Dennis Sutton was looking for something that was missing, but he found much more than he’d set out to find, much to his horror.
The time was one-thirty p.m. on Wednesday, 25 November. A miserable, murky day in central London that was soon to become considerably bleaker for the edgy murder squad.
Mr Sutton was employed as Assisted Civil Defence Officer at the Civil Defence Corps headquarters in the basement of Kensington Central Library in Phillimore Walk, just off the fashionable High Street. He was shivering in a public car park at the rear of the library. Hands in pockets, cussing about the cold and a dustbin lid that had gone ‘walkabout’, he headed disgruntledly for the concrete building which served as the Civil Defence’s control centre.
‘Gotcha!’ he exclaimed aloud to himself as he spied the out-of-place dustbin lid behind the concrete building, among various debris and illegally dumped rubbish, including used condoms and soiled nappies.
Shaking his head in disgust, he picked up the dustbin-lid – and froze. Unbeknown to him, he had just stumbled across victim number six in the ‘Nudes’ series, Frances Brown, whose undernourished body was already severely decomposed. Maggots had infested most of her flesh, including her head. Naturally, she was naked, which, after all, was the killer’s signature; his voice and announcement to the world, Yes, it’s me again. Take notice. Just as you were beginning to think it was safe to go out after dark once more… The police, those plodding flatfoots, are no nearer to catching me than on day one. Aren’t I clever? More sleepless nights for the Yard dickheads. And more bodies to come, too! Below her torso, she had been crudely concealed by chunks of concrete, broken pieces of wooden furniture, twigs and leaves.
Mr Sutton dropped the dustbin lid and ran.
The police swooped on the scene like moths drawn to a campfire. The speed of events from thereon was as swift as a relay race, with the baton (in this case, the body) passed with smooth changeovers along the chain of command so that by five o’clock that same Wednesday the post-mortem examination had already begun in the Hammersmith mortuary, led by Home Office pathologist Professor Donald Teare, one of the ‘Three Cadaver Cavaliers’, the nickname among the morgue humourists for the venerable pathology professors Keith Simpson, Francis Camps and, of course, Teare.
Just like all the previous victims, she was small, a mere inch over five feet tall and weighing a maximum of seven stone, although this had to be an estimate in view of the defiled condition of the body. Old scars on the right lung indicated to Teare that she had once suffered from tuberculosis. Brown’s viscera provided an explicit insight into her unhealthy lifestyle. Teare speculated that a recent kidney infection, pyelonephritis, could have been caused by a dose of VD.
Gallbladder stones were common in middle-aged women, especially those with a liking for fatty food and prone to a daily tipple, but rare for a twenty-two-year-old. The single stone plucked from Brown’s thick-walled gallbladder was blamed by the pathologist on a poor diet and persistent dehydration, almost certainly the result of excessive alcohol consumption. A very pertinent fact for the detectives was that she was missing three lower front teeth and there was no indication how – or indeed when – they were extracted. Exterior injuries were minimal, consistent with the previous five killings in the series. Crucial to Marchant and his team was cause of death: would this also be compatible with the others? Marchant hoped so or it would introduce confusing anomalies into the methodology. A change of signature – or indeed a completely new one – would not be welcomed; in fact, it would be a nightmare. A nightmare heaped upon an already existing nightmare. The police have historically had a penchant for consistency and regularity.
Gone were her nose, eyes and much of her face, probably due to scavengers such as rats and urban foxes, plus the maggots, of course. Nailing the cause of death, beyond all doubt, was proving elusive: no blow to the head, no gunshot or knife wounds, no evidence of manual strangulation, such as contusions made by thumb-pressure, no reason to suspect poisoning, although that could be confirmed only by toxicology tests which would take days. Then Teare spotted the spread of pink pigmentation below Brown’s chin and signs of minor haemorrhages in the larynx, but no fractures. He now had the crucial answer to the number-one question: she had died from asphyxiation. Just like the others.
Not of too much interest to Teare, but very much so to Marchant, was the roll of paper that had been thrust into the dead woman’s vagina. Was there some kind of message in that gross act of defilement? Certainly not a written one because the paper was plain white, without a mark, not even a semen stain. If only it had been blue and matched the texture of the ‘Solicitor’s’ notepaper, Marchant lamented.
Brown was identified by her fingerprints, which should have been a routine task, considering her bulky file of convictions for soliciting. No novice, this one. An old hand at a mere twenty-two. That was the Swinging Sixties for you, everything embroidered to an evocative patchwork of apocalyptic milestones that symbolised the zeitgeist of the times: the assassination of President Kennedy, the Great Train Robbery, the Profumo/Keeler political sex scandal, the Zodiac killer in the USA, the Beatles phenomenon, the drug-popping revolution, the birth of Flower Power (Make Love Not War) and the sensational revelations of orgies with peers of the realm cavorting with call girls. Also spurring the pulse of the British public were the first James Bond film and the Hitchcock thriller Psycho.
Very little was routine or as it seemed in the chaotic London netherworld. The police were quick – possibly too quick – to identify victim number six as Margaret McGowan. The truth is that she had worked the streets under a range of aliases: Frances Quinn, Nuala Rowlands, Donna Sutherland, Anne Sutherland, Susan Edwards and Frances Brown. With the media snapping at the heels of the police for personal details of the latest victim, Scotland Yard ran with the name that had appeared most recently on her list, like movie credits, of convictions. Even the Police Gazette, the coppers’ own bible, seemed confused about Frances Brown’s true identity, naming her as Margaret McGowan, which was just one of her aliases.
To be fair, even the prostitutes soon lost track of who they really were. In fact, they ceased to have an identity; they were strapped to a treadmill and once on, there was no way off: well, not entirely true, six of them had been removed within a few months, but not of their own volition. For those left, the daily grind ground them down inexorably: little sleep, rubbish food, whisky, purple hearts (the speed drug of choice in that bewitching era), more whisky, grubby, soul-blitzing business, front seat of cars, back seat of cars, up against a wall in an unlit alley, in a park, on the banks of the Thames, under a tree, more street-trawling, tired feet, aching heart, finally home to a slapping from the ponce for not having earned enough, for being a ‘lazy cow’, for wasting ‘dosh’ on drugs and booze. Every day, in their dreams, they vowed to stop the world and jump off, finding a life where venereal disease and daily degradation were not the ensign of their trade, the badge of dishonour. But few ever did get off because it was just a dream. For most, the treadmill was a relentless downhill slope towards some form of unspeakable oblivion.
Jack the Ripper, east London, 1880s; Jack the Stripper, west London, 1960s; eighty years and about eight miles apart, but very little change in lifestyle and prospects among the sediment of the capital’s society.
As for the mistaken identity, there was no excuse for Deputy Assistant Commissioner John ‘Four-Day Johnny’ du Rose of Scotland Yard sloppily perpetuating the name error in his autobiography, Murder was my Business, which was published in 1973, a full eight years after the reign of terror in cosmopolitan west London came to an abrupt and untidy end. One can only assume that the book was ghost-written and the great man was too busy or idle to checks the proofs. It seems that he was as cavalier in his writing as in his previous day job at the Yard.
Du Rose was soon to take over from Marchant as the General, appointed as the swashbuckling overall leader to bring about the equivalent of an ‘Operation Overlord’ D-Day invasion that would bring this war on London’s west front to a swift conclusion. This was how his appointment was sold to the public and politicians, who jointly were becoming restless and beginning to wonder if the legendary Scotland Yard was still up to the job. The Yard had always been seen as the trailblazer for police forces around the world, but now that image was becoming tarnished, mocked even. Jack the Ripper had outsmarted the Yard, along with all criminologists, and now Jack the Stripper was making a mockery of the allegedly greatest police force worldwide.
The initial task facing the investigators after the murder of Frances Brown was formidable: three unknown quantities, of equal value, had to be resolved as quickly as possible: when had she last been seen alive, by whom, and how long had she remained undiscovered in the public car park? Marchant was also keen to learn as much as possible about her background, though this was unlikely to have any bearing on her death, an assumption that was to be dramatically challenged within a few hours, especially as the autopsy had shown that she had most certainly not been raped just prior to death, nor had she even indulged in sexual intercourse, strange indeed when that was apparently her calling and only reason for patrolling the streets at night.
Soon it became apparent to detectives that Brown must have disappeared on Friday, 23 October. They discovered that she had been drinking whiskies most of the evening in the Warwick Castle pub around Shepherd’s Bush with a kindred spirit, blonde Beryl Mahood. They had tottered out together into the fresh evening air at around eleven p.m., when it was time to clock-on for the night whoring shift. It is understandable that they needed to be drunk in order to provide some of the depraved services that their forthcoming clients would be seeking.
Brown was Scottish-born, Mahood an exile from Liverpool. Huddled together, they headed towards the junction of Westbourne Park Road and Portobello Road. Two men in separate cars were slyly kerb-crawling, perhaps not obvious to the untrained eye but clear as a pawnbroker’s sign to those two women. One of the men emerged from his car and gestured for the women to follow them into Portobello Road. Although driving separate vehicles, it was readily apparent that the men were together. When Brown and her companion caught up with the potential punters, they were parked in Hayden’s Place, a dim mews.
Brown suggested that she and Mahood should travel in one car, while the second punter followed. The destination would be Chiswick Green. However, the men disagreed and as money was king they got their way. According to Mahood, Brown climbed into a Ford Zephyr or Zodiac ‘or something similar, anyhow’, while the second car was light grey in colour, but she had no idea about the make or model, except it had a gear lever on the steering column and a ‘convenient’ bench-seat in the front.
The Zephyr or Zodiac or whatever led the way. Traffic was heavy with the usual end-of-the-working-week revellers. Headlights dazzled. Friday-night fever was kicking in. And for two young ‘working-girls’, fuelled by whisky, there was no fear. Fool’s Paradise never ceased sucking in the guileless.
Just east of Shepherd’s Bush Green, the first car, with Frances Brown aboard, disappeared from view, lost in the traffic congestion. It didn’t matter. Nothing had been proposed about a foursome. This was private enterprise; all is fair in love and whore.
Frances Brown, out of sight, already almost out of mind, had gone, not to be seen again until Dennis Sutton went looking for the lost dustbin lid.
Mahood told detectives days later, ‘When we lost Frances and her bloke, the man I was with said something like, “It doesn’t matter. He knows where to find me at the flat.”’
What did it matter that they were separated? They were big girls now. This was their territory. They could take care of themselves. The punters were the mugs. Fortunately for me, neither Nipper Read nor John du Rose knew that my first home when I married in the early 1960s was a flat in Palace Gardens Terrace, which joined Church Street in Kensington, just around the corner from the car park where Brown’s body had been hidden. Now that would have been a coincidence too far for Nipper and ‘Big John’ to have swallowed easily, which demonstrates just why circumstantial evidence, without any other backup, should be treated cautiously.