The Brown family in Glasgow were in paralysed denial. Neither parent, Francis or Helen Brown, would travel with detectives to formally identify their daughter’s body. They couldn’t come to terms with her brutal death, despite the headache she’d been for them constantly since a scapegrace child.
Mrs Brown even denied that Frances had been embroiled in the Profumo/Keeler international scandal. I say international, because a few years later, when I was working in the USA and the Caribbean, the hottest subject of gossip in the cocktail lounges (bars in the UK) was Keeler. Not Profumo. Not Ward. Certainly not Macmillan or Mandy Rice-Davies. Just Keeler, who, while reviled in the UK, had become a cult figure in the States. In Miami, for example, to have known Keeler was always worth a free lunch.
The conservative middle class in the UK symbolically snubbed Keeler because she was pitched as a parvenu. There was also a racist undercurrent in the hostility fired at her: many of her lovers had been black. Britain claimed to be colour-blind; unfortunately, that meant it saw everything in black and white.
In America, however, Keeler was a breath of fresh air; the Brits were not as staid and stuffy as their international persona. She was seen as a racy rascal, a Hollywood siren-type, who had box-office appeal and therefore was high-value currency. The demimonde of US cities envied and admired her in equal proportions, yet another phenomenon of those crazy Swinging Sixties.
When shown photographs of Frances Brown entering and leaving the Old Bailey during the trial of Ward, her mother simply stated that it was a lookalike, a case of mistaken identity or someone posing as her daughter. Not even the police could convince her and sedatives had to be prescribed to avert a mental breakdown. The truth was that the slur on the family name was too much of a burden. ‘After all we did for her,’ she lamented, a remark that probably unlocked Mrs Brown’s psyche – as if Frances had deliberately got herself murdered just to crush her parents further.
Shortly after Frances Brown had set up home in Southerton in west London, she wrote a letter to her parents:
Well here I am writing to let you know that Paul and I have a great flat, 1 kitchen, 1 living room, 1 big lobby and it has a garden back and front.
Paul got a job back with Steven and Carters. He works late nearly every night and he is always tired. Oh, Mammy we have a television and I hope to get a radiogram this week. [The baby] is teething and crying all the time. Paul sends his love to everyone.
The letter was signed, Frances and Paul, plus twenty-six kisses from their infant son.
No hostility or recriminations there. On the contrary, it was optimistic and upbeat, but maybe a shade surreal in view of all that had occurred, plus the emotional and domestic turmoil that the couple had left in their wake when abandoning Glasgow. Frances’s two other children, the conflict with the police and other authorities appeared to have been rubbed off the chalkboard of her life.
Maybe she was attempting to ditch her corrosive past, cut the umbilical cord with her squalid history and make a fresh, wholesome start. If that was indeed her mindset, it was stillborn because, almost immediately, she’d gone the way of her inclination, turning tricks. Like so many of her street-clan, she was a dreamer. Tomorrow would bring a new dawn, goodbye to the old, hello the reborn Frances Brown. Unfortunately, most dawns Frances was still hobbling the streets on her stiletto stilts, feet and other body parts sore, and her brain mushy with whisky. Her new dawn would have to wait another day, and so it went on… a runaway train hurtling towards its lurking nemesis. No brake could save her.
A couple of weeks following the letter, Mrs Brown received a picture postcard of Piccadilly Circus, purporting to be from her daughter. On the reverse side, the message read: Dear Mom, I received your letter OK. Paul, myself and Baby are doing fine and I hope all is the same at home. Lots of love, Frances.
This postcard gave Mrs Brown ‘a funny feeling’ and a ‘sort of foreboding’, a ‘bit fishy’. Instead of putting her mind at rest, it did the opposite, unsettling her, as if cockroaches were scuttling around in her head, was a colourful description she saved for me. For a start, the writing did not resemble Frances’s ‘in the slightest; nothing like.’ Secondly, there was no punctuation (I have added some to make it readable) and as seen from her letter above, Frances always included punctuation where she considered it necessary. Thirdly, in the address, the writer had added Scotland after Glasgow. ‘That was the final evidence for me that this card wasn’t written by Frances,’ she told me emphatically on the phone. ‘Frances never included Scotland in the address. What was the point? Everyone knows where Glasgow is. You’d only put Scotland if you were writing from abroad.’
The postmark on the picture postcard was legible: Hammersmith, 1 October 1964. So who had written the postcard?
‘It could only have been that Quinn,’ Mrs Brown said disparagingly. ‘Who else down there knows our address, except him and the police.’
‘Have you informed the police?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes. They have the letter and postcard. But I don’t think they’re taking it seriously.’
This was probably true. The writing and message may have been fraudulent, but the postmark didn’t lie. The postcard had been mailed more than three weeks before Frances had disappeared. Too many people had seen Frances alive between 1 and 23 October for there to have been a conspiracy to fake the date of her death, Neither could the pathologist have been hoodwinked to that extent. Anyhow, I made a note to raise the issue when I next spoke with ‘Jack’, which I duly did. I called him late afternoon/early evening that same day from a public phone-box on the ticket-machine concourse at Leicester Square Tube station.
‘I haven’t heard of anyone this end getting excited about these things,’ he said disinterestedly, referring to the letter and postcard. ‘Can’t see how they can have any bearing. Just fluff. We’ve got too much else to bother about.’
‘Really?’ I rejoined. ‘Such as?’
‘The paint stains. Crucial. And someone well-known.’
‘Not Profumo?’ I suggested incredulously, upping the stakes.
Bigger! Bigger than the former Secretary of State for War and husband of one of the most beautiful and celebrated film and stage actresses of the age! Come on! Surely we weren’t descending into risible Jack the Ripper apocryphal yarns, fantasising about princes of darkness and ludicrous machinations of royal culpability? Too absurd! Stop winding me up, Jack.
‘Just how big?’ I said soberly, pulse ticking in my ear as I fished for something realistic, a marker, a ballpark figure, figuratively.
Click. He was gone. So, too, any chance of a publishable exclusive. This was the way it was done in the movies – another example of fiction choreographing real life, true crime. The mystery of the postcard and the letter were being handled by the staff of our Scotland office. Time to move on, like vultures: once all the meat was off the bone, there was nothing left to scavenge.
There were lots of debates surrounding the positives and negatives of my writing a feature article about being a suspect in such a heinous series of murders and how circumstantial evidence could impact on an innocent person’s life, social, personal and professional, bringing distrust and upheaval in a family and tension to a marriage. No smoke without fire. Naturally, I was strongly and vociferously in favour and pushed hard for the go-ahead.
News editor Ken James, as usual, straddled the fence. He recognised the news value of the proposed article and especially its exclusivity, but he had reservations. Therefore, he would have to consult Andrew Mellor, he said. In other words, he wanted to ensure that the bullet stopped with someone else should it backfire. Self-preservation was a common mantra among middle executives in Fleet Street where the casualty rate was war-zone high.
Andrew Mellor was the editorial manager. As self-protective as James, he trotted off to the editor, Sydney Jacobson, who was later to go to the House of Lords, that retirement home for many national newspaper editors and proprietors. The issue, apparently, was the reputation of the newspaper and all the possible ambushes we could stumble into. What would the public make of a reporter discarding confidential information in a public place when sozzled? Politicians and the police might demand an explanation as to how I came by the sensitive information, if only to cause mischief; a proverbial cat among the pigeons. If the truth had to be disclosed that police officers of Scotland Yard, the world’s citadel of law enforcement, were on the payroll of newspapers, the whole system could be scuppered. Where would we be then? No more under-the-counter tip-offs. Stymied. Police officers could lose their jobs. There could even be criminal charges, followed by reprisals against the press. Denunciation from the rest of sanctimonious Fleet Street.
The verdict from the three-man jury was unanimous. Too risky. Too much to lose for too little gain. Not a sound commercial proposition. Sorry, Michael, but hey, it must have been a hoot. Plenty of free drinks to be had regaling that yarn.
The Scotland Yard hierarchy and most savvy politicians knew about the informal police/press arrangements and had no quarrel with it, as long as it remained underground, out of the public eye and mutually beneficial; after all, it was merely an extension of the Westminster lobby communication network.
With hindsight, I suppose the three wise jurors were right to play safe and, in angling parlance, allow this one to swim away so that something larger might venture into our net without adverse repercussions.
‘Jack’s’ mention of the portrait artist Vasco Lazzolo had to be worth following up in view of the paint marks on the bodies. His name had been dragged into the public domain by Frances Brown during the Ward trial, when she told the jurors that she’d been touting for business in Shaftesbury Avenue with Vickie Barrett when accosted by Lazzolo, without any prior knowledge of his name and fame – even the Queen was among the nobles who had ‘sat’ for him. That aside, Brown swore that she and Barrett had gone with the artist to his studio, where a threesome sexual frolic had taken place… for money, of course.
Married and with his self-esteem to defend, he appealed for the right to appear in the witness box to rebuff such ‘scandalous lies’. In addition to Brown’s evidence, Barrett had said that she caned him at Ward’s flat for the market price of £1 a stroke.
Not in all his life had Lazzolo been ‘so insulted and besmirched,’ he said. Both women were liars. ‘Why are these degenerates trying to ruin me? How can this be permitted?’
The jurors were unlikely to have known that scandal was not new to him. In 1943, when he would have been in his twenties, much worse accusations had been propelled at him. Arthur Stambois, an inventor of sorts, smeared him publicly as a ‘pimp, a diseased pervert, a Portuguese pig and swine.’
Could ‘Jack’ have been nudging me towards Lazzolo? It didn’t seem likely. Wrong kind of paint, for starters. Paint used by artists is very different from all types in the car-spraying industry. The paint stains on Brown and at least two of the other bodies were composed of globules. And how could this portrait painter be considered a bigger fish than Profumo? No, he didn’t fit.
Always there was the problem, the stumbling-block, the bedrock of logic, of being able to complete the circle: if Lazzolo killed Brown, he also had to be ‘Jack the Stripper’, killer of the others, and there was nothing whatsoever to couple him with any of the previous victims.