It was in December, 1924, when a ward sister in a London hospital noticed that the door of a drugs cupboard had been neatly forced open. A large bottle of chloroform, new and unused, with its glass stopper still sealed, was missing. She reported the matter immediately to the matron. The police were called in to investigate the theft. They talked to all members of the staff and to walking patients. They made enquiries among out-patients, and checked up on visitors known to have entered the hospital on the day in question. They wondered, of course, why the thief should want chloroform. It brought them eventually to the reasonable assumption that the person was an outsider, a clever crook who had done his homework and had lifted the chloroform with the intention of using it to put prospective victims to sleep.
That theory looked remarkably like fact when, a month later in January, 1925, a Lewisham jeweller entered a police station in what appeared to be a state of inebriation. He reported having been chloroformed by a heavily masked man who came into his shop just as he was about to close up. When he recovered consciousness some time later, his takings for the day were missing. The thief left no fingerprints and had not yet been traced.
Among other things occupying the attention of the police in 1925 was the usual list of missing persons. The list included three young girls. Ivy Connor of Bermondsey had disappeared in February, Mary Wallace of Rotherhithe in October, and Amy Charles of the Old Kent Road in December. Their disappearances had been investigated without success and their case files were still open.