Back to the river Thames, such a central feature in all these crimes, as if the main artery of the story, choreographing all the twists and turns. A tidal river, ebbing and flowing, once the lifeblood of the metropolis, now just another of its myriad, murky attractions, like the Tower of London, where heads once rolled off the chopping block. As the Thames ebbs each day, so it deposits its flotsam, even the human detritus, on its muddy foreshores. The river police are always looking for floaters. The sinuous stretch of river through the capital has always been a temptation for those with suicidal ambitions. The Thames has also been the watery grave of people who have died by the hands of others, using the river as a convenient repository. Certainly, if the Thames could talk and write, it would have the best story in town to tell. But kiss and tell isn’t Father Thames’s style; it keeps its dark secrets buried in its sediment until prised out.
Sunday, 2 February 1964 was no day of rest for Chadburn and his overworked team. They were busy preparing for the inquest into Gwynneth Rees’s death, while continuing to garner evidence in the forlorn hope that a denouement might be delivered by a magic spell, otherwise known as unbelievable luck.
Not far away from Richmond police station, just a few miles east along the Thames on the sweeping bend before Hammersmith Bridge on the Surrey side, members of the London Corinthian Sailing Club were preparing for a dinghy race. Most of them were in the comparative warmth of the forty-year-old clubhouse, but brothers George and Douglas Capon were messing with a rubber craft on the foreshore, near a pontoon. Casually casting his eyes around the area, Douglas spied an object beached further along the foreshore that bore ‘a remarkable resemblance’ to a human body, so he wandered off to explore. Moments later, he was shouting to his brother, ‘George, come here quickly!’ The mysterious object wasn’t a ‘resemblance’ to a human body but a real one. Female, dead and naked, apart from a pair of nylon stockings around her ankles and knickers stuffed in her mouth.
Douglas guarded the body while George scampered breathlessly into the clubhouse to raise the alarm and make an emergency phone call. Naturally enough, there was soon a ghoulish gathering around the bloated discovery. If there is such a phenomenon as telepathy, Chadburn’s antenna should have been twitching as it received the foreboding signal.
Joshua Stein, the divisional surgeon and one of the first officials on the scene, reckoned that the dead woman must have been in the river for ‘quite a few days’. The tide was rising and the Thames was preparing to reclaim its current star attraction, so she was hastily transferred to the Hammersmith mortuary, a manoeuvre urged by renowned coroner Gavin Thurston. The ‘Nudes’ series was gathering momentum, driven almost by a kinetic energy, though this was something that could be grasped only with hindsight.
By six-thirty that evening, pathologist Dr Donald Teare was conducting the post-mortem and making routine notes, such as height, five feet, two inches; brown eyes; dark brown hair; abdominal scar indicating Caesarean surgery; slender build but age difficult to assess; pronounced stretch marks on lower stomach; several teeth missing. Body weight was immaterial because of water-absorption. In fact, the corpse was totally waterlogged, proof that it had been immersed in water for between two and seven days. The lungs had ‘ballooned’, consistent with death by drowning, which was the pathologist’s knee-jerk conclusion that day.
Not so routine for recording in Teare’s notebook were the knickers filling the deceased’s mouth, bulging her cheeks and puckering her lips, plus the fact that they were heavily stained with semen, unwashed by the discerning Thames.
In her stomach was a fatty meal, mostly undigested. Identification was uncomplicated this time. Fingerprints gave her an immediate name: Hannah Tailford, aged thirty, born in Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, more recently of a number of London addresses; a prostitute with a colourful track record. She was highly unusual because of her social mobility. She traded relatively upmarket as well as unequivocally downmarket. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, she straddled the spectrum: a unique accomplishment.
But let’s not race ahead of ourselves. Despite the perfunctory findings of the pathologist, the police quickly abandoned any notion of suicide or accidental death. What woman would strip naked in mid-winter and ram a pair of soiled, semen-soaked knickers so far down her throat as to induce choking just prior to leaping into the river? Who would bother to consume a hearty meal if, in a few minutes, they intended to leap towards watery oblivion? As for an accident, how absurd! Logic, logic.
Consequently, by the Monday, a fresh murder squad had been scrambled, headed by Detective Chief Inspector Benjamin Devonald, who was stationed at Shepherd’s Bush, which immediately demonstrated an administrative and organisational weakness. As we know, less than three months earlier prostitute Gwynneth Rees’s murdered body had been found a little to the west of where Tailford was washed up. Yet there were two different murder squads at work, with separate chiefs and Indians, one tribe encamped at Richmond and the other in nearby Shepherd’s Bush. The only common links between the two encampments were pathologist Dr Teare and coroner Gavin Thurston.
It was going to be several months before a Scotland Yard commander took an overview role and introduced joined-up thinking and an all-inclusive Yard appraisal and approach. Even then there would remain different leaders of the individual investigations, which inevitably triggered friction and rivalry instead of cohesion and harmonisation of effort. However, it would be remiss to take these crimes out of the context of their era and judge the police response and performance by today’s standards and investigation methodology. Serial killers were still rare beasts and unexplored. Understanding them was limited. Forces worked as individual firms. Information was only grudgingly shared. Brawn still outweighed brain when it came to policing.
Admittedly there had been John Haig, the ‘Acid Bath Vampire’, who murdered six people – men and women – then drank their blood, disposing of the bodies in vast, sizzling vats: the ‘Blackout Ripper’, who killed four women in war-ravaged London. Of the latter, Chief Supt Fred Cherrill wrote, rather hysterically for a normally measured senior cop:
Not since the panic-ridden days in 1888, when Jack the Ripper was abroad in the East End, had London known such a reign of terror as that which existed in this war-time February (1942) when, night after night, death – fiendish, revolting and gruesome – came to four unsuspecting women in the heart of the metropolis.
Hyperbole, perhaps, considering the reign of terror of the Blitz, which Londoners were still in shock from, but there was something phantom-like about a killer who stalked the street under the cover of darkness, perhaps shrouded by fog, and striking at random prey. Perhaps such a killer was indeed spookier than a silently falling bomb or the sudden engine-cut of a V1 or V2 remote-controlled missile.
Haig’s crimes, although spine-chilling, had a conventional motive – money and greed. The ‘Blackout Ripper’ was dismissed as a vagary of war. Airman Gordon Frederick Cummins was quickly arrested and hanged, aged twenty-eight, in Wandsworth Prison. Nothing to be learned from him because the police had been so proficient, though their task had been made easy by such an artless perpetrator who left so many clues, like confetti at a wedding; detection would have been a snip for any armchair sleuth.
The ‘Nudes’ killer was in a completely different category. It would be misleading to suggest that he didn’t leave clues, but they always seemed calculated ones, not mistakes; frustrating clues because they led nowhere, except to sleepless nights and frayed tempers for the pursuers.
The knickers in Tailford’s mouth were some kind of message, but any attempt at deciphering could only be clumsy conjecture, squandering valuable time. Yet the deliberate desecration was so deliberate and taunting that it couldn’t be ignored. Was ‘Deep Throat’ highlighting his disgust, portraying Tailford as a dustbin, a vessel for trash, nothing but garbage, like herself? Maybe he was revealing what he’d done to her, how he liked his sex, giving away something as a tease, a sort of, now let’s see how clever you are. Game on! Or was the message more sinister, sort of Mafia-styled. A warning to certain people to keep shut about events that could cause embarrassment – even ruin – in high places if made public? This would have been a risible theory with Rees or Figg, but not in the case of Tailford who seemed to lead a schizophrenic working life, criss-crossing social boundaries. High and low. Variety. The spice of life. Poison, too.
Hannah Tailford was formerly identified by her sister, Mrs Elsie Youngman, on 5 February. Hannah was the second daughter of coal miner John Tailford and mother Elsie. By the age of fifteen, her life was already in meltdown.
Most of her teenage years were a shameful catalogue of thefts, care and protection orders, approved schools, absconding, probation, breaching probation, running riot and finally borstal, from which she also escaped; she was obsessed with delinquency and had a dog-of-war tenacity against authority. What a beginning! She managed to break through every safety net. Nothing would impede her fall.
Soon she was in London, soliciting in Hyde Park, opposite and parallel with Park Lane, emulating the Victorian courtesans, many of who would parade on horseback or in carriages. Tailford kept her feet on the ground, if not her delusions.
Within a few months she was pregnant, resulting in her conceiving a crazy scheme which exemplified her depravity and the moral depths to which she’d plummeted. She placed an advert in a shop window in south London, offering to sell her baby to a ‘good home’. Although not yet born, she promised that the child would be on the market in April. Of course this was illegal, but had years ago ceased to be an impediment to Tailford’s impulses. What were laws for it not to be bent and broken had long been her anarchic philosophy.
When confronted by a reporter from the Sunday Pictorial, she assumed the alias Theresa Foster and her sob story (a litany of lies, of course) was related by her with all the aplomb of a RADA-trained ingénue. ‘I know it’s shameful and wicked of me,’ she simpered. But I was forced to make this terrible offer to attract attention to my plight. I met my husband, John, a merchant seaman, five years ago at a fairground in Manchester. We married eighteen months later. He seemed to like the idea of becoming a father. But when I told him the baby was on the way, it started a terrific row. Next day he left to join a ship. I haven’t heard from him since and I don’t know where he is. I cry at nights wondering what to do. Now I know it’s illegal, I have withdrawn my advert. But my baby must have a good home. I shall be broken-hearted parting with it, but I’m only doing my best.’
What a tear-jerker! What an inventive mind! All of it was fantasy, of course. She wasn’t married, there was no seaman in her tacky life and all her penury was self-induced. The only truth in her pitiful plea of mitigation was her pregnancy.
On 22 May she gave birth in St Stephen’s Hospital, Fulham to a boy. Despite now aware that selling a child was illegal and a serious criminal offence, she went ahead with negotiating a deal with a couple who were desperate for a baby of their own, but the wife was unable to conceive. Instead of going through the proper channels and being vetted as a suitable couple to adopt, they met Tailford surreptitiously on the premises of the hospital on 5 June, the day she was being discharged with the baby. The couple had drawn up an agreement, which Tailford readily signed because it meant she pocketed twenty pounds in cash immediately for handing over the newborn.
Rather than heartbroken, Tailford was cock-a-hoop. Of course in such a busy environment, it was inevitable that the transaction failed to pass unnoticed and it was reported. Hospital officials were rightly disgusted and the crime was left to London County Council’s legal department to implement legal proceedings, but after considerable internal soul-searching a decision was taken to ignore the transgression. The one person who would have suffered most from court proceedings would have been the baby. Not only would Tailford have been charged, but also the couple. The baby would either have been returned to his biological mother, a lawless street girl, or taken into care at public expense, though with the possibility of going to a decent home through a recognised adoption agency, repeating a process already consummated but without the underhand exchange of money. Occasionally the inertia of bureaucracy could be the wisest and most humane course of action.
From the late 1950s, Tailford cohabitated with a man known as Allan Lynch, although he’d been born William Ewing. Wherever they lived – too many different addresses to count and document – they posed as husband and wife, although they never married. Hannah gave birth to a daughter in April 1961, and a boy in May the following year. The son went the way of his half-brother, hawked for adoption in a blackmarket auction. What made Tailford keep the daughter is another of this narrative’s mysteries. Much of the time the little girl was farmed out to babysitters. Of Tailford’s three children, the boys were undoubtedly the lucky ones.
By the beginning of January 1964, Tailford and Lynch were living in West Norwood at 37 Thurlby Road. Virtually every afternoon, when Lynch was at work in a billiards’ hall, Tailford would be visited by a stocky ‘woman’, with dark hair, an aquiline nose, and about five feet, eight inches tall, always arriving in a van. Tailford’s flat was on the top of three floors. She told her neighbours that her visitor was ‘Auntie Gwen’.
As soon as ‘Auntie Gwen’ was inside Tailford’s three-room flat, off would come the wig, dress and high heels and there would be the recently retired Thomas Trice, an odd-job and handyman, who lived in the Victoria area of London. Certainly he was odd and also very handy, especially with Tailford. In return for doing all the chores, Tailford would service him in the bedroom. Usually he was made to clean the flat naked, which was to his liking.
After an hour or two scrubbing and polishing, he would have to stand to attention in the bedroom while Tailford inspected his housework. If she found as much as a speck of dust, she would thrash him with a cane, which she kept hidden under the mattress. Apparently, ‘Gwen’ was disappointed if he failed to displease.
Tailford’s very personal drag artiste would often drive her in the evenings to her various patrol zones. Like many of the street girls, she would have breaks during the night shift, stopping at one of the numerous mobile snack bars around central London. Her favourite was on the Charing Cross Embankment. One client she met there was a chauffeur, William Sales, who drove his employer’s Bentley, which really impressed Tailford, who had never had sex in such a ‘classy’ car. They drove all the way to Epping Forest to do business, and there was enough room in the front, on the soft, lush leather upholstery, so they didn’t have to clamber into the back. ‘She came cheap,’ Sales was to tell the police ungraciously.
On other nights, along the Bayswater Road, which could become congested with hookers in the sex ‘rush hours’, she was ‘collected’ by a car bearing diplomatic plates and driven to a mansion in ‘Millionaires’ Row’, alongside Kensington Palace Gardens, for an orgy, in which there might be at least twenty participants, reminiscent of Sir Francis Dashwood’s eighteenth-century Hellfire Club. All very ‘civilised’ and polite, and so very different from her normal trade.
At first this may seem improbable. Why choose from the lowest end of the market when women like Mandy Rice-Davies, and enthusiastic ‘amateurs’ from the courtesan higher echelons, might well be willing and available? There are several plausible answers. Most importantly, women such as Mandy Rice-Davies would have recognised a politician or many of the peers, such as the lecherous Lord Boothby, for example, or a sporting personality. Street girls rarely read newspapers. If they watched TV, it wouldn’t be the News, so the men they would be performing with would most likely be unknown to them. Bon viveurs and entertaining conversationalists weren’t required. The ‘parties’, as they were billed euphemistically, were for men with kinky tastes who also liked a bit of rough, hence the Tailfords. The women had to be prepared to dominate whipping and bondage sessions and also acquiesce when oral and anal sex were requested.
Most times the men would be dressed in dinner suits and black bow ties. The ‘party’ wouldn’t begin until after the men had dined, smoked cigars and downed vintage port. Only then would the toastmaster rap his gavel and declare, ‘Gentlemen, the girls are ready to be served!’
The women would be seated in a drawing room, drinks and cigarettes in hands. The men would bow, mix, circulate and choose. All rooms were available. Another reason for its plausibility was the ease with which a dozen street girls could be corralled. These weren’t women residing miles apart in suburbia who were slaves to a social calendar and their diary, having to juggle Ascot with Henley Royal Regatta and Wimbledon, Glyndebourne and weekends in Nice or Cannes. The chauffeur ‘collectors’ could drive to one square-mile of streets in west London and round up a dozen tarted-up women, game for anything, within twenty minutes. By the time they were deposited back on the streets where plucked from, they would be legless from drink, drugs and exhaustion, with only a hazy memory of where they had been. However, the money in their handbags would have reassured them in the morning that it had been a worthwhile night’s work.
If those anecdotes had come from prostitutes, ponces, a woman trying to sell her story or creative hacks, then I would, of course, have treated them as apocryphal. Those sorts of stories immediately build a wall of suspicion around discerning researchers. My sources were of a very different calibre. The facts were validated by the police. MI5 and the Special Branch were concerned about how the foreign diplomats, some of them spies, were using ‘honey traps’ to compromise UK politicians and influential donors to political parties.
Of course, at the time of Tailford’s death, none of this was known to me. Along the way, however, ‘Jack’, my informant, dripfed me with mouth-watering titbits, later endorsed by Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard John du Rose: ‘There were indications that Hannah had attended “kinky”’ parties arranged by a foreign diplomat, who employed an agent to recruit women willing to take part in perverted sexual practices,’ he wrote in his autobiography, Murder Was My Business, published by W.H. Allen in 1971.
Tailford was a really bad lot; to depict her as evil is no exaggeration. ‘Auntie Gwen’ was also far more devious than an eccentric cross-dresser, chauffeur and factotum for Tailford. They had their own little racket going, a blackmailing cottage industry, but this wasn’t even uncovered by the police until considerably later. Facts to emerge leant weight to the theory that the gloating, silent message to Tailford with her knickers rammed in her mouth was: Now you’re the one who’s stuffed! Oh, what a picture! (A big clue there.) Clarification will follow.
Detectives questioned more than seven hundred people as they compiled a documentary of her life, then men and women with whom she’d been acquainted, and her last hours, a tedious and yet at times illuminating insight into her dark, deep and labyrinthine psyche and daily habits – almost intrusive if it hadn’t been for the commendable motives – and yet the breakthrough remained tantalisingly elusive.
Tailford last left home for the streets on the evening of Friday, 24 January. She was dressed in a flame-coloured frilly nylon blouse, a black cardigan and matching skirt, a dark blue winter overcoat, light blue pixie hat and black leather court shoes. She also had on a wristwatch with a black leather strap and a wedding ring. In her black leather patent handbag was a wallet containing notes and coins, a vanity mirror, brown plastic purse, a key to the flat, tissues, a diary, cheap ballpoint pen and a packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. There were vague reports of sightings of her right until the end of January, but these were dismissed as unreliable and misleading by the police. One person said he’d seen her ‘stoned on uppers’ on 31 January, but there was no trace of amphetamines in her blood at the autopsy.
Before daylight on 19 February, Sergeant John Towes was navigating his police launch on the Thames near the Festival Hall Pier, quite close to the King’s Reach shore, when the boat shook, shuddered and spluttered. One of his crew of two constables called out that something had become ‘caught up in the works’. Towes cut the engine and managed to drift the launch to the Waterloo Pier police station.
Later, Sergeant Ronald Wills soon located the problem – a blue woman’s overcoat, now considerably shredded by the launch, but sufficiently intact to be identified as the one worn by Tailford on the last evening she was seen alive.
After two adjournments, the inquest into Tailford’s death was finally concluded on 28 April. Despite the medical evidence that still pointed to her having died from drowning, there were bruises to her chin, which could have come from blows, maybe fists, prior to her death, Dr Teare conceded. Before entering the water, she could have been rendered unconscious by a couple of professional, knockout punches. As in the case of Rees, the jury returned an ‘open’ verdict. Certainly no one now was thinking any more of suicide or accidental death, especially as Scotland Yard – already twenty days into yet another ‘Nudes’ episode.