesman, stiffly. What situation? No subject had been mentioned. ‘What’s this all about?’ I asked. Did my wife know? If she did, she wasn’t saying. All telepathic communications between us had been broken. I don’t know if it’s possible to feel oneself going pale, but if it is that’s exactly how I felt. Bloodless.
‘I think the subject is one you’d rather not have aired in front of your wife, sir. It’s essential you come with us to the police station in order to clarify things.’ The transparent code within this mischievously considerate comment would have been deciphered in an instant by an adolescent: sexual misbehaviour, at the least. Such a statement, although devoid of facts and substance, was so loaded that it came across as a damning indictment. The web of mystery being woven was far worse than an out-in-the-open clarification or accusation.
Pearl blanched.
At this point I suggested driving myself to the police station and rendezvousing with them there, hoping for a private catch-up moment with Pearl before I set off. This proposition was met by a united shake of heads and at least one smirk, which translated to, What do you take us for, provincial prats?
‘That isn’t the way we do things in serious cases of this nature,’ I was told.
Again the reference to serious! My brain was turning into a runaway train. I was losing control of all the competing and racing machinations, with no way of applying the brake. The freedom of making choices had already been taken from me. Already I was a prisoner, but within invisible walls, trapped in a scenario I didn’t understand and that was beyond my comprehension. For as long as I can remember I’ve suffered from claustrophobia, and this situation was rapidly becoming claustrophobic for me, although I wasn’t entombed – not yet.
Whatever this was all about, it had to be a mistake, I kept reasoning to myself. Maybe a simple matter of mistaken identity. The harder I concentrated on the permutations, the less sense it made and was far from being a salve. Whatever the offence, clearly it had been committed in London, where I worked.
‘I think we’d better go, sir.’ No more wriggle-room remained.
I cannot remember if they introduced themselves by name or showed me ID, though I’m sure they must have, probably early on. One thing was certain: although the word arrest hadn’t been used, that’s exactly what was happening. I went either voluntarily or in handcuffs. These cops were not for turning or deterring.
Just as we were about to leave, there was an hysterical, clichéd caricature movie moment. Pearl crossed the room purposefully, gripped my hand and, blushing, said, ‘Whatever you’ve done, I’ll stand by you.’ Briefly the tension snapped because, for me, that moment was so comical that I couldn’t prevent myself from laughing.
‘Darling, I don’t know what you’re imagining, but I’m no murderer or rapist,’ I said, trying to lighten my load as well as hers.
Instantly, I spotted the exchange of telepathic messages passing between the two towering police officers.
‘Of course you’re not,’ Pearl said, rather light on conviction, I thought, as she returned my hand.
‘I’ll sort it,’ I promised. ‘See you soon.’
I could have sworn that Pearl flicked away a tear.
We left the house rather resembling a hanging party, one detective leading the way and the other behind me: a sandwich formation, with me as the filling, the tasty bit. (The death penalty had not yet been abolished, something I was to reflect upon very shortly.)
Not a word was spoken during the fifteen-minute drive until we were manoeuvring into a reserved slot in the central police station’s parking zone. All the way my blitzed brain had been a hive of frenzied activity. I’d come to the conclusion that whatever the crime – or suspected offence – my purported involvement had to be an administrative error. Or maybe they had reason to believe that I’d witnessed something, inconsequential to me but of relevance to Scotland Yard’s investigators. Reasonable assumption, surely? Yes, that’s most likely the answer, I assuaged myself, though I must confess that my thoughts were in disarray, like garments in a tumble dryer, going round and round, tossed one way, then another.
‘You ought to know that we’ve had a look at your vehicle in your garage,’ said the senior detective, who was sitting beside me in the rear of the unmarked car.
At the time I owned a grey-blue minivan, not because I needed it for my job but because it had been cheap to buy second-hand and economic to run. The significance of the van and its colour would only become apparent weeks later.
‘Forensics may have to tow it up to London for fingerprints and fibres to be lifted, also any stains will need testing. That’s just one of the reasons why we didn’t want you driving it and touching it any more. It might even have to be dismantled.’
The scenario was darkening by the minute. ‘What for?’ I queried, in relation to the possible need for my vehicle to be impounded. The answer was evasive. Some banter followed. Not idle banter from them, though; they were sharply focused. I remember being bemused by a question about painting; did I do much.
‘I’m no artist,’ I said naively, which was a hoot to them.
They were talking about painting and decorating, one of them said. Although I managed a self-deprecating chuckle, I wasn’t the least amused or comforted, just more confused.
At the police station, I was escorted upstairs to the office of a detective inspector, a middle-aged man, with the easy-going, dangerously disarming doctor’s bedside manner. He was at his desk, busying himself with folders and documents, behaving as if I was invisible and he hadn’t noticed my occupation of a chair directly opposite him. The other detectives stood like sentinels inside the door, as if to prevent a rash attempt at escape.
Finally, he looked up. ‘Ah, Mr Litchfield, thank you for dropping in!’
‘Dropping in, isn’t how I’d explain my presence here,’ I said, to which he smiled, recognising the game that was being played, all on his terms. We shook hands. No one could possibly have been more affable. Don’t drop your guard, I lectured myself. This is Danger Man, the intelligent one, the brains of this place. I started thinking of him as a snake and I had to be as smart and quick as a mongoose.
Right from the start he had the appearance and mannerisms of a methodical civil servant and I was there just to help fill in some forms, as if applying for a passport or something trivial like that. He repeated the routine of checking my full name and address, date of birth and marital status, then enquired what I did for a living.
This was the defining moment when the mood and tempo in that office changed palpably, like a fever suddenly subsiding and the mercury dropping like a stone. I explained that I was a crime correspondent for a national newspaper (The Sun, then a serious broadsheet that had morphed from the Daily Herald, a crusader for the Labour Party and the trades union movement, and now embraced within the Daily Mirror empire, divorced from its old owners, Odhams. This high-quality Sun was soon to be bought by the Australian press mogul Rupert Murdoch and reborn as a raunchy tabloid, with a different semi-naked Page Three Girl each day as its insignia.)
‘Any crime case in particular you’re currently covering on a regular basis?’ the inspector asked, as if making polite small talk, simultaneously offering me a cigarette, which I eagerly accepted. I was one of those chain-smoking obsessives who felt naked without a coffin nail between my lips or fingers. The inspector had no doubt that I would pluck a cigarette from the packet, like a mouse being lured into a spring-trap. This was an old police trick of which I was unfamiliar, highlighting my callowness. His confidence was based on the culture of the age: tobacco seemed more essential to Western survival than oxygen. Pubs were smog zones because of the cigarette smoke. So, too, were restaurants, where diners would smoke between courses, finally lighting cigars when coffee and port were served. The movies made smoking cool, something the smart-set did on dates, just before and immediately after having sex, in the office, on trains, buses, liners, aeroplanes and even on the beach. Huge advertisements on London buses and hoardings, displayed prominently in towns, urged the nation to light up and inhale the fumes of the good life. So the inspector was on to a safe bet that I would bite the bait.
‘Yes, the London “Nudes Murders”,’ I said, making use of the flame of a flick-lighter that was proffered by one of the sentinels, yet another little test, which I was to learn I’d failed. This whole experience was a learning curve about the nuances of police interrogation techniques. At the time, though, the last thing on my mind was the value of the free education that few other writers would receive in these potentially dire circumstances. The relevance of the death sentence not yet abolished was later to chill me to the core when I pondered upon the possible consequences. I was first assigned to the ‘Nudes’ investigation a year before, immediately following the first freakish crime.
The body of Gwynneth Rees had been discovered naked on 8 November 1963. In each successive case, there was a yawning gap between the date of the murder and the appearance of the corpse, an important feature of the serial killer’s modus operandi that will be elaborated as the narrative unfolds. I shall continue to use the term ‘serial killer’ although the label wasn’t coined until the mid-1970s by FBI agent Robert Ressler. Mythology has it that Ressler came up with the tag while listening to a lecture at Bramshill, the British Police Academy. The lecturer was focusing on different categories of crimes occurring with distinctive patterns. This coincided with a realisation by the FBI in the USA that a pandemic was evolving and a new killing culture spreading: perpetrators not murdering for traditional motives, such as jealousy, greed, hatred or revenge, but for pleasure, even as a hobby, though mainly with strong sexual stimulation. In view of Jack the Ripper and others, serial killing wasn’t a new phenomenon; it was more a revival.
Ever since the slaying of Rees there has been conflict among criminologists and police historians as to whether this was indeed the first or second killing in the series. There are those who believe that number one was Elizabeth Figg in 1959. I am in the opposite camp, but more on that later. Back to Bedford police station…
Suddenly, like a conjuror pulling a white rabbit from a hat, the inspector produced a plastic, transparent evidence bag and slid it across the desk to me, saying deadpan, ‘Have you ever seen this before?’
Seasoned detectives rarely ask a question without already being in possession of the truthful answer.
I know it’s a cliché, but I really could not believe my eyes. If ever gobsmacked was a justifiable description of a reaction, this was the occasion. In the bag was a white envelope which I had ripped into tiny pieces and stuffed into an ashtray on a late-night train from London St Pancras to Bedford, a distance of fifty miles north, a few days earlier. Unknown to me, another passenger in that open-plan carriage had scooped up all those pieces from the ashtray after I’d alighted, taken them home and pieced them together, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, and then Sellotaped everything in place. After reading what was written on the back of the envelope, he or she had gone hotfoot with it to Scotland Yard, no doubt hoping that there might be a reward and glowing publicity in the pipeline: Sherlock Holmes Train Passenger Solves ‘Nudes Murders’ Mystery!
I was so astonished that it took me some time to compute the scenario and compose myself.
‘You’re unsettled,’ observed the inspector.
‘You bet!’ I replied, my voice quaking.
‘I also noticed when you took the cigarette I offered you that your hand was shaking nervously.’
Ah! The trick.
‘Also when one of my colleagues here lit the cigarette for you.’
Trick number two! Corroborating the result of trick number one.
‘If there’s something you want to get off your chest, now’s the time to do it,’ he said paternally. ‘The longer you leave it, the harder it will become to open up about it.’ His voice and manner were soothing; he had style and certainly knew how to entice one into the confessional. He was reclining, fingers interlaced, talking to me just like a solicitous father or a priest delivering a soothing homily. Trust me. I’m your friend. I want to help.
Here I was being encouraged to confess to being a serial killer, the monster the media – me included – had dubbed ‘Jack the Stripper’, as evil as Jack the Ripper and just as hard to catch. In view of the spine-chilling spectre of the judicial rope and noose, mocking these detectives would not have been a smart course of action. Here I should explain the significance of the pieced-together envelope. On the front was my name and address, typed, and on the reverse side I had listed the names of all the victims, so far, in chronological order and the dates on which the women disappeared and the corpses were later discovered: Gwynneth Rees (alias Tina Smart), 8 November 1963; Hannah Tailford (alias Terry Lynch), 2 February 1964; Irene Lockwood (alias Sandra Russell), 8 April 1964; Helene Barthelemy (alias Helen Paul and Teddy), 24 April 1964; and Mary Fleming, 14 July 1964; all prostitutes with police files.
However, there was much more incriminating ‘evidence’ against me on that rescued envelope. I had scribbled certain sensitive details relating to the killer’s specific MO that were not yet in the public domain, deliberately held back by the police. These juicy delicacies were known only to detectives at the top of the food chain, amounting to no more than a dozen senior officers, including forensic specialists and a Home Office pathologist.
In homicide investigations, it was common practice the world over for the police to withhold from the press, and therefore the public, certain key elements of which only the perpetrator could be aware, apart from the few top guns running the investigation operation.
Doubtlessly detectives at Scotland Yard were hoping that the envelope that had been passed to the Bedford police would prove to be my death certificate: a unique form of smoking gun.
As I sat staring at that envelope, chilling images scrolled through my head like a speeded-up documentary movie: a court chaplain placing on the head of a judge a black cap, made of silk and measuring nine inches square, which was always worn by the judge when passing the death sentence. Always there would be a melancholy, cathedral silence, broken only by the stony-faced judge reciting the ‘gallows litany’ that was as precise as a piece of Masonic ritual: ‘…There is only one sentence which the law permits me to pronounce and that is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’ Bang on cue the chaplain, head bowed, would round-off the grim ritual with a solemn, ‘Amen.’
Still fresh in my mind was the trial and execution in Bedford of James Hanratty, known as the A6 or Deadman’s Hill murderer. He shot dead a married scientist and seriously wounded his young mistress, who was left paralysed for life, in a lay-by. After the hanging in Bedford prison on 4 April 1962, I interviewed the prison chaplain, ‘Ref’ Bearman – he was known more as ‘Ref’ than Rev. because he was an official football referee, in addition to his teaching duties at a local public school and gaol pastoral care work.
There was something inhumanly ghoulish about those procedural rites, so meticulously and cold-bloodedly structured by the state, for the final hours before the hangman pulled the lever to open the trapdoor to oblivion. Flashbacks of that conversation with Bearman seemed so germane as I sat in the office with those detectives, maybe in the same seat Hanratty had occupied before being charged.
About two days before a hanging a messenger would leave the Home Office in Whitehall on a motorbike bound for the prison where the execution was to take place. In his possession would be a box that he had to guard with his life, the contents so morbid to those in the know, yet meaningless to most of the population. Two reels of rope, the product of John Edgington and Sons of the Old Kent Road, London. Ropes for the very special purpose of hanging people. One of the ropes would be new. The other would have already been used, whether or not around someone’s neck, I am unsure. The point of the choice for the hangman was that some executioners, proficient in this ancient black art, preferred rope that had been tried and tested, mainly because it had no stretch remaining, thus ensuring a clean break of the neck.
Upon the ceremonious arrival of the messenger at the gaol, the governor would take charge of the box and lock it in his office safe. At four p.m. precisely, on the day before the rope would snap a human neck, breaking the vertebrae, the box of grisly tricks would be removed from the safe, coinciding with the arrival of the hangman and his mate. They would examine the ropes and read the physical statistics of the condemned prisoner, which would have been meticulously prepared by the medical officer. Despite being in possession of these details, the hangman always wanted to peer for a few minutes into the cell through what was known as the ‘Judas Hole’. Veteran executioner Albert Pierrepoint said that in those few minutes, he got a ‘feel’ for the person he was going to kill and could accurately assess how he would react during the seven paces to the rope and when the noose was slipped over his hooded head.
The execution chamber was always next door to the cell where the condemned prisoner spent his last few weeks, watched over by two warders day and night. A door connected the two rooms, but was traditionally hidden by a wardrobe. During the final evening, after one of the ropes had been selected, the drop would be tested, with sandbags deputising for the ‘dead man talking’ in the next cell. The bags would be filled with the exact amount of sand to equal the weight of the victim, and the length of the rope adjusted accordingly. The sandbags would be left hanging overnight in order to stretch the rope, removing any stretch, so the sudden jerk would be instantly lethal – if all went to plan. Then to dinner and a few beers for the state’s professional killers, during which warders would be regaled with bleak ‘jokes’ about how previous prisoners had ‘messed themselves’ even before they encountered their brutal fate.
The hanging team always slept in the prison, usually with the two warders who would take over the ‘last watch’. Reveille was six-thirty. The first task was to untie the sandbags and place them in a corner, near to a stretcher; this was in the ‘drop zone’. Then it was up the steps to the trapdoor, on which chalk marks were made where the prisoner’s feet should be positioned. After that was accomplished satisfactorily, it was breakfast-time, nearly always eggs and bacon. As Pierrepoint once told an interviewer, ‘You can’t do this job on an empty stomach.’
About ten minutes before the ‘drop’, the hangman and his assistant, the governor, two prison officers, the chaplain and maybe the county sheriff or his/her deputy, would assemble quietly in the hanging chamber. Any conversation was conducted in whispers.
As soon as the governor gave the thumbs-up sign after checking his watch, the hangman would strut briskly and purposefully into the condemned prisoner’s cell through the main door, binding his hands behind his back. Simultaneously, one of the ‘death watch’ warders would push the wardrobe to one side, while the other opened the secret door to the prisoner’s nemesis. In full, stark view would be the hanging rope. From that moment everything would happen fast. Seven measured paces to the trapdoor. Legs strapped at the ankles. A close-up encounter between hangman and his victim, eye-to-eye, smelling each other’s breath, and for one the smell of fear. Like a conjuror producing a white rabbit from a hat, the hangman would pull a hood from his pocket to blind his helpless victim. The noose would be slipped over the hood, knotted, and the rope run through a metal eye and tightened. A rubber washer would be manoeuvred along the rope to hold the noose in place. A nod from the governor and the hangman would pull the lever, causing a distinctive clatter as the ‘trap’ opened beneath the tethered and blindfolded prisoner. The body would plunge from view, leaving the sad little group mesmerised by a gently swaying rope, resembling a pendulum.
There was still more work for the hangman. He was responsible for releasing and stripping the body for an inquest the same morning, a mere formality, with the medical officer confirming that death was the result of ‘judicial hanging’. The body would be buried within the grounds of the prison.
Legend has it that just before Neville Heath was hanged in Pentonville prison, north London, in 1946, he asked for a whisky when the governor enquired if he had one last wish before dying. Just before the governor left the cell to fetch the drink, Heath is said to have added cheekily, ‘While you’re at it, you might as well make it a double, old chap.’ I’m sure I would have asked for the whole bottle.
All this knowledge on such a gruesome subject was counterproductive for me that afternoon in Bedford police station. Ignorance may not have been bliss, but it would have been preferable.
Nonchalantly, in fact almost apologetically, the inspector asked for an explanation about my jottings on the back of the envelope.
Without histrionics, I explained that I’d been to the daily press conference, held early every evening, Monday to Friday, at Shepherd’s Bush police station, the operational headquarters in west London of the long-running investigation. Politicians and the public were braying for a result, especially the female nightwalkers in the red-light territory where this serial killer stalked. The conference on the evening in question was led by Detective Superintendent Bill Marchant. There had been an almost tangible edginess among the top brass because there was an intuition flowing through the team that another corpse was overdue.
The killer had settled into a rhythm, roughly a three-monthly killing cycle. Forensic psychologists had expounded on the theory that the killer would emotionally ‘feed off’ each crime and would remain satiated for several weeks, comparable to an animal squirrelling away sustenance for a given period. Gradually, however, his hunger would return until he was consumed by a lust to strike again, thriving on the publicity, being an anonymous star; quite possibly someone who was a nonentity in his work and a failure as a husband and father. The urge and tension would mount until he could no longer be contained and he would be out of control, hunting on the streets again virtually robotically.
Helene Barthelemy’s body had appeared in April. We were now into November. The clock was ticking. Marchant and his team feared that they were probably into the final countdown to number six. In fact, the killing could quite easily have already occurred and the wait now was for the killer to release the body from his lair and dump it, almost certainly within view of the River Thames. The fact that no prostitute had been reported missing was of little significance. Most of them were rootless. Their lifestyle tended to be nomadic. Usually they were little more than marionettes, dancing to the tune of their ponce. And ponces weren’t known for their pastoral philosophy. Cops and police stations were anathema to them. Therefore, if one girl of a stable did a runner or just disappeared, it was unlikely for her ‘master’ to contact the police and fill out an official missing person’s report.
Marchant made the usual noises. ‘We are closing in. Never before has there been so much coordination between so many police divisions and nationwide cooperation.’ Very Churchillian. ‘The trail hasn’t gone cold. It would be wrong to give the public that impression. We’re confident we’re on the right track.’
‘What track is that?’ I’d asked.
‘Sorry, but that has to remain confidential at this stage. We don’t want to alert our man that we have him in our sights; well, almost. You boys will be the first to know, I promise, when we’ve banged-up our man.’
There were no girls among us, so Marchant wasn’t guilty of being sexist, although being macho was his nature. The nature of them all.
‘So you think you know the identity of the killer?’ I’d pressed, already being a pain.
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he’d said cagily. ‘But we’re building a shortlist.’
That was news.
A Daily Express reporter beat me to the obvious follow-up question: How many names were there on the shortlist?
‘Can’t tell you,’ was the anticipated, pithy reply. He meant won’t rather than can’t.
Someone else asked for a ‘steer’ – four, six, eight, ten, twelve, a thousand?
‘We hope to be trimming it substantially within the next few days when all alibis have been bottomed-out,’ Marchant had blagged.
‘From what number?’ I’d tried again.
‘No more than a dozen.’
Well, that was something; a ballpark figure, at least.
Each answer had spawned more questions. I was eager to learn how the shortlisted men had become suspects. Had they police records for sex crimes, for example. Marchant had already ‘let slip’ too much, he confided artificially, as if we’d milked him further than he’d intended to allow, which was nonsense, of course. Officers of Marchant’s rank and experience were shrewd and manipulative when it came to handling the media. He knew exactly how to play the press, to make reporters believe they had squeezed more out of him than he realised. Both sides wanted something; a bargain if possible. Everything came at a price, though. Marchant gave what he had to sell – nothing more at any price – and we paid by giving him the particular publicity he was angling for. I had many more questions, but not for him; they were stored up for a rendezvous later that evening with my special contact – or mole –who was deep within the elite murder squad.
We met in a pub less than a quarter of a mile from Shepherd’s Bush police station. He was a detective sergeant. Having police officers on a newspaper’s payroll was an integral part of press and police culture of the times. Payments to my mole went openly on my expenses’ account and would have been seen and accepted by the Inland Revenue. Senior officers were content to accept a bottle of whisky and a brace of pheasants at Christmas. No harm done. No investigation compromised. No lies told, except in ruses to snare villains. These gifts, not bribes, were seen as just another means of oiling the wheels of the working world. More importantly, it paradoxically gave the public a better deal in terms of transparency than in today’s sterile and over-sanitised and zealous restrictive practices. Gone are the days when detectives had special relationships with crime correspondents, with two-way trust assiduously cultivated and nursed solicitously. Now the press have to rely on evasive statements from press bureaux, which merely encourages journalists to speculate and, in doing so, may easily compromise a delicate, softly-softly police operation.
During my covert meeting with the detective sergeant following Marchant’s press conference, we consumed quite a few beers. That was the evening he tipped me off about the ‘Deep Throat’ modus operandi, which had never been hinted at before, not even during the inquests, when the pathologist who performed the post-mortem examination was legally required to give precise details at the public hearing of the cause of death.
In each case, the coroner had simply recorded death due to asphyxiation. In retrospect, it is astonishing that the media, including myself, hadn’t led a chorus for greater amplification and clarification. After all, asphyxiation is so generic. I think we had all gone along like lemmings with the assumption that the hapless prostitutes had been strangled or suffocated with a pillow. None of the relatives of the deceased hired a solicitor to cross-examine the pathologist at the inquests. Most likely this was due to lack of funds and not a callous act of disinterest.
As my insider informed me, the conspiracy of silence – or economy of detail – had been orchestrated with military thoroughness. Of course it couldn’t have been achieved without the cooperation of pathologist and coroner. In fact, the full facts, the entire story, were contained within a tightly knit inner circle, a cop cabal of top brass, coincidentally nearly all Freemasons, plus a couple of detective sergeants who were also ‘on the square’. Scotland Yard even had its own Freemasons’ Lodge, meeting once a month on Friday afternoons, autumn until spring. After the ceremony in the ‘temple’, members would dine (known as the festive board) in one of their favourite restaurants, where they were treated to a concessionary rate, and the imbibing would continue unabated into the wee hours of Saturday. The cop Masons were humorously known within the Met as the ‘Untouchables’.
There is no suggestion here that Freemasonry among the murder squad elite bred corruption or in ay way detracted from their investigations. However, it did bind together the ‘brethren’ into a club in which total loyalty to one another was expected, in accordance with the oath they had taken at their initiation, as long as their undertakings were lawful. However, human nature being what it is, jealousy was generated among those officers who weren’t in the brotherhood, particularly those who had applied to join but had been blackballed, resulting in defamatory rumours doing the rounds, even in Parliament and among the press gang.
Inevitably, one theory was that the killer was a Freemason cop who was being shielded by his fellow ‘brethren’ in the murder squad. On a similar theme, there was a fable that the serial killer was a prominent businessman who was known to senior Met cops through Freemasonry and, once again, was being protected out of misguided loyalty to the secret society that boasted royalty among its ranks. (Since then, Freemasonry has become much more open and rather than being a secret society it is promoted as a society with secrets.) There was never anything to give credence to these malicious stories. There was nothing unusual about them, however; they were typical of those doing the rounds during Jack the Ripper’s rampage.
At first I could not believe what I was hearing from my always reliable source – that the murder weapon was the perpetrator’s penis. This was just too far-fetched. Certainly it wasn’t something that I could contemplate putting in copy to my news editor, Ken James, a Welshman with a shock of pure white hair who was, at thirty-five, the youngest on national newspapers at that time to hold his pivotal position. The news editor was the beating heart of the news-gathering process of every newspaper. His ability determined the strength of the product. My view, as perhaps a rather reckless ‘publish and be damned’ Young Turk, was that James was feckless, a man who did his best to duck ‘what if we’ve got it all wrong’ nightmares. A very different animal from fellow Welshman Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the tabloid Daily Mirror, famous for its Andy Capp caricatures and the venomous snake-bite ‘Cassandra’ column.
I really thought that my mole was winding me up, that the beer had set fire to his lurid imagination, with the inevitable flames of fantasy. These murders preceded Linda Lovelace and the classic porno movie Deep Throat, later to become the sobriquet for the mole within the White House who was keeping the Washington Post apprised of all the black arts relating to President Richard Nixon’s presidency and the scandalous Watergate cover-up. So it was understandable for me to think that my informant was joking, in bad taste, admittedly, but drink worked wonders on inhibitions and shibboleths. Seeing my reaction, he managed one of those instant sobering-up feats and eyeballed me with penetrating sincerity, making it clear that he wasn’t jesting.
Of course I asked the obvious question: why hadn’t the killer been castrated, surely the instinctive, self-defensive response by any woman having her windpipe blocked in such grotesque fashion? The answer was that in each case an instrument had been deployed to restrain the women from being able to bite and was the reason why a number of the victims had front teeth missing.
‘How much of this could I publish?’ I asked, really testing the veracity of what I’d been told because I knew it would never get into print in my family newspaper, unless it was released in the form of an official statement, such as from Scotland Yard or a coroner at one of the inquests.
‘None of it,’ he replied definitively. ‘Not yet. Not until I give you the thumbs up. It’s something you have in the bag, so you can work out why certain things are happening.’ He knew it was safe to confide in me because if I reneged on the code of trust I’d never get anything else from him or anyone else in the murder squad. My name would be circulated and I’d be on the outside, a pariah for ever.
Something more plausible and usable at that stage was the news that similar paint marks had been found on a number of the bodies, indicating that they had been stored in the same place, possibly a garage or workshop. ‘You mean I can write that?’ I said.
‘It could be helpful, but don’t attribute the info to me; it might make the warped bastard overreact and do something stupid in panic. You never know. Optimism is a healthy drug.’
On the envelope, in addition to the victims’ names and a few personal particulars, I had scribbled penis weapon and body paint marks, neither of which meant anything to the Bedford officers, but had most certainly resonated with Scotland Yard’s A team. The Bedford bunch were merely emissaries of the Yard. Their task was to pull me in, put me through the tumble dryer, and make a judgment. Did my story stack up or was it threadbare?
No provincial police force cares to make a fool of itself by having a serial killer in its grasp and casually letting him go, something that occurred years later several times with the West Yorkshire Police. The inspector quizzing me was only too aware that if he released me and later it transpired that I was the perpetrator, who was being hunted nationwide, his career would end on a bonfire of profanities. Someone at the Yard, not Marchant or one of the lead detectives, had instructed the Bedford police to hang on to me if in any doubt. This communique from the Yard had come from a deskbound middle-ranking officer to whom my name and address meant nothing. Why should it? Even if the envelope had been seen by my Yard insider, there would have been no reason to immediately make the connection; he had no idea that I lived outside London.
The Bedford inspector asked for the name of the Met officer I’d gone to a pub with, ‘just to verify your story’. Bollocks! I thought. I replied affably, ‘You don’t really expect me to divulge that source, do you? If I did, I’d be out of a job.’
He smiled whimsically, ‘Well, I had to try,’ adding, ‘So what made you dispose of the envelope if it had valuable references for you?’
I went through the sequence of events methodically and chronologically. I left the pub between nine and nine-thirty, took a cab to St Pancras railway station, where I caught a slow, suburban, stopping train to Bedford, using my season ticket, which I produced for the police inspector’s benefit. I’d been dozing fitfully for about half an hour when the train reached Luton and the noise of slamming doors woke me. Making use of the time, I copied the notes on the envelope into my notebook. Somewhere after Luton, I decided there was no point retaining the envelope and ‘you know the rest,’ I said.
‘The person who took the envelope to the police has alleged in a statement that you were behaving suspiciously,’ he remarked, eyeballing me, the way you see it done on TV, watching for a nervous tic or tell-tale evasiveness.
‘I wasn’t behaving suspiciously, I was pissed,’ I countered testily. I was content to be self-deprecating when it was to my advantage.
By now we were playing the game of who blinks first. I was gambling that he wouldn’t wish to make an ass of himself. He could have locked me up, ‘pending further inquiries’, but my newspaper would have had a lawyer down to Bedford within an hour and the situation would have snowballed. I knew from personal experience that the murder squad then was a gigantic, leaking battleship. All crime correspondents on national newspapers had their own moles, at various levels of seniority in the Met. The hottest leaks came from middle-rank informers, especially those who felt they were undervalued and underpaid.
Although the inducements were small beer, it was nonetheless a cottage industry and for that to have been made public would have sunk many a ship. So I knew I had leverage, an insurance policy that afforded me comprehensive cover.
Decision-time had arrived for the inspector. He seemed to toss a coin in his head and it came down on the side of common sense.
‘Let’s go to the canteen for a cup of tea,’ he suggested, his demeanour now chummy.
At one point in the conversation in the canteen – just the two of us – he prodded the evidence bag containing the envelope and speculated, ‘Something as crazy as this affair is how the maniac will probably eventually be caught.’
He was wrong, of course.