February 1965: Leonard Beauchamp stopped abruptly. Two bare feet came into view. They were partly covered by the undergrowth. He was to say later, ‘I first noticed a pair of feet and I could see them up to the ankles. My first reaction was that I was looking at a dummy.’ Even though the toenails were painted.
Unperturbed, he ambled to the main shed on the industrial estate in Acton to tell the store man, Maurice Chester, of his find. ‘I told him there was a woman’s body behind the stores. I was half joking. We had a laugh and a joke about it.’
Minutes later, Beauchamp crossed the compound to the admin office where he made a report to production manager Gerald Marshall. Consequently, a small investigation party marched to the appropriate spot of undergrowth, where all kinds of rubbish was discharged. Marshall concluded that they were looking at a dummy, but ‘to be on the safe side’ he would phone Acton police.
Body number seven was just about to be unveiled.
Showtime again. Curtain up. The troupe would be on stage within the hour. The same old routine, dancing to the tune of the police manual. The same morgue humour. Synchronised shaking of heads. Scripted blasphemy. Jack the Ripper was well and truly eclipsed. London was under siege from a new kind of Blitz, bodies dropping like bombs. There was a distinct smugness among the clean living. This Blitz killed only whores. It was selective, leaving alone the gentrified. No cause for alarm, then, among the good girls, such as those who went to bed for a diamond necklace rather than a paltry fiver. Still someone’s daughter, though; I’m not sure that epitaph entered many heads.
Bridget ‘Bridie’ O’Hara was completely naked. ‘Wrong time of year for sunbathing,’ quipped Detective Superintendent Bill Baldock who took charge. Yet another leader. Scotland Yard was rapidly running out of murder squads.
Enter a new pathologist, Dr David Bowen. Dr Teare, probably much to his relief, was already carving up someone else. Dr Bowen arrived at the Surgical Equipment Supplies Ltd. depot in Westfields Road, Acton at a few minutes after one p.m. and within three hours he was conducting the PM in the Acton mortuary.
O’Hara was five feet and one inch tall, weighing nine stone. Clearly this serial killer liked them short – and undoubtedly submissive. Not one had given him a fight. Never any blood under the victims’ fingernails, few marks except the occasional bruise from a blow to subdue them. A big man. A big name: that’s what ‘Jack’ had said. ‘Jack’ knew his stuff. He was there at PMs, heard the pathologists, and was in the confidence of every team leader. He crossed boundaries, drank with different chiefs, and was privy to every latest development, even when it was nothing more than another head bashing against a brick wall
Apart from being dead, O’Hara was reasonably healthy. The state of her aorta testified to her addiction to booze and fast, fatty food. She wasn’t pregnant and no damage had been inflicted on her vagina. However, some male fluid was found in her airways. Death was due to asphyxia. The interior of her mouth and throat were extensively swollen and there was some bleeding in the tonsils region. Her tongue had been forced down below the lower level of her teeth, of which several were missing, including a plate. There was no sign of strangulation; no ligature or hands had squeezed the life from her lungs. The only clues of asphyxia were in the mucous membranes of the face and lungs. Neither the larynx nor neck had been injured. X-rays established beyond all doubt that there wasn’t a single fracture in the whole of her body.
Giving away the definitive conclusion one lab technician remarked sardonically, ‘It was as if she’d been lovingly robbed of air’ (the italicisation is mine). But when had she been killed? Dr Bowen calculated that she’d been deceased for two or three weeks, plenty of leeway there. She’d been lying in the undergrowth on the industrial estate for a week and had been stripped after death, something the pathologist could determine from the lividity and tell-tale discolouration on various parts of the body: another repetitive signature.
That same evening she was identified by her husband, Michael Joseph O’Hara, aged twenty-eight. He had eleven convictions for robbery, assault, theft and shoplifting. They were well-matched. He was also his wife’s ponce. Naturally enough, the police went to work on him, if only for show, but anyone with a toy marble for a brain would have known that, despite his criminal record for violence, he couldn’t be implicated in this murder unless he could be tethered to all the other victims; the ultimate litmus test.
Mr O’Hara maintained that he hadn’t seen Bridie since the evening of 11 January and she’d been last seen alive leaving the Shepherd’s Bush Hotel at closing time that day. She had been wearing a loose-fitting, grey herringbone tweed coat, with a black-fringed scarf, a fawn cardigan over a red and black speckled blouse, a black skirt and the same coloured, calf-length boots. She was also known to be carrying a small black plastic purse. On one finger was an octagonal wedding ring. She also wore a white metal eternity ring. The missing plate from her upper jaw had been fitted with six teeth.
So what was Bridie O’Hara’s story?
Born in Dublin on 2 March 1937, she was the sixth child in a Roman Catholic family. Her father, Matthew Moore, was a plasterer by trade; honest, hard-working and devoted to his wife and children. Her mother had little time for anything beyond caring for her ever-expanding entourage of children. Money was severely limited, but they were proud folk. All the children went to school and church clean, tidy and well fed. Although devout Christians and resolutely God-fearing, there was no ascetic extremism to their faith.
Bridie left school at the age of fourteen and secured work immediately as a cleaner, firstly in a hospital and then in factories, where the wages were slightly better. When she turned eighteen, restless and stifled, she waved goodbye to her tearful parents and headed for London, that neon magnet for the young, settling in Acton. It’s hard to imagine the attraction of drab, unfashionable Acton, except that it was probably affordable, a place where there was a bed.
Work as a cleaner was easy to come by. The pay was peanuts, but that was something to which she was accustomed. It was a launch pad, but in which direction? It was not long before she was living with labourer Michael ‘Mick’ O’Hara in Shepherd’s Bush. It was also not long before Mick was arrested for robbery and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Two of Bridie’s brothers were despatched from Ireland to ‘save’ their sister from sin and the Devil. They found her drunk in a pub. A few hours later, all three were drunk and arrested for disorderly conduct. There was a certain Irish inevitability to this segment of the story, albeit it mirthless in truth. Bridie already had convictions for soliciting. The die was cast. When news reached Bridie’s mother, it is said that Mary Moore stayed on her knees in church for two continuous hours and worked her way through her rosary even during her fitful hours of semi-sleep.
Despite all this, Bridie and Mick were finally married in Dublin in the neighbourhood Catholic church on 17 September 1962. The night before the wedding, both had attended confession and were forgiven all their sins. It is not known how many Hail Marys they were sentenced to, but by rights it should have kept them up all night and through the honeymoon, which comprised nothing more than a trip to the pub. Her parents seemed reconciled to her attachment to Mick; at least he was a Catholic, even if a villainous one and an inveterate layabout.
Everyone got merrily drunk at the reception, including the parish priest, and it was noteworthy for not having one single fight as entertainment. After the hangover, Bridie had to return to London; there was a living to be made, customers to be serviced.
As the turbulent end approached, the rowing, fighting, brawling, occasionally affectionate, semi-civilised couple were living at 41 Agate Road, Hammersmith, a few roads from top cop Tommy Butler; another teasing red-herring.
By 21 February, the man at the helm of the serial killer investigation was the celebrity cop, Detective Superintendent John du Rose: large, tough, conceited and always surrounded by an aura of invincibility and a pack of sycophants. Baldock had been ruthlessly usurped by this flamboyant showman, who was adept at playing to the gallery, especially the press gallery. Baldock resented the way he had been eased aside as if a disposable nonentity, a mere prop on this stage where du Rose had arrived as the saviour.
These two men had never rubbed along. Baldock decried du Rose as a glory hunter and publicity stuntman. This wasn’t now a harmonious team. Baldock also despised du Rose’s deference to some of his Masonic pals in and out of the force. However, under the frenetic orchestration of ‘Four-Day Johnny’, the tempo reached a feverish high. Detectives descended on Wimpey Autos, a grubby, lock-up sort of commercial garage at 1a Barb Mews, Hammersmith, owned by a William Chissell.
Forensic pickers swept up dirt from the stone floor, bagged it and took it to the lab. After extensive tests, the head of the lab was able to inform du Rose categorically that the globular paint stains on several of the bodies, now revealed as including Frances Brown, were ‘very similar’ to those separated from the dust retrieved from the floor at Wimpey Autos.
‘We’re there!’ Baldock exclaimed. Not quite. As usual in this case, there was yet another stumbling-block: the globular paint was more or less the same as the spray used in all garages that specialised in spraying. The detectives were confronted and confounded by the recurring obstacle: Cresswell or an employee had to have had a provable sexual adventure with not only Brown, but also all the others. Back to genesis.
Other items were lifted from the garage, including a Luger pistol. Great, except no one had been shot. Du Rose was far more interested in a ledger that listed clients and jobs done for them. ‘Big John’ burned the midnight oil in an office in Shepherd’s Bush police station, sifting through the pages alone. Three insertions caught his eye, one for a spray and two for servicing. The name of the client merely read ‘Citroen Freddie’, plus the explanation, paid in cash. Freddie who? He would have to ask. One thing was certain: the answer wasn’t long coming. How do I know that? ‘Jack’ told me, of course. Not immediately, but within a few weeks, while he was salivating over sultry Jo Marney, whose voice that night was as beguiling and seductive as ever, though I could have spoiled ‘Jack’s’ evening by telling him that she was accounted for. But she was certainly a convenient distraction.
Three men worked at Wimpey Autos garage. All denied knowledge of the pistol and of ever encountering Frances Brown. Soon, like so many other suspects, they were eliminated from the murder investigation. But du Rose was harbouring a secret. He knew a Freddie who drove a Citroen Cadillac, a fellow Freemason. Now he was in a dilemma. He would have to tread carefully, which was against his nature because, by instinct, he was a cross between a bulldozer and a bulldog.
Fear and paranoia on the streets of west London mimicked the terrifying days of Jack the Ripper. Even the night fogs and smogs were as bad, adding atmospheric creepiness to the build-up to each disappearance and death, occurring almost on a three-monthly cycle, enabling the police and press to bang on endlessly about another murder being due or overdue. Everything about these serial killings was spooky and haunting.
The hookers kept a keen, twitchy eye on the calendar. Some refused to venture out when the date for a death approached, even if they were behind with the rent or it meant a beating from their ponce.
One of du Rose’s first initiatives was to flood west London streets with decoy ‘whores’, all fearless policewomen volunteers from across London. Working in twos, the brief was to allow themselves to be propositioned by kerb-crawlers. Looking the part, dressed and painted as tarts, they discussed terms and conditions. They haggled, encouraging punters to discuss in detail their proclivities. ‘Don’t be shy, luv, just tell me exactly what you’re looking for. Don’t worry, I’ve heard everything before, so give it to me straight.’ The patter had been rehearsed before they were sent forth to ferret. The men they were targeting were ‘Deep Throat’ bandits.
While the negotiating proceeded, one of the officers would casually wander to the rear of the vehicle, ‘clocking’ the registration number. Finally, they’d make an excuse not to chance a joyride and walk off, strutting their stuff once more.
One of the registration numbers of interest that popped up several times was a Citroen and the driver was readily recognisable.
‘Want my autograph, sweetie? What am I doing? – Just soaking up the scenery. Girls, girls, girls.’
‘Citroen Freddie’. Du Rose now knew a big fish had been caught in the net, a headache for him on a personal level.