Shot one: a digger is at work in a landfill or somewhere similar, such as a vehicle-crunching plant. The driver is doing his job robotically, a glazed, bored expression highlighting the monotony. The mechanical shovel digs into the muck and the giant metal claws are clenched by remote control. Another lever is pulled. The elbow of the mechanical arm bends. The high-in-the-sky control cab, like an eyrie, rotates as the driver prepares for the culmination of this segment of the long day’s action. The digger’s arm looms above the workmen on the site below. The driver prepares to open the claw to release the shovel’s contents. Then freeze. The scene is supposed to be suspenseful. But it’s not. It’s yet another tedious cliché. The jaded viewers know exactly what’s coming next. One of the workmen on the ground shouts, ‘Hold it! Oh, my God! There’s a body!’
Shot two: Police cars circle the digger. From the lead car leaps Lewis, Frost, Morse, Columbo, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, Barnaby of Midsomer Murders, Wycliffe, Cagney and Lacey, or any of the cops in the hundreds of gangster movies made since the 1960s.
And this may seem harsh, but I blame poor Gwynneth Rees. Naked, except for one stocking rolled down to her ankle, she was suspended by an arm from the shovel of a mechanical digger, operated by Patrick Dineen. At first, he thought he’d caught some kind of animal, until he had an unobstructed view of the two white hanging legs, whereupon he shouted, ‘Bloody hell! I’ve hooked a body.’
Thereafter, for decades, even now, one episode of every TV crime series had a corpse exposed this way. My theory, and I’m sticking to it, is that this was the moment, at two p.m. on Friday, 8 November 1963, that TV crime series’ writers were presented with a formula they couldn’t resist. The trouble is that formulae induce laziness and so it has been trotted out ad nauseam, to such an extent that the moment viewers see a digger they know it’s safe to pop into the kitchen to brew a cup of tea, confident that they will not be missing anything unexpected. Yawn. Body in the claw. Seen it all before.
If Rees started a clichéd fiction drama trend, she also almost certainly provided the opening sequence in what was to morph into the ‘Nudes’ serial epic. No other story in the following fifteen months was to gobble up so many column inches in British national newspapers. Du Rose even prophesied that this killer would eclipse Jack the Ripper in the public psyche. That was another issue on which we were in agreement and also jointly mistaken, but for one reason only: the conspiracy between the police mandarins and newspaper editors to censor out the unique murder weapon, which, if made public, would have stunned the world and galvanised Hollywood, long before Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat’ and Linda Lovelace’s enactment of the slogan, her legacy to politics and art, at a stretch.
However, the reason for the retention made sound investigatory sense, because it amounted to what the police in the USA call the ‘control question’: something known only to the killer and the cream of the investigators – plus, in this case, myself, through a leak, hence such a fuss being made over the remnants of the envelope on the train. A ‘control question’ is particularly useful for a speedy elimination of the disturbed people who always have a need to confess to high-profile murders, even if execution awaits them, as in numerous states of the USA and in the UK in the early 1960s, if believed. The ‘control question’ is usually such that the odds would be a million-to-one against a false confessor hitting on it by chance.
If the finding of Rees’s body was spectacular by 1963 standards, there was nothing unique about her way of life in London and her method of earning a living. In fact, from beginning to end her lifestyle was something of a bromide. Although the climax wasn’t inevitable, it was never likely to have been anything other than tragic. The graph of most people’s lives have highs and lows, punctuated by a few plateaux, but hers had flat-lined long before adulthood; in the real definition of living, she was dead long before she died.
On that early Friday afternoon in November 1963, the digger was in use at Barnes Borough Council’s household-refuse disposal plant in Townmead Road. One lorry had already been loaded when the discovery was made. A team of three was involved in the dirty work. In addition to Dineen, there was a foreman, Edward Kimpton, and lorry driver Peter Taffurelli. It is easy to understand why so many professional and amateur sleuths are reluctant to exclude Figg from the corpse count of the ‘Stripper’: Location, Location, Location.
This refuse dump was less than fifty yards from the Thames’ towpath. From the towpath, one could look across the river directly to peaceful Duke’s Meadows, where Figg’s body had been displayed beneath a willow tree. So easy to reason that the predator had mapped out this riparian territory of west London as his personal burial ground, another signature, in fact. Very tempting, I admit, but the four-year hiatus and absence of the crucial signature are sufficient for me to dismiss Figg as a one-off, concurring with du Rose.
It was the foreman, Kimpton, who alerted the police. The emergency call went through to Richmond police station. The police posse was led by Detective Superintendent Frederick Chadburn. The body was still suspended from the shovel by its right arm when Chadburn’s team showed up.
Not far behind Chadburn was pathologist Dr Arthur Mant, who made a preliminary examination after Rees’s remains were released from the claws. The digger had caused considerable damage. The giant claw had decapitated the corpse and the head had rolled several feet away from the torso into the pit. Major organs were missing, including the brain, which spawned rumours that a belated Jack the Ripper copycat was on the loose. The reality was much more mundane, however: putrefaction was the culprit for eliminating the soft-tissue organs, due to the length of time the body had been buried in the tip, possibly as long as two months, Dr Mant estimated, during the post-mortem in Kingston mortuary on the Saturday morning. Not of great significance at the time, though pertinent to later developments was the fact that four teeth were missing from the skull. Despite so much destruction and natural wastage, the pathologist was able to gauge the woman’s age between twenty-two and twenty-five, and her height was calculated at five feet, three inches. Miraculously, in view of the decimated skeleton, he was positive that she took a four and a half-sized shoe. Excellent pathology, but of limited assistance to Chadburn, especially as Dr Mant was unable to confirm how the anonymous woman had died.
The U-shaped bone that supported the tongue had been damaged, but the larynx was missing, adding to Dr Mant’s difficulty in establishing the possible cause of death. She could have been strangled, but might have died from a blow, even an injury sustained in a road or river accident. It was also possible that the snapping of the U-shaped tongue bone could have occurred after death, quite easily by the rampaging digger. For Chadburn, the outcome of the PM couldn’t possibly have been more maddening. Was he investigating murder, manslaughter, misadventure or accidental death? He had no idea, except that the circumstances were suspicious. Instead of enlightening him, the medical findings had obfuscated. Dr Mant had concluded in his official written report that the cause of death was ‘unascertainable’.
A coroner’s vehicle transported Rees’s loose collection of remains to Guy’s Hospital, in central London, where Dr Mant lectured in forensic medicine. After more tests, experiments and consultations with Prof. Warwick, his colleague, he was able to be considerably more constructive. With Prof. Warwick’s input, Dr Mant was now ‘ninety-five per cent certain’ that Rees had been strangled; still five bricks short of a full load, though, tantamount to the key to a cell door if anyone was charged with Rees’s murder and the jurors were instructed that they had to be certain beyond all reasonable doubt before convicting. Chadburn was happier, but only by about five per cent!
Before thinking about finding the killer – if indeed there was one – the police first had to identify the victim. Just how much did the police know about her? Very little; nothing, in fact, apart from her height, approximate age, the size of her feet and, courtesy of the beheaded skull, that she had long brown hair. From herein, the investigation went into a sort of autopilot mode, with orthodox police procedures from the handbook taking the driving seat. Appeals to the public were made through all media outlets. Every force was requested to scrutinise their missing persons file.
The response was encouraging. Many people came forward, fearing that the deceased could be their daughter or wife, but all to no avail. The breakthrough was to come via the forensic lab, at a time when detective science was being routinely embraced by the more enlightened police forces, though a pocket of obscurantists still existed.
So much of Rees’s body had decomposed beyond all recognition, but not the left hand, on which some skin remained in a reasonable condition. This hand was amputated from the skeleton, X-rayed and placed in a forensic lab freezer. Skin from the thumb and forefinger was delicately removed and microscopically analysed, while Chadburn kept his fingers, and much besides, crossed.
Bingo!
Twice!
Not only did the scientists extract a fingerprint, but one that was already on file at Scotland Yard in the name of Gwynneth Rees, alias Tina Smart, aged twenty-two, convicted twelve times for soliciting and once for theft.
Chadburn must have inwardly groaned, though. The good news of identification was qualified by the bad news of Rees’s profession. The majority of murders were committed by a spouse, a lover, another family member, or certainly within the victim’s network of contacts. Not so with prostitutes. The normal rule of thumb didn’t apply in the netherworld of the demimonde. More often than not, the killer would be a random pick-up; more so when the whore was a street girl. At least call girls, nightclub hostesses and escorts on the books of agencies tended to keep diaries of appointments and there were controllers – very different from ponces and pimps – who handled the bookings and were aware of the hotels and apartments used. In stark contrast, street girls were lone-rangers; lone-dangers. They flagged down motorists they’d never seen before; any one of these could be an undiagnosed psycho.
They were driven to remote places, for obvious reasons, including their own protection from the law. Any scream for help would be a silenced one. So where to begin in these daunting situations was always a testing dilemma for the police.
The common approach in such cases was twofold, as adopted by Chadburn: one half of the team would assemble the victim’s history, from her first breath, while the other half focused on her street life – girls and ponces she worked and socialised with, until her last breath. Always a Herculean task because, even before setting one foot outside the police station, every officer was aware that he/she would be up against a wall of downright lies, half-truths (if lucky) and slyly doctored recollections, all designed to tamper with the truth.
Chadburn also had the challenge of galvanising his overstretched force. It was not uncommon for the lower-ranking officers to balk at the long hours and foregoing weekends with loved ones: why all this public expenditure, hours upon hours chasing shadows, shadow-boxing with riff-raff, and our family life compromised for a slag who probably got nothing more than the worst of a spat with her fat ponce?
‘Someone’s daughter.’ Chadburn would always repeat the sentimental slogan. ‘Maybe even someone’s mother.’ He was right about that this time, without knowing it.
Some of the officers would be spurred on, while others would continue to drag their feet and grumble. Here was a microcosm of the nation, probably an accurate reflection of the divide of public opinion. Life was precious, but some would always be more so than others.
Chadburn was no philosopher. He was old school. If there was a killer at large on his patch, he wanted him caught. To hell with cost and manpower. Just nab him! Fast! Before he struck again. The thinking couldn’t be faulted, the outcome could.
The records showed that Rees was born in Barry, Glamorgan, South Wales on 6 August 1941. Her father, Gwilyn, was a labourer. Her mother, Amelia, was listed as a housewife. Gwynneth did well at local schools, becoming a prefect in her last year, when fifteen.
Her first employment was in her home town as a machinist in a factory mass-producing lingerie. A year later, when she was only sixteen, her mother died suddenly from brain thrombosis. This was the turning point – tipping point, in fact – in her life. Her father wasn’t an emotional or sensitive man. These things happen. You can’t turn back the clock. You just have to get on with it. Tears only make a mess of your face. He seemed to be completely oblivious to the traumatic impact on Gwynneth, who had four sisters – one older – and a brother who was married. Her oldest sister, Joan, was also married.
After the funeral, Gwilyn reacted as if he’d been jilted, as though his wife had walked out on him. The soil had scarcely settled over the coffin before he was bad-mouthing Amelia. Without preamble, he made it clear that he expected Gwynneth to succeed Amelia as mother to the three younger girls. Gwynneth refused, saying she had no intention of giving up her job to be anchored to the home. There were rows, which grew in intensity and violence. Whenever Gwynneth was physically abused, she hit back, not one for passive submission. The bitterness between father and daughter became explosive.
The house – no longer a home – was a battleground. Gwynneth started staying out all night and not returning in the morning. Twice she was reported missing to the police and twice they discovered her sleeping rough and returned her home, only delaying the inevitable – the Great Escape, to London, the city of flashing neon and nylons, coiffeurs, cologne and condoms, the capital of fun and fantasy, where dreams were realised, where old Father Thames kept its secrets, and spivs loitered at railway stations for runaway female teenagers with all their worldly goods stuffed into a porous shopping-bag. This was Gwynneth’s welcome to paradise and freedom. A freedom that would soon see her on the nightly treadmill, sashaying along streets, doing as little as possible for cash in cars, back to padding pavements, and finally home to a flat, shared with another prostitute, and handing over much of her takings to her leech, the ponce, who promised her stardom among the sluts: Head Girl one day of London’s most lucrative red-light garbage dump, a sort of red carpet of the street-girls’ industry. Eat your heart out Hollywood! Sadly, a story as old and current as it was futuristic.
The downhill path wasn’t as steep for Rees as for most runaways. There were periods of semi-stability, crossroads at which she paused and pondered, when she still had a choice of direction, a change of course that would have saved her, but the pull of gravity to the gutter and the grave was too great. Her married sister, Joan Oxley, several times gave her shelter at her home in Canvey Island, Essex. Soon, inevitably, they were locked in disagreement. Gwynneth was pregnant and took off for Wales, but not to her father’s house, of course.
After giving birth to a daughter, she begged sister Joan to take her back, but this was only a ruse to dump the child. London called to her, pulled at her skirt, and she went running. Her nemesis couldn’t be kept waiting. In retrospect, the countdown to the date with the digger had already begun.
During Rees’s stay in London while working as a prostitute, the police were able to calculate that she’d resided – perhaps not quite the right word – at twenty-eight different addresses and had given birth to two children; the second was born in the City of London Maternity Hospital on 27 December 1962.
In the first few months of 1963, she even took the baby with her when she went soliciting on the streets late at night and into the early hours of the next cold and frosty January morning. It was gross, but true – she would do business on the back seat of a stranger’s car while her son was wrapped in a blanket in the front, often crying for a feed, causing customers to demand cut-price deals because of the noise and nuisance factor.
Cornelius John Whitehead was probably Rees’s longest lasting ponce. He was a born and bred East Ender, living in Stepney. By day, he made money by doing as little work as possible as a docker, a protected species in those days. By night, he lived off Rees. Here was a major difference between Rees and all the other women to die violently in this series: the six accepted by du Rose as victims in the ‘Nudes’ saga all milked the streets of west London, whereas Rees made the East End, Whitechapel, of Jack the Ripper infamy, her hunting-ground.
In du Rose’s mind, as he once told me over a pint in a Shepherd’s Bush pub, Rees wasn’t ‘a hundred per cent’. In other words, he had reservations about her right to be included in this cast. No matter: wherever she traded, it all came to an end in the right place: west London, near the Thames, opposite Duke’s Meadows, immortalised more by our ‘Deep Throat’ unique murderer than the young gentlemen of Oxbridge who row this stretch of river every spring.
She might have favoured the East End for living, but clearly ‘Deep Throat’ didn’t for killing. All roads led west as far as ‘Deep Throat’ was concerned.
What attracted Rees to Whitehead? Well, in addition to his twinkling blue eyes, fair hue – including his hair – slim but muscular build and teasing good looks, he was an experienced ponce for his age, twenty-six. There was also much to be said for his street-cred. He had convictions for theft, though they didn’t carry much kudos in the East End, rated about the same as raiding a toddler’s piggy bank. What hoisted him head and shoulders above the hundreds of petty villains of the East End was his conviction for beating up a police officer; that made him special, a celebrity, in fact. The East End jungle drums beat out the message: no one messes with Cornelius, not even Old Bill. Assaulting a police officer earned him respect, bordering on reverence and communal genuflection. Grandees of gangland even began to notice. The gun-slinging, razor-slashing Krays always had their eyes peeled for new talent.
Rees doubtlessly saw the benefit in having a handyman as a minder. Of course it hadn’t occurred to her that all fighters needed sparring-partners and punchbags. She became the punchbag. Her first black eye made her question the wisdom of a working and cohabiting relationship with a thug who believed in settling every difference of opinion with his fists. Whitehead, who was already married, warned Rees that she’d get a beating if her nightly returns fell below a plimsoll line he’d set before she set sail soliciting: this was something he actually boasted about when interviewed by the police.
The last time Rees was seen alive in public she was wearing a tight-fitting black skirt, tan-coloured nylon stockings, a white woollen jumper with a distinctive blue zigzag pattern, a black and white speckled coat with a large collar and patch pockets, and high-heeled navy-blue shoes. This description was given to the police by another street girl, Brenda Meah, Rees’s soulmate.
Rees and Meah had been working as a pair in Commercial Road, a rough patch – what other sort was there in the East End then? – in the early hours of Sunday, 29 September 1963, meeting up again later, by arrangement, in Farmer’s café, which, despite its incongruous name, had almost certainly never accommodated a rural customer. The not-funny joke was that it was there to service the local cows.
After a cup of tea and feet up for half an hour, they returned to work until four a.m. Having teamed-up again in Commercial Road, they began walking, arms linked sisterly fashion, towards New Road in the hope of finding a trawling taxi to take them to their flat, where, in the tradition of street girls, they never entertained clients. They needed a sanctuary, however much of a tip it was in itself, that was untarnished by the bi-products of their street life.
As they reached New Road, a car passed them, cruising, and stopped. The driver was male, but he didn’t turn, so the women saw only the back of his head. Softly the engine ticked over. Headlights remained on. The prostitutes slowed their stride. The driver continued staring ahead. Neither Rees nor Meah wanted any more trade. They were done for the night, well and truly. Suddenly, Rees exclaimed, ‘He’s all right, I know him.’ Breaking from Meah, she ran to the car. Before jumping in, she shouted to her kindred spirit, ‘I’ll see if he’ll take you as well, if you like.’
Meah shook her head, saying, ‘No, you go on. I’ll make my own way.’
Rees shrugged and climbed in. The car sped off northwards into what was left of the night. Gwynneth Rees was gone. For ever.
Interviewed at length by the police after the body was retrieved from the jaws of the digger and identified, Meah said she couldn’t really explain why she had declined the chance of a free lift home. ‘It was instinctive, just a gut feeling,’ she said. The free ride might have come at the cost of her life, a priceless example of false economy. ‘I think he was young,’ she added. Is that something that can be gauged from merely the back of a head? Maybe.
Of course, most crucially, Chadburn wanted details of the car. Did she note the registration number? Of course she didn’t. Who would have in those circumstances? She scratched and shook her head. ‘I’m not good on cars.’ She couldn’t even recall if it was a saloon, sports or estate model. What colour? Impossible to tell at night in street lighting. After more rumination, she reduced the possibilities of make to a shortlist of three, after being shown photographs: a Zodiac, Consul or Zephyr.
Cornelius Whitehead drove a Ford Zephyr.
Within hours, Whitehead was arrested. He admitted knowing Rees, having regular sex with her ‘over a period of time’ and giving her ‘quite a few whackings’, which ‘the lazy cow fully deserved’. What’s that saying about not speaking ill of the dead? However, he denied being her ponce because it would have been ‘a poor business investment’ as she was ‘such a bloody useless earner’. And to think that some woman had actually married him and he was a couple’s son-in-law! What a duff hand they’d been dealt.
Scrubbed bloodstains were detected in Whitehead’s car and on his clothes. Analysis proved of little help. Both Rees and Whitehead had the same blood group, O, the most common. DNA profiling and other high-tech forensic techniques were mere embryos and a long way off hatching. Whitehead readily accepted the bloodstains could have come from Rees, when receiving one of the punishment ‘whackings’. With utter disrespect and scorn, he said, ‘But I guess she won’t be pressing any charges against me.’ Chadburn was too much of a veteran to be incited into doing something silly that he would regret.
During the two days that Whitehead was detained at Richmond police station, several East End prostitutes gave statements, testifying how scared they were of him because of his propensity for unprovoked, savage violence, out of all proportion. ‘Someone to stay well clear of,’ said one. Whitehead asked Chadburn, ‘Where the fuck is Mortlake, anyway; in Yorkshire?’
Unamused, Chadburn quizzed Whitehead about when he was last in the Mortlake area. Whitehead’s response was predictable. ‘If I don’t know where the fucking place is, how can I have been there, except by accident, like passing through, unaware.’
The more Chadburn garnered evidence of Whitehead’s reputation, the less he became a suspect. ‘He’s all right, I know him,’ Rees had said to Meah, before running to the car. If she’d known it was Whitehead, surely she’d have run the other way – jet-propelled. The litmus test of logic was steadily but inexorably ruling out Whitehead. Chadburn was right to have groaned when Rees’s occupation was made known to him. The investigation had become a nightmare, bogged down in a maze of dead ends.
Two inquests into Rees’s death were adjourned. The third and final one was held with a jury on 4 March 1964 at Kingston Coroner’s Court. The outcome was a formality: the jurors returned an ‘open verdict’, confirming that the cause of death was ‘not ascertainable’, exactly what the pathologist had concluded months earlier. One week later, Rees was buried in the ancient graveyard of St Katherine’s Church, Canvey Island. A simple aluminium cross marked her final resting place, but not where her life had ended, something still eluding Chadburn, which it would continue to do throughout the year, and not just him, but all those who followed in his despairing footsteps.1
Whitehead was an East End boy to the core. West was for the toffs. And Mortlake was in a foreign land. In 1964, Chadburn was sure that Whitehead was guilty of many crimes, but not the murder of Rees. He was not ‘Deep Throat’. But Chadburn was philosophical, if not a philosopher. Whitehead would keep. Time was against him. And in 1964, the Old Bailey and 1969 were not far off. Not if you had the patience of Scotland Yard.
1 On 7 January 1969 Whitehead stood in the dock of the famous Number One court at the Old Bailey. Alongside him were Ronnie Kray, Reggie Kray, Charlie Kray, John Barrie, Ronald Bender, Anthony Barry, Christopher Lambrianou, Anthony Lambrianou and Freddie Foreman. Whitehead was now in the big league, among a gallery of gangsters who for years had terrorised London from east to west. All were charged in connection with the murders of George Cornell, Jack McVitie and Frank Mitchell. Found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of Jack Mitchell, Whitehead was sentenced to seven years in prison. Few people among the public would have remembered him as a suspect in the ‘Nudes’ murders. The police remembered, though, and no doubt wondered…