My meeting with ‘Jack’ on Wednesday, 13 January 1964 was, as usual, at my instigation. I was seeking a progress report, which normally turned out to be an oxymoron. Progress wasn’t something readily associated with this stumbling, bumbling, pitiful investigation. But this evening was different – or so it seemed.
‘I think we’re getting there.’ Oblique but definitely stimulating. Not another Archibald, I hoped.
I gulped on my beer. We were in Milo’s drinking club. Two detectives from Bow Street police station were chatting-up the one and only ‘hostess’, who had seen better days. She was probably someone’s grandmother. There were only a couple other customers, Covent Garden workers of some kind, one of whom was steadily feeding the jukebox. ‘King of the Road’ was playing. The lighting was very low, probably for the benefit of the hostess, giving her a chance.
‘Jack’ didn’t know the two middle-aged Bow Street detectives, who resembled a couple of bookmakers’ clerks, he told me with a smattering of snobbery. Scotland Yard, especially the murder squad, represented the elite, a cut above the staff of the neighbourhood stations, mimicking the clash in the US between the FBI and regional police forces. The riposte from the Bow Street Boys would have been that smart-arse Scotland Yard wasn’t proving its elitism when it came to catching ‘Deep Throat’. Fifteen-love to Bow Street. And how about Jack the Ripper? Thirty-love to Bow Street.
So what did ‘Jack’ mean by we’re getting there?
‘Not for publication,’ he prefaced what was to follow. Not for publication was worse to the ears of a journalist than this is off the record, which at least left room for bargaining and nifty manoeuvring.
‘OK,’ I said pragmatically, but what exactly isn’t for publication?’
“‘Top Gun” believes we’ve got our man nailed.’
Top Gun! I’d never heard that one. ‘Who the hell’s “Top Gun”?’
‘I can’t tell you that, either.’
This was becoming more ludicrous than a scene from Spooks.
‘I assume it’s Osborn or Marchant?’ I fished.
‘Or above.’
How high was this going? ‘Well, is he senior or not?’
‘It’s immaterial because no names, OK? You know the drill.’
I wasn’t sure that I did.
‘King of the Road’ ended. Someone else took his place. Sound and rhythm a carbon copy. The volume was high, pleasing ‘Jack’, who was pre-empting any Bow Street earwigging. Time to drill for oil.
‘You’re near to making an arrest, is that it?’ I avoided any sarcasm alluding to Archibald.
‘Nearer than ever before.’
That wasn’t saying much.
Had all the scientific evidence come good in terms of a final resolution?
‘Yes and no,’ he said enigmatically. Here we go again, I thought, just like those mysterious crop circles in the West Country.
‘Is there about to be an arrest?’
‘Could very well be.’
Definitely time for another drink. Milo recognised my strafed expression and pleading gesture towards our empty pint glasses. Replacements came by express delivery.
‘He lives in south London.’ This was offered before I’d even asked another question. Alcohol had the magic quality of opening doors, but south London was a big area, something I pointed out, devoid of pugnacity. He then asked me if Beulah Hill meant anything to me. It didn’t; not immediately.
‘Keep an eye on south London,’ he urged me. ‘That’s where all the action’s going to be. We’re closing in. It’s all rather complicated. There are known vintage villains connected to this.’
South London, known vintage villains, that could only mean the Richardson mob, surely, who were into organised fraud and torture, for kicks, as a pastime when life was tedious. So I said, ‘Must be the Richardsons, right?’
Slowly, ‘Jack’ shook his head. ‘Wrong name.’
It couldn’t be the Krays; they ruled east and west. South of the river was a foreign country to them.
Finally, I tired of this guessing game. Two pints had lubricated the tongue a little more. ‘I don’t want you to be fooled, Mike,’ he said earnestly. ‘This will be a decoy, to lure someone out of his lair by turning the spotlight in the wrong direction.’
It didn’t seem to me that ‘Deep Throat’ needed luring from his lair; he’d already murdered at least six young women, the last only a few weeks previously, but I had no wish to dissent and ruffle the symbiosis.
‘Jack’ then reminded me of something he’d said to me at a previous rendezvous. Think big. Did he mean a big man in size, reputation, authority or notoriety. I posed the question.
‘Three out of four,’ was all that he’d say on that subject.
Suddenly Beulah Hill in Upper Norwood, south London, near Crystal Palace, registered with me. ‘Not Jimmy Evans, the safe-blower?’ I said incredulously.
‘Jack’ just grinned impishly and said,’ Now there’s a name to conjure with.’
‘But is he the decoy or the real deal?’
‘He’d blow the tarts’ heads off, not just mangle their tonsils,’ he answered irreverently.
Evans had already castrated with a shotgun George Foreman, brother of gang mobster Freddie. ‘So Evans is just the dupe?’ I pushed.
‘Use your noddle,’ he said. Eliciting a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was tantamount to Oliver Twist with his bowl asking for more.
If Evans was just the distraction, then who was the real fox that the hounds were after? This I put to ‘Jack’.
‘That’s something that has to be firmed-up,’ was all he would say.
‘Does this have anything to do with what happened last week in the House of Peacocks?’ I wondered aloud.
‘Forget it. Nothing at all, but it will spice-up the background material for you when you’re able to write something.’ This was harder than trying to push a juggernaut uphill single-handed.
Jimmy Evans lived in a mansion-sized house he called The House of Peacocks. The previous Wednesday it had been raided by armed police. Evans wasn’t there at the time. In fact, the house was empty. But next day the national newspapers had a carnival with the story, describing a ‘siege’ that wasn’t one.
The Sun, my newspaper, was no exception, but I wasn’t the guilty party. A Daily Mirror reporter wrote:
Swarms of police raided the House of Peacocks yesterday in the search for Ginger Marks who is believed to have been shot in a London street. Since two a.m. hidden detectives had kept watch on the big corner house where two pet peacocks strut in the back garden. At lunchtime fifty police – some with dogs – suddenly surrounded the house. One detective climbed to an upstairs window and tried to get in. Others went to the back and broke a window… Police had been given a phone tip that Ginger Marks had been taken to the house, badly hurt.
The Daily Sketch really went over the top: Revolver-carrying detectives moved in… the message was clear: whoever lived in the House of Peacocks had shot and abducted Marks.
If they’d carried out the raid a few days earlier, they would have encountered Evans and thirty of his gunmen, but no Ginger Marks. They were armed with every conceivable weapon from revolvers and shot guns to semi-automatics, not expecting the police but Freddie Foreman and his gang with firebombs, retaliating against the shooting of brother George by Evans. This swashbuckling yarn is told in much fuller detail by Evans in his autobiography, with Martin Short, entitled The Survivor (Mainstream Publishing, 2001). Marks was a small-time crook who was presumed kidnapped and murdered: his body was never recovered.
Around noon the day following my drinking session with ‘Jack’, I received an anonymous call. The man said something to the effect of, ‘Prepare for the arrest of Jimmy Evans. Not for robbery, but murder. Not Marks but mass murder. All in west London. Follow my drift?’ Then click, he was gone: the tried and tested format of seasoned troublemakers. I tried to ID the voice because it was familiar. I phoned ‘Jack’. He was out. I called again after a liquid lunch. Now he was at his desk. I told him about the call. His explanation was given in one pithy word before hanging up just like the tipster: ‘Decoy.’
Stupidly and irresponsibly, the South London Advertiser, a weekly local newspaper that subsequently went out of business, took the bait and fell for the hoax. The day after my call to ‘Jack’, this newspaper splashed on the canard, without verification or tracing the source: ‘Has the House of Peacocks a Link with the Thames Nude Murders?’ The text went:
On Tuesday an Advertiser reporter passed on to a senior Scotland Yard detective information linking an Anerley man with the Beulah House of Peacocks raid, the disappearance of Ginger Marks and the Thames Nude Murders.
The information came during three telephone conversations between the reporter and a mystery voice who was an underworld tipster. He explained that the man in question is believed to have controlled the activities of three of the murdered prostitutes – Hannah Tailford, Margaret McGowan [Frances Brown] and Gwynneth Rees. He was detained in Kensington police station by detectives inquiring into the murders, but later released.
The name cropped up again after last week’s Flying Squad raid on the House of Peacocks during the massive London hunt for the missing East End car-dealer, Ginger Marks.
The ‘grass’ or ‘tipster’ said that the name of the man owning the House of Peacocks was known to criminals as an alias of the man questioned about the Nude murders. The ‘grass’ also said that the man had done some crooked car deals with Ginger Marks.
In a third conversation, the ‘grass’ cast further light on what might have happened to two of the prostitutes the night they died. Gwynneth Rees died of an abortion – not as the result of a sexual assault as such, one of the others died in a bath in a house in Marylebone Road before being dumped in the Thames.
The ‘grass’ then alleged that the man bossed a chain of brothels and call girls, and held the lease of house in Curzon Street, Mayfair, formerly owned by the notorious Messina brothers. [They controlled brothers and street-prostitutes in the West End for many years previously.] He gave this reporter names of two South London prostitutes, the addresses in in Notting Hill Gate and Bloomsbury used by prostitutes and the name of a south London public house used by an unnamed prostitute – she arranged to meet the man in the House of Peacocks – all the women were controlled by the same man.
The ‘grass’ said the man, knowing he was known to the police, had provided himself with an escape route to Dublin. The ‘grass’ then said that the underworld generally believed that the man was in hiding abroad. ‘But,’ said the ‘grass’, I know that he is living at Number … ……. Road, Anerley.’ He added, ‘My underworld friends tell me that ‘Ginger’ Marks is not dead but seriously wounded.
One of the two cars standing in the driveway of the House of Peacocks – the blood-red Ford Classic – belongs to the man. The other, an American convertible, is known to criminals as belonging to an associate of the man.
The astonishing aspect of this wildly inaccurate and libellous story was how it ever got into print without credible backup and authentication. Solicitor Jimmy Fellowes wasted no time in issuing the newspaper with a writ for libel on behalf of Evans, who was understandably incandescent. Despite his criminal record, Evans won a small fortune that in today’s money would amount to about £250,000.
It was years after the ‘Nudes’ murders had become mothballed, and following my reading Evans’s account of his life, that the identity dawned on me of the man who had phoned me anonymously forewarning me of the notorious safe-blower about to be arrested as a serial killer. It was Tommy Butler, one-time head of the Flying Squad, whose obsession had been rounding up all the Great Train Robbers, perhaps for more than purely professional reasons. It became proven – not merely known – in police circles that when recovering stolen loot he would squirrel away a percentage for himself and a few of his cronies; one of those cronies was Detective Chief Inspector Frank Williams, of the Kennington police station, south London. Evans had good reason to know and detest him because he traded with the Foremans. So, too, did Butler. In his book, Evans went on to accuse Butler of being the ‘Nudes’ serial killer. Now that was carrying a grudge a step too far. Butler may have been severely ‘bent’, but he was no killer; well, perhaps that’s vindication without proof, but he definitely wasn’t ‘Deep Throat’, who was indeed much bigger than he in both physique and celebrity status. Evans’s only justification, apparently, for naming Butler as the serial killer was that he lived within a mile of most of the cast-out bodies, was single, and as we saw earlier, not only lived with his mother, but had strange habits. Yet the only really strange habit of his for a policeman, that I can see, was his propensity for stealing cash from burglars.
Of course it was shocking that a coterie of senior officers of Scotland Yard, the mecca of policing, was undoubtedly corrupt, but that shouldn’t be confused with being surprised; it was an almost inevitable gravitation. Fleet Street reporters, for instance, were earning more than GPs, surgeons, Scotland Yard commanders, airline pilots and even the Prime Minister. As Sir James Anderton, the former Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, said, nearly all police officers throughout the nation came from a ‘working-class’ background. Nationally there was a large economic imbalance, and there still is.
In the 1960s, the police considered themselves the poor relations of the services. Egalitarianism had gathered momentum after the war as a political and social issue. Crime, especially white-collar crime, was seen as acceptable and a proportion of the police, all from CID, started helping themselves to some of the spoils, not seeing themselves as criminals but exploiting their own influence and clout to create a fairer society. They were merely joining the every man for himself culture and redistributing wealth: there was no evidence of women officers being admitted to the dubious magic circle.
Long has been the assumption that any trend starting in the USA would soon be imported to the UK, and so it was with police corruption. The evergreen ‘Black Dahlia’ case in Los Angeles more than any other demonstrated the depth of corruption within the LAPD, embracing the police chief and political administrators, right up to governor level. Elizabeth Short had followed the well-worn trail to tinsel town in search of stardom – America’s take on Dick Whittington – which she found dramatically but not in the image of her dreams. As briefly described earlier, she was carved in two, decapitated, her face slashed from ear-to-ear, viscera including her womb removed, then deposited beside a residential road; all the parts were laid out like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, there for a pathologist to try to reassemble. Grisly, right?
What emerged from ‘Good Cop’ Harry Hansen, who was leading for much of the time, was a day-to-day working relationship between police, City Hall, movie studio bosses and gangsters, mostly the Mafia. Hansen deduced that Short had been disembowelled and further butchered following a botched abortion, which was then still illegal, by an ‘eminent’ gynaecologist who regularly carried out these procedures for the stars, such as Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner. A cabal of gynaecologists of high rank in their profession, equivalent to Britain’s Harley Street professionals, would perform the illegal procedure, if the money was right. But for every thousand dollars they took, fifty per cent went to the police to keep them out of gaol. Short’s body had been so professionally dissected that Detective Hansen recorded that this could only have been performed by a qualified surgeon.
Donald Wolfe revealed in The Black Dahlia Files (Time Warner Books, 2006):
When the Gangster Squad came under scrutiny by the Grand Jury in 1949 and was found to be enforcing pay-offs from the Syndicate [the Mafia], the name of the Squad reverted back to the ‘Intelligence Unit’, under the regime of Chief William Parker. However, when the Intelligence Unit was put under investigation by the Police Commission in 1974, it was learned that once again only the name had changed.
So no one should be the least surprised by corruption among London’s police in the 1960s. They were simply behaving like police forces the world over. No excuse, but a reality check nonetheless. We have to understand without condoning.