A Million to One: When Chance Exposed the Perfect Crime
Criminals often make the same mistake: they believe that once the crime is planned, the danger is over.
They calculate the risks. They remove evidence. They invent alibis. They dispose of anything that might connect them to the scene. They may even convince themselves that they have committed the perfect crime.
But there is one factor no criminal can completely control.
Chance.
A fingerprint left behind. A misplaced object. A passing stranger. A piece of evidence carried somewhere it should never have gone. Sometimes the smallest and most insignificant accident can unravel an elaborate plan.
That is the theme running through three extraordinary cases from the past: the murder of fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks in Chicago, the mysterious disappearance of Mamie Stuart in Britain, and the Liverpool murder in which a dented hat helped expose a killer.
Each case demonstrates the same chilling principle.
A murderer may be able to control what he does.
He cannot control what happens next.
The original account of these cases appears in Crimes That Time Forgot, in the story “A Million to One.”
The spectacles that ruined a “perfect” murder
On May 22, 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks was found dead in a culvert beside a railroad near Chicago.
The boy had been severely beaten. There appeared to be little reason to believe that the police would immediately be able to identify his killer.
But lying close to the body was an object that would change everything.
A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
At first, they might have appeared insignificant. But detectives discovered that the frames were unusual enough for a Chicago optical company to identify them. Only three customers had been supplied with that particular type.
One of them was nineteen-year-old Nathan Leopold Jr., a university student and amateur birdwatcher.
Leopold initially claimed that he must have lost the spectacles weeks earlier while birdwatching. But the discovery placed him uncomfortably close to the crime. During questioning, he also referred investigators to his friend Richard Loeb.
Loeb eventually broke down and confessed.
Leopold followed.
The two young men had believed they could construct the perfect murder. Instead, an ordinary pair of spectacles had become the tiny thread that unravelled the entire scheme.
It is difficult to imagine a more frustrating ending for a carefully planned crime.
Of all the objects that might have been left behind, it was a highly identifiable personal possession that happened to fall at precisely the wrong place.
That was chance.
And chance would play an even stranger role in another case more than a decade later.
The shark that gave up a secret
In 1935, Albert Hobson was fishing from Coogee Beach near Sydney, Australia, when something remarkable happened.
He hooked a shark.
Not an unusual event for a fisherman, perhaps, but this was a large tiger shark. Hobson eventually had the creature brought in alive and displayed at his brother's aquarium.
Seven days later, on April 25, the shark disgorged the contents of its stomach.
Among the material was something unmistakably human: an arm.
The limb had a rope around the wrist and carried a distinctive tattoo depicting two boxers. Fingerprints and the tattoo eventually identified the arm as belonging to James Smith, a forty-year-old former amateur boxer who had been missing for more than two weeks.
Suddenly the police had a murder investigation.
The trail led to a rented cottage at Cronulla and to Smith's friend Patrick Brady, a known forger who had been lying low while awaiting trial.
There was no obvious blood evidence at the cottage, but detectives noticed something strange. A tin trunk listed in the cottage inventory had disappeared and been replaced by another.
Brady was arrested and later charged with Smith's murder. He denied killing his friend but implicated Smith's employer, Reg Holmes, in forged-cheque dealings.
Then the case became even more bizarre.
Holmes changed his story and claimed that Brady had admitted killing Smith and disposing of the body at sea inside a tin trunk.
But before Holmes could testify at the inquest, he was found dead in his car, having been shot.
The prosecution's case became increasingly complicated. The physical evidence was incomplete, the principal witness was dead, and Brady's defence attacked the very idea of holding an inquest without a complete body.
Eventually Brady was acquitted of murder.
Yet the strange case continued to attract attention.
Forensic expert Sir Sydney Smith later examined the surviving arm and reached a disturbing conclusion. He believed Smith's body had been cut up inside the cottage and placed in a tin trunk. The arm, which would not fit inside, had apparently been severed and tied to the outside.
The trunk was then taken out to sea.
Somehow, the arm broke loose.
Somehow, it ended up inside a tiger shark.
And somehow, that shark was caught and brought back to an aquarium.
It was an extraordinary chain of events. Remove just one link and the investigation might never have taken the same course.
The case became known as the Shark Arm case.
The arm itself was eventually lost, leaving behind police records, photographs, fingerprints and unanswered questions. But its bizarre journey remains one of the clearest examples of chance interfering with a criminal's attempt to conceal a crime.
Yet perhaps the strangest example of chance was still to come.
This time, the clue came from a dream.
The woman who dreamed of a well
After the First World War, Eric Tombe and Ernest Dyer went into business together.
Tombe had money. Dyer had ambitions involving motoring and horse racing. Their business ventures failed, and eventually they acquired a racing stable and stud farm known as “The Welcomes” at Kenley in Surrey.
Then the farmhouse burned down.
Dyer made an insurance claim, but the property had been insured for far more than its purchase price. The insurance company became suspicious.
Financial problems continued. Dyer borrowed money from Tombe and forged his partner's signature on cheques.
Then Eric Tombe disappeared.
He had written to his parents saying that he intended to visit them, but he never arrived.
His parents began searching for him.
Gradually, suspicious details emerged. Money had been transferred from Tombe's bank account to Dyer. A later letter apparently gave Dyer power of attorney over the account. Tombe's father immediately recognised that the signature was a forgery.
The disappearance was beginning to look like something much darker than a failed business partnership.
Then chance intervened again.
A man calling himself Fitzsimmons advertised in a Yorkshire newspaper for men of “the highest integrity” who were interested in employment opportunities requiring a substantial cash deposit.
It was a con trick.
Police became interested.
When a detective confronted Fitzsimmons at a Scarborough hotel, a struggle followed. A gun went off and Fitzsimmons was killed by his own weapon.
The dead man's room contained a suitcase marked with the initials E.T., Eric Tombe's passport and a collection of cheques bearing Tombe's forged signature.
Fitzsimmons was actually Ernest Dyer.
But there was still one question.
Where was Eric Tombe?
Dyer was dead, and the secret might have died with him.
Then, ten months later, Eric Tombe's father approached Scotland Yard with an extraordinary story.
His wife had been dreaming repeatedly about their missing son.
In the nightmare, she saw Eric's body lying at the bottom of a well.
A police officer might reasonably have dismissed such a story as grief, imagination or coincidence.
But Superintendent Francis Carlin decided to investigate.
The officers went to “The Welcomes”.
There were five disused wells on the property.
They searched the first.
Nothing.
The second.
Nothing.
Then they searched the third.
At the bottom of the well, a human foot appeared through the mud.
The body was eventually recovered.
Eric Tombe had been found.
The investigation concluded that he had probably been shot and his body hidden in the well.
Was the dream simply a coincidence?
There is no way of knowing.
But the fact remains that without the dream, the body might have remained hidden for much longer.
The case demonstrated something particularly unsettling about chance.
Sometimes it does not arrive in the form of physical evidence.
Sometimes it arrives as a thought, an accident or an instinct that persuades someone to look in a place where nobody else has thought to look.
Mamie Stuart: the woman who vanished for 41 years
If the previous cases demonstrate how chance can expose a crime, the disappearance of Mamie Stuart demonstrates how long the process can sometimes take.
Mamie was twenty-six years old, attractive and formerly a chorus girl. In 1918 she married George Shotton, a marine surveyor.
But there was a problem.
Shotton was already married.
In 1919 Mamie and Shotton were living in Swansea. He eventually rented a detached house called Ty-Llan-wydd, where the couple stayed together.
Then Mamie disappeared.
Her parents became increasingly alarmed when correspondence was returned marked “House Closed”. A Christmas telegram apparently sent by Mamie offered greetings, but it would prove to be the last communication they received.
Then police discovered a portmanteau at a Swansea hotel.
Inside it were pieces of Mamie's clothing that had been cut to shreds, along with jewellery, a Bible and a manicure set.
Another discovery followed: a handbag found at Ty-Llan-wydd containing Mamie's ration card and money.
It was difficult to believe that she had simply left voluntarily.
The police began to suspect murder.
Shotton's story became increasingly suspicious.
He admitted knowing Mamie but claimed they had quarrelled and separated. Meanwhile, evidence emerged that he was a violent and jealous man.
Most disturbing of all was a letter Mamie had written to her parents months before her disappearance. She expressed fear of Shotton and asked her parents to investigate if they stopped hearing from her.
Police searched the house and garden repeatedly.
Nothing.
They searched the surrounding countryside.
Still nothing.
Shotton was eventually arrested, but the charge was bigamy rather than murder. He admitted leaving Mamie's belongings at the hotel and was sentenced to eighteen months' hard labour.
And there the story might have ended.
For forty years, Mamie Stuart remained missing.
Then came another million-to-one chance.
On November 5, 1961, three young men exploring a disused lead-mine airshaft near Brandy Cove on the Glamorgan coast made a discovery.
Deep underground, they found human remains hidden behind rocks.
Nearby were objects that had once belonged to a woman: a black butterfly comb, a wedding ring and an engagement ring.
The remains were taken for forensic examination.
The skeleton was that of a young woman. Its estimated age was consistent with Mamie's age when she disappeared. Clothing and other evidence also pointed towards the 1920s.
Finally, forensic specialists used photographic comparison techniques to compare the skull with a photograph of Mamie from her theatre days.
The correspondence was remarkable.
After forty-one years, Mamie Stuart had been found.
The discovery also revived memories that had been forgotten for decades.
At the subsequent inquest, an elderly former postman recalled seeing George Shotton struggling with a heavy sack outside Ty-Llan-wydd in 1919.
Shotton had apparently been startled when he noticed the postman and had refused his offer of assistance.
The recollection was another piece of a puzzle that had taken more than four decades to assemble.
The coroner's jury concluded that the remains were Mamie's and that she had been murdered. The evidence pointed towards Shotton.
But justice could not reach him.
Shotton had died in 1958, three years before Mamie's remains were discovered.
The man suspected of killing her had escaped the law by the narrowest of margins.
Yet fate had eventually exposed his secret.
The dented hat that became a murder clue
The final case in this extraordinary collection began with something almost laughably trivial.
A hat.
On a wild and windy evening in Liverpool in December 1913, ship's steward Walter Eaves was waiting for his girlfriend.
As he stood outside a shop in Old Hall Street, a sudden gust of wind blew down a shutter.
The shutter struck Eaves and dented his new derby hat.
Annoyed, he confronted a young employee who came outside. A second man appeared, apologised and offered Eaves two shillings in compensation.
The incident lasted only moments.
Eaves had no reason to believe it was important.
But as he continued waiting, he watched the two men leave the shop with a handcart.
He forgot about the incident.
Until the next day.
A canal worker had difficulty opening the gates at one of the locks. Something was blocking them.
When he investigated, he discovered a heavy bundle in the water.
A human body was inside.
The victim was Catherine Christina Bradfield, who managed the shop where the two men had been working.
The strange incident involving the dented hat suddenly became significant.
Eaves had unknowingly seen the men transporting the body.
The police arrested Samuel Elltoft and George Ball.
Their stories did not agree.
Ball claimed that an unknown armed intruder had murdered Miss Bradfield and that he and Elltoft had panicked and disposed of the body.
But investigators found problems with the story.
There were bloodstains inside the shop.
There was a bloodstained sack.
And there was a sailmaker's fid—a tool used by Ball—which showed evidence connecting it to the attack.
Blood was also found on Ball's clothing.
Elltoft's version of events was different, and the evidence against the two men was not identical.
Eventually the jury found Ball guilty of murder and Elltoft guilty of being an accessory after the fact.
Ball was sentenced to death.
Later, shortly before his execution, he confessed to the murder.
The entire case had turned on a remarkable combination of accidents.
First, a gust of wind knocked down a shutter and dented an innocent man's hat.
That caused Eaves to notice the two men.
Then the body happened to obstruct canal lock gates.
That caused the body to be discovered rather than swept away.
One accident produced a witness.
Another produced the victim.
Together, they created the chain of evidence that brought the killer to justice.
The million-to-one factor
What connects these cases is not simply murder.
It is uncertainty.
Criminals can plan. They can anticipate obvious dangers. They can destroy evidence and manufacture explanations.
But they cannot predict every possibility.
Leopold and Loeb could plan their crime, but they could not predict that a pair of spectacles would fall from a pocket.
Those involved in the Shark Arm case could not possibly have anticipated that a tiger shark would swallow a human limb, be caught by a fisherman and subsequently disgorge its stomach contents in front of aquarium officials.
Ernest Dyer could conceal a body in a well, but he could not predict that the victim's mother would repeatedly dream of precisely such a place.
George Shotton could hide Mamie Stuart for more than four decades, but he could not predict that three young potholers would eventually explore the underground shaft where her remains had been concealed.
And George Ball could attempt to dispose of a body in a Liverpool canal, but he could not control the wind—or the lock gates.
That is the real lesson behind these forgotten crimes.
The perfect crime is almost impossible because the criminal never controls the whole story.
There is always the possibility of something unexpected.
A stranger might walk past.
A storm might alter a plan.
A machine might malfunction.
An object might be dropped.
A witness might remember something years later.
A fisherman might catch the wrong shark.
Or a group of young explorers might decide, on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, to descend into a forgotten mine shaft.
Chance is not justice.
It has no moral compass.
It can help a criminal just as easily as it can help the police.
But in these cases, chance happened to fall on the side of discovery.
And that is what makes them so compelling.
The criminals believed they had buried their secrets.
Some buried them in the ground.
Some threw them into the sea.
Some attempted to hide them behind false identities and elaborate stories.
Yet the past has a strange habit of resurfacing.
Sometimes it takes a pair of spectacles.
Sometimes an arm emerging from a shark.
Sometimes a mother's nightmare.
Sometimes a dented hat.
And occasionally, it takes forty-one years.
But when enough unlikely events collide, even a crime that appears forgotten can suddenly come back to life.
Because somewhere between planning the perfect crime and getting away with it lies the one factor no murderer can ever eliminate: chance.
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“A Million to One” appears in Guy Hadleigh's Crimes That Time Forgot
Blog written by Guy Hadleigh, author of Crimes That Time Forgot, the Macabre True Crimes & Mysteries Series, the Murder and Mayhem Series, the British Killers Series, the Infamous True Crimes and Trials Series - and many more!
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