LEFT LUGGAGE MURDERS – BODIES IN THE BAG CRIMES AND TRIALS
The suitcase was found at a London railway station. It contained the legs of a young woman whose severed torso had already been discovered. Top pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury was called in to join the search for a killerwho stored away his victim like pieces of unwanted property !
It was once suggested that the ideal place for a secret society to meet would be an open balcony overlooking a public square. The same kind of wild logic seems to inspire those murderers who use trunks for the disposal of the corpse. The ideal solution to the murderer’s problem would be to make the body disappear into thin air; next on the list, to hide it where it could never be found. Putting it in a trunk, where it is sure to be discovered is no way to conceal a murder.
The policeman and the pathologist, on the other hand, are bound to experience a certain satisfaction when a killer chooses this method of disposal. It gives them a sporting chance. For unless the murderer has the coolness and foresight of a master chess player, he is almost certain to have left a dozen clues that will eventually reveal his identity.
This was the view held by the Chief Constable of Brighton when, on June 17, 1934, he was called to the Brighton left luggage office to examine the nude torso of a woman that had been found in a plywood trunk. Railway clerks could recall nothing about the man who had deposited the trunk there on Derby Day, June 6th, the busiest day of the year. But there seemed to be an abundance of clues.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury examined the remains. They were of a young woman in her early twenties. The head, arms and legs had been removed; but the torso suggested that the girl belonged to the middle or upper classes. She had a good figure, with no slack flesh, and the muscles were well developed, suggesting plenty of exercise. The golden brown of the skin also indicated that she spent much of her time in a warmer climate than England. At the time of death, she had been four months pregnant.
Important clues
An alert sent out to all other cloakrooms in England led to the discovery of the legs in a case at King’s Cross station in London. Each had been severed at the thigh and the knee, and they confirmed the view that the girl had been athletic and well-proportioned. The conclusion that the trunk had been left by a man was reached by weighing it; only a strong man could have lifted it without help.
There were two important clues. On a sheet of brown paper,in which the body had been wrapped, there was the word “ford”. It looked as if it was the second half of a place name, like Guildford or Watford. In the trunk, there were two newspapers. The copies of the Daily Mail dated May 31st and June 2nd were of an edition that was circulated only within fifty miles of London. When a porter recalled helping a man to carry the trunk on Derby Day, it began to look as though a solution was near.
Secret affair
For the man had travelled on the train from Dartford to Brighton. A girl who had travelled in the same third class compartment was able to give a rough description of him. But of the five cheap day return tickets that had been issued on that day, not all could be traced, and the police eliminated all those they were able to contact.
Although the police were able to trace the makers of the trunk and suitcase, they were unable to give any useful information as to where or to whom these had been sold. No shop owners came forward with any recollections of either piece having been bought from their shop in the weeks leading up to Derby Day. So here the trail petered out.
Spilsbury estimated that the girl had been dead since May 30, a week before it was left at the station. The man obviously had plenty of spare time, as well as a home where he could conceal a body for a week without fear of discovery. That again suggested a man of leisure. The fact that it had taken him a week to dispose of the body indicated that the crime was not premeditated. And so the police could reconstruct most of the story. A well-to-do man, strong and athletic, has a secret love affair with a girl of his own class. He lives in Dartford, which is on the south-eastern edge of London, part of the "stockbroker belt”.
She gets pregnant: on May 30, she calls on him to ask him what he intends to do about it. There is a quarrel, perhaps a fight, and he hits her on the head with some heavy instrument,the head was never found, but the body bore no marks of violence,or perhaps fell on top of her against a piece of furniture. Her death shocks him; he spends several days thinking on what to do with the body, then decides to dismember it and deposit the trunk at Brighton. He travels on a third class day return, so as not to attract attention. And, in all probability, he leaves the country as soon as he has disposed of the body.
Careful searches
Sherlock Holmes would have had no difficulty solving the problem. He would have ordered a check on all ports, to establish which resident of Dartford had left the country immediately after Derby Day. He would have investigated the sports clubs in the Dartford area, and the riding stables. And the murderer would probably have been arrested boarding the train bleu to Cannes . .
The British police had less luck. Careful searches of left-luggage offices revealed the corpses of three children and much stolen property, but no further clue to the Brighton trunk murderer. From that day to this, the crime has remained unsolved. This can be attributed to luck rather than careful planning. But the case remains the interesting exception that proves the rule: that a trunk is the worst possible place to hide a body.
Wishful thinking
A study of the history of trunk murderers suggests that in many cases, the murderer has a subconscious desire to be caught. It can certainly be argued that the act of hiding a body in a trunk bears an interesting resemblance to the ostrich’s attempt to hide by burying its head in the sand. In short, this is an example of Jean Paul Sartre’s psychology of “magic”, wishful thinking that we have already encountered in the case of passion-killers. This can be seen clearly in one of the earliest cases of trunk murder in England: that of Arthur Devereux. It is a story of weakness, self-deception and wishful thinking that would have appealed to Stendhal, whose Scarlet and Black is based upon just such a true-life murderer.
One warm summer day in 1898, a pretty girl named Beatrice Gregory was strolling in Alexandra Park, Hastings, when she fell into conversation with a polite and neatly dressed young man. His name was Arthur Devereux, and he was a chemist’s assistant. Beatrice was on holiday with her mother, and the holiday atmosphere no doubt made her more susceptible to romance; she saw Arthur Devereux every evening for the remainder of her holiday. Her mother liked him too. Arthur Devereux was ‘’different”,imaginative and ambitious. When he talked about the future, it seemed marvellous and exciting, and she longed to share it. When he proposed, she accepted at once.
Pretty and feminine
Mrs. Gregory was less than happy about the engagement. There was something of the born loser about her, and she was afraid it had rubbed off on her daughter. She found it hard to believe that the future could be as glorious as Arthur painted it. And after a few months of marriage, Beatrice began to share her mother’s misgivings. The truth was that, emotionally, Arthur was something of a child. He had wanted her because she was pretty and feminine; it never struck him that there is a practical side to marriage. He found the penny-pinching of married life on a chemist’s assistant’s wages less romantic than he had expected. He became gloomy and preoccupied.
Then a son was born. It made things more difficult for Arthur; yet oddly enough, he didn’t seem to mind. He adored his son, whom they named Stanley. For a while, it looked as if the marriage was going to be a success after all. Then fate intervened, and Beatrice discovered she was again pregnant. The news plunged Arthur into depression. He spent more time than ever cuddling and playing with his son. When his wife produced him twin boys, Lawrence and Evelyn, it seemed the last straw. His affections were already fully engaged; he had no interest in the new arrivals.
Morphine bottle
During the course of the next two years, the Devereuxs moved to a flat in Kilburn, north-west London. Beatrice was now undernourished. Arthur was still working as a chemist’s assistant, but the wages were poor. He was an embittered man who felt that his wife had trapped him, and he daydreamed of how easy life would be without Beatrice and the twins. One day in 1905, he decided to do something about it.
The murder was carefully planned. First, he asked the landlord if, when the tenants in the flat below moved out, he could take over the extra flat. Then he brought home a large tin trunk. A few days later, on January 29,1905, he brought home a bottle of morphine, and somehow induced his wife to swallow most of its contents,perhaps leading her to believe it was a medicine for her cough. Both she and the twins were dead by the next morning. Devereux placed them in the trunk, arranged for it to be taken to a warehouse in Harrow, then moved,with Stanley to another part of London.
Mrs. Gregory called at the Kilburn flat, and found it empty. She succeeded in getting a letter forwarded to Arthur, but his reply was strangely non-committal. He said that he had sent Beatrice on holiday, and that he would prefer that her mother should not try to contact her. Mrs. Gregory’s intuitions warned her of the worst. She heard about the furniture van, traced it to the depository in Harrow, and finally succeeded in getting an order authorizing her to open the trunk.
Twenty-four hours later, with the story of the discovery of the three corpses in all the newspapers, a worried Arthur Devereux prepared to move on again. This time, he went to Coventry, where he found another job with a chemist. Inspector Pollard, the man in charge of the case, had little difficulty in finding him; it was simply a matter of making a nationwide check on chemists who had recently hired a new assistant with a 6 year oldson. When Pollard called to arrest him, Devereux blurted out: “You’re making a mistake. I don't know anything about a tin trunk. " Pollard had not mentioned it.
Fantasy world
At the Old Bailey, Devereux’s defence was that his wife had killed herself and the twins, and that he had lost his nerve and concealed the body in the trunk. But there was one fact that undermined his story. On January 22, 1905, he had replied to an advertisement for a job at Hull, with a telegram: “Will a widower with one child, aged six. suit?” But at that time, Beatrice and the twins were still alive. On August 15, 1905, Arthur Devereux was hanged at Pentonville prison.
An alienist, which is what psychiatrists were called in those days,had found Arthur Devereux to be sane, but it is difficult to agree with this conclusion. Is it sanity to live completely in a world of fantasy, and to commit a murder without the slightest chance of escaping the penalty? Devereux adored his son; did it not strike him that, in killing his wife, he was risking leaving his son an orphan?
He knew his mother-in-law well enough to know that she would never rest until she had traced her daughter; and he must also have realized that a trunk containing three corpses will soon begin to attract attention by its smell. If he had been sane, he would have taken Stanley and simply left his wife. But he wanted Beatrice to vanish, to disappear like the lady in a conjurer’s cabinet. Wishful thinking, to that extent, is surely a form of insanity?
Sexual charms
The Monte Carlo trunk murder, which took place two years after Devereux’s execution, raises the same questions in an even more acute form. The killer was an adventuress called Maria Vere Goold, who had assumed the title “Lady Vere Goold”. Her husband, an alcoholic and weak-minded Irishman, was in line for a baronetcy; but his wife was anticipating.
Maria’s career had been even more remarkable than that of her fellow countrywoman, Maria Manning, hanged in 1849 for the murder of her lover. Both were hard, calculating women, who used their sexual charms unscrupulously. Maria Goold,born Girodin,had lost two husbands in suspicious circumstances when she met her third husband, Vere Goold, in London. Goold had little money, but that didn’t worry the adventuress; she was used to living on credit and borrowed money.
Mumbled answers
In their first year of marriage, Vere Goold exhausted the patience,and the purses,of all his close relatives. In Monte Carlo, in the early months of 1907, they tried gambling with what was left of their money, and lost it. Various dishonest expedients, like obtaining a ring from a jeweller “on approval”, and then pawning it,kept them going a little longer, until Maria succeeded in making the acquaintance of a rich old Swedish lady, Madame Levin, who was impressed by the aristocratic Vere Goolds. But she proved to be tight-fisted with money. She lent Maria forty pounds, but declined to part with any more. In fact, she pressed relentlessly for its return.
On Sunday August 4, 1907, “Lady” Vere Goold invited Madame Levin out to the Villa Menesimy, where they were living in considerable poverty. And as the old lady sat talking to “Sir Vere Goold”, whose mumbled answers suggested he was drunk again, Maria crept up on her from behind, and dealt her a crashing blow with a heavy poker. Mrs. Levin collapsed, Maria produced a knife, and drove it into her tormentor’s throat. Then she proceeded to hack off the head and limbs of the victim, and to pack them into a large trunk. A niece who was staying with them returned later that evening and found the place covered with blood. Maria explained that her husband had had a fit, and vomited blood.
It is not clear what Maria had in mind. They left Monte Carlo for Marseilles that evening, taking the trunk with them. In Marseilles, the trunk was labelled “Charing Cross. London”, and a luggage clerk was instructed to dispatch it, while Maria and Sir Vere Goold retired to a nearby hotel for breakfast and a sleep.
Cold contempt
The clerk, a man named Pons, observed blood oozing from the trunk. The August heat was also causing it to smell unpleasantly. He went to their hotel, and asked them what was in it. Maria explained haughtily that it was poultry, and ordered him to send it off immediately. Instead, Pons called at the police station, where an Inspector told him that the Vere Goolds could not be allowed to leave Marseilles until the contents of the trunk had been examined by the police.
Pons returned to the hotel, and found Maria and her husband about to leave. He asked them to accompany him to the police station. With cold contempt, Maria agreed. She took along a carpet bag that had accompanied them to the hotel. In the cab her facade collapsed, and she suddenly offered Pons ten thousand francs to let her go. He remained immovable. An hour later, the police had found the torso of Madame Levin in the trunk, head and legs in the carpet bag.
It was so obvious that Maria was the guilty party that it was she who was sentenced death, while her husband received life imprisonment. The death sentence was not carried out. While she was in prison in Cayenne, Maria died of typhoid fever. Her husband, deprived of alcohol and drugs, committed suicide. Yet in retrospect, it seems that Maria also subconsciously committed suicide.
Copious bloodstains
What could she gain from the death of Madame Levin? What was to prevent her flitting quietly out of Monte Carlo by night, as she had flitted from so many other cities? Or had a lifetime of crime and calculation finally loosened her hold reality, as the murder suggests? Once again, the trunk is seen as the symbol of human inadequacy and self-deception.
As the interesting question of who invented the trunk murder, there is no agreement among historians of crime. Possibly the honour belongs to a Herr Bletry, an innkeeper of Hegersheim,
Germany. When the corpse of a woman was found in a yellow trunk at the Hegersheim left-luggage office, some time in the mid-1870s, the sheet in which the body was wrapped was quickly traced back to Herr Bletry’s establishment.
If Bletry was the killer, he was singularly fortunate. Local gossip alleged that the corpse was that of his former housekeeper and mistress, Adele Brouart, who had vanished some time before. Finally, it was positively identified as that of Adele Brouart by various witnesses. But while Bletry was preparing to stand trial for his life, Adele Brouart walked into the police station. . . . The case collapsed, and the police were too discouraged to start all over again. If they had, Bletry would surely have been found guilty.
He tried to explain copious bloodstains in his kitchen with a story of a bleeding nose. The police were fairly certain that the trunk belonged to Bletry’s present housekeeper, Franziska Lallemend, but because the other evidence seemed so strong, they had neglected to pursue this line of enquiry. Finally, a strange woman had been seen to arrive at the inn, and had not been seen subsequently. The motive for the crime was probably robbery; but since Bletry was allowed to go free, we shall never know.
A book called Supernature by the zoologist Lyall Watson mentions a curious fact that may be of interest to trunk murderers of the future. A Frenchman named Bovis, who was exploring the pharaoh's chamber in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, observed that although it seemed damp, the body of a cat, and various other litter, was apparently undecayed. It struck M. Bovis that perhaps the shape of the pyramid might account for this. He made an accurate scale model of the pyramid, and put a dead cat in it.
Cosmic energy
The body mummified instead of decaying. Dr. Watson claims to have tested this himself with a home-made cardboard pyramid, (made of four isosceles triangles with the proportion base to sides of 15.7 to 14.94). A dead mouse placed in the pyramid mummified, whereas a mouse placed in a shoe box decayed, and stank, in the normal manner. Even more strange, razor blades left in such a pyramid remain sharp even after much use, a Czech firm has patented the Cheops Pyramid Sharpener.
Dr. Watson’s theory is that the pyramid acts as some kind of a greenhouse to cosmic energy, which dehydrates organic matter, and somehow affects the crystalline structure at the edge of a razor blade. So in theory, a trunk shaped like a scale model of the Great Pyramid should preserve bodies indefinitely, even if dismembered, and prevent smell. On the other hand, it is true that the shape might arouse curiosity in railway cloakrooms. No modification is likely to alter the fact that the trunk is one of the least efficient means of disposing of human remains.
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