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Overview
They were an elite group of renegade Fleet Street crime reporters covering the most notorious British crime between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s. It was an era in which murder dominated the front and inside pages of the newspapers – the 'golden age' of tabloid crime. Members of the Murder Gang knew one another well. They drank together in the same Fleet Street pubs, but they were also ruthlessly competitive in pursuit of the latest scoop. It was said that when the Daily Express covered a big murder story they would send four cars: one containing their reporters, the other three to block the road at crime scenes to stop other rivals getting through. As a matter of course, Murder Gang members listened in to police radios, held clandestine meetings with killers on the run, made huge payments to murderers and their families – and jammed potatoes into their rivals' exhaust pipes so their cars wouldn't start. These were just the tools of the trade; it was a far cry from modern reporting. Here, Neil Root delves into their world, examining some of the biggest crime stories of the era and the men who wrote them. In turns fascinating, shocking and comical, this tale of true crime, media and social history will have you turning the pages as if they were those newspapers of old.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750987219 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Grisly Jigsaw
Dumfriesshire, Scotland, Sunday 29 September 1935
It was late summer for an optimist, and early autumn for a realist. The sedate landscape of the Scottish Borders, a healthy walk in the fresh air – just what Miss Susan Haines Johnson, a young woman visiting her family from Edinburgh, needed. Little did she know that her gentle stroll that day would soon set the Fleet Street crime sheets ablaze and that what she saw would make a marked entry into criminological history.
While millions all over Britain were wetting fingers and thumbs and rustling the crinkled pages of the Sunday Pictorial, News of the World and Sunday Graphic, Susan had walked alone about 2 miles north from where she was staying with family in the town of Moffat. She rested, leaning on the edge of a bridge overrunning a densely wooded valley with a stream called Gardenholme Linn. The British public would soon come to know this place, below where Susan had stopped, as 'a ravine'. Susan looked over the bridge at the view. Peace, tranquillity; she'd escaped from the city, seduced by nature. But what then suddenly drew her gaze was most unnatural.
Susan wasn't far from the Devil's Beef Tub, which lies a further three miles north, a deep valley surrounded by four hills, a favourite for walkers. The Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, author of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, romanticised this area in his writing, but the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace had made it famous by his actions more than five centuries earlier, when he launched his first attack against the English by gathering the clans in the Devil's Beef Tub in 1297. Now, in 1935, the very bridge on which Susan Haines Johnson was standing was known locally as the Devil's Bridge.
It was a sort of package she saw, pushed against a rock in the stream that runs into the River Annan. Her eyes zoomed in on this object so strange to its surroundings, and her easy solitude was destroyed, though Susan could hardly believe her eyes. Poking out of the package was a human arm. Susan ran the 2 miles back to Moffat, to the hotel where her family was staying. Her brother Alfred did his best to calm her down and called the police.
* * *
The terrible and unexpected find made the local Scottish newspapers in coming days, and as always Fleet Street's Murder Gang of crime reporters wasn't far behind. Exactly a week later, the crime covered half of page 13 of the News of the World. By this time, an extensive search of the area in and around the stream under Devil's Bridge, under the aegis of Inspector Strath and his right-hand man Sergeant Sloane of the Dumfriesshire Police, had uncovered further dumped bundles, containing various body parts, and this was undoubtedly the catalyst for the crime reporter Norman Rae and his news editor sniffing out the chrysalis of a major murder story.
NEW MOVES IN RAVINE MURDERS RIDDLE
Police Confident Of Solving Gruesome Crime
News of the World, Sunday 6 October 1935
'Certified Net Sale Exceeds 3,350,000 Copies', the News of the World then proudly announced under its masthead every Sunday. This was nothing compared to the circulations that this and other British national newspapers would achieve in coming years, for which substantial credit was due to the Murder Gang. These hard-living, intuitive, cunning, manipulative and sometimes unethical or, by twenty-first-century standards, immoral hacks were already building close contacts with the police all over Britain, and especially with London's Metropolitan Police, and that of course meant Scotland Yard.
Incredibly, until the mid-1930s Scotland Yard had no Press Bureau, and therefore no official conduit between it and Fleet Street. Before the Press Bureau was established in 1936, the year after Susan Haines Johnson saw that arm protruding from that bridge in the Scottish Borders, informal 'press conferences' would be held in smoke-filled pubs, often with the Murder Squad detective in charge of the case tipping off favoured hacks. This lack of official channels meant that personal police contacts were imperative.
The early Press Bureau of the late 1930s was also not very helpful to the public. When the first telephone was installed in the Press Bureau in 1936, the duty police officer was incredulous: 'we will be expected to take calls from the public next!' In fact, a separate department known as the Information Room had been set up two years earlier, in 1934, to receive calls from the public on Whitehall 1212.
Early stalwarts of the Murder Gang such as Norman 'Jock' Rae, Percy Hoskins, Hugh Brady and Stanley Bishop would wait in their respective newspaper offices late into the night drinking Scotch waiting for the notorious Back Hall Inspector to do his rounds. He was a Metropolitan Police inspector who went around Fleet Street at night selling tip-offs. He was never identified by the hacks.
The police, within whose ranks corruption was endemic, did not trust Fleet Street, and members of the Murder Gang had to build individual relationships with key detectives of the time such as Ted Greeno, Reg Spooner, Jack Capstick, Robert Fabian, Bill Chapman and Peter Beveridge. If the hacks betrayed these policemen in any way, the channel would be immediately closed; information given 'off the record' had to stay 'off the record'.
But as the 1940s progressed and gave way to the 1950s, Scotland Yard, provincial police forces and Fleet Street became more professional. When Scotland Yard was based on the Embankment from 1890 to 1967 – where it returned in 2015 – the whole building only had two telephones, but after moving to The Broadway in 1967 there were numerous telephones and contact became easier. Still, some Murder Gang members would spend hours a day working at spare desks at Scotland Yard, so as to be on the spot for a tip-off if something came in.
It was almost definitely a police tip-off that led the News of the World Murder Gang reporters to chase the story of the body parts in 'the ravine' at the end of September and into October 1935. Norman 'Jock' Rae was first on the case, leading where the rest of Fleet Street would follow. The 'Sundays' usually had more resources to follow a case, and of course more time, as the reporters only had to file once a week, although, of course, they would sometimes be making multiple filings when covering several cases at once. Not that the 'Dailies' and the evening papers were in any way slouches with regard to workload: the members of the Murder Gang just had to gather sources and leads on a story, go deeper and do interviews, write it up and file to make the next day's or that evening's edition.
Rae, working closely with his News of the World colleague James Howie Milligan, would use the extra time they had incredibly well and get the biggest scoop of the case, at that early stage still referred to amongst the Murder Gang as the Ravine Murder. It was to become one of the biggest British murder cases of the 1930s, and in particular was to make Rae's name amongst the Murder Gang and all over Fleet Street. By the late 1940s he was almost a household name.
Norman Rae, known by most who knew him as 'Jock', was a Scot, being born in Aberdeen in 1896. He fabricated his age to serve in the Highland Division in the First World War, and after that conflict moved into journalism and to London. Rae's tough and bloody-mindedness masked a compassionate nature, his intellect mixed with streetwise instincts, his huge capacity for hard work, real tenacity and staying-power on a story, and his shrewd understanding of human nature and literary ability, made him a natural-born journalist – just as he himself must have sometimes wondered if some of the murderers he came to know over a long Fleet Street career were natural-born killers. Rae was also 'nobody's fool' as they used to say. Ravenously driven, adept at fighting his corner and defending his story by any means, he would sometimes go to extraordinary, near-illegal lengths to get his scoop. And this was of course a time when there was far less press regulation.
An early incident in Rae's Fleet Street career is enlightening as to his character and working methods. Rae himself had made the newspapers, for once the subject of the story, on 29 September 1927 – exactly eight years to the day before Susan Haines Johnson saw the package with the human arm on Devil's Bridge in the Scottish Borders, precipitating the rush of 'Jock' Rae and James Howie Milligan to Moffat. He had been arrested whilst chasing a story, a fire in Redhill Street in the Marylebone district of London, on 9 September that year, which claimed four lives. The headline, which ran twenty days later in the north-eastern regional paper the Shields Daily News, read, 'Wrongful Arrest: Police Fail In Case Against Journalist'. Rae was then aged 30, living in Clapham, South London and working in Fleet Street.
Appearing at Marylebone Police Court, Rae was defended by the King's Counsel barrister Mr J.D. Cassels, a noted brief who had already unsuccessfully defended the brutal 'ladykiller' Patrick Mahon, who had murdered and dismembered the tragic Emily Kaye in a cottage on the Crumbles, a stretch of beach close to Eastbourne, Sussex, three years earlier. (Interestingly, Cassels had also defended the culprits in the unconnected murder of Irene Munro in 1920, also on the Crumbles.) Patrick Mahon was hanged, but the prosecution case against him had been extremely formidable, almost watertight. The Mahon case was also forensically very important, as the painstaking work done by the legendary Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury on Emily Kaye's remains was ground-breaking, and led to the introduction of the 'Murder Bag' set of implements by Scotland Yard, which all detectives from then on had to take to murder scenes to preserve vital evidence. The Ravine Murder case, which Rae covered in 1935, would also prove to be forensically highly innovative.
Rae was facing a charge of obstructing the police on the day of the fatal fire, and he had been arrested by an Inspector Simpkin of the Metropolitan Police. Simpkin had testified at an earlier hearing that when he closed the street Rae had been asked to leave the vicinity but had refused. However, the presiding magistrate found that the prosecution had 'failed to satisfy him that Rae had obstructed the Inspector, or that his arrest was justified'. Rae was acquitted, and awarded 20 guineas for costs, a not insignificant sum then. The magistrate, Mr H.A.C. Bingley, said, 'The police always ask me to give them costs if they win. Whether my decision is right or wrong this defendant has been put to vast trouble and expense. He was arrested, I think, wrongfully.' It was a victory for Rae, but he would certainly have to develop far better relationships with the police in the future if he was to get what the 1920s American humourist and sports journalist Ring Lardner called 'the inside dope'. Above all, though, this incident shows how fiercely determined Norman Rae was in pursuit of a story, a quality which would help make him a leading member of the Murder Gang in coming years.
The News of the World in 1935 was a heady mixture of politics, sport, humour, 'charming bounder' love rat stories, household features, advertising and of course crime stories. It was then a broadsheet newspaper, and would remain so until Rupert Murdoch changed it into a tabloid when he bought it thirty-four years later. The Italian dictator Mussolini dominated headlines in the News of the World that summer and autumn, as he threatened to and eventually did march into Abyssinia. Recurring weekly features included the 'Great Men of Our Time' series by the Right Honourable Winston Churchill MP, then in the political wilderness without high office, but soon to warn about Hitler's massive rearmament programme and nefarious intentions, before becoming wartime Prime Minister in 1940.
The heavyweight British boxing champ Jack Petersen, a Welshman who had held the title for some months in 1932–33, relinquished it, but regained and held it between June 1934 and August 1936, told his story 'Fighting the Big Fellows' on consecutive Sundays, and Hugh Gallacher, the Scottish footballer of the 1920s and 1930s, a prolific goal-scorer for Scotland who also played for Newcastle United, Chelsea and other top league clubs, had his serial 'Inside the Football Game'.
A typical love-sex interest story of that year was headlined 'Pose of a Married Man: eloped with girl and ran up bills.' Humour also crept headlong into tabloid advertising. 'Public Enemy No.1 (Stomach Trouble)' with Maclean Brand Stomach Powder being the tonic, was a sardonic nod to the obsession on both sides of the Atlantic with the successive small-time gangsters thus named by J. Edgar Hoover's fledgling FBI – most famously the bank robber and killer John Dillinger and his gang, who were all over the front and crime pages in 1934 and 1935. Far more dangerous organised crime figures such as Al Capone (already in prison for tax evasion), Dutch Schultz (murdered by rival gangsters), and Lucky Luciano (about to be arrested for pimping and imprisoned, before later being deported) were off the radar.
Back in Britain, on Sunday 22 September 1935, a week before the discovery of the body part in a package beneath the bridge in Moffat, the News of the World reported that Tony Mancini had received three months' hard labour for stealing a wristwatch from a jewellery shop in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Just ten months earlier, in December 1934, Mancini, whose real name was Cecil England and whose aliases as a petty criminal were the more exotic Hyman Gold and Jack Notyre, had been sensationally acquitted of the second Brighton Trunk Murder, after the body of his lover, the dancer and prostitute Violet Kaye, was found in a trunk at his Brighton lodgings. This terrible discovery was a direct result of a house-to-house search after a dismembered torso of a woman was found in a trunk at Brighton train station in July 1934, known as the first Brighton Trunk murder. Her legs were soon found in another trunk at Kings Cross station in London. She was never identified, her killer was never caught, and no link to Tony Mancini was ever established. The unknown tragic victim had been given the moniker 'The Girl with the Pretty Feet' by the Murder Gang. Coincidentally, Mancini was unsuccessfully prosecuted for the murder of Violet Kaye by J.D. Cassels KC, who had defended Norman Rae against his obstruction of a police officer charge in 1927. In 1976, just prior to his death, Mancini confessed to Violet Kaye's murder, knowing that he could not be tried again for the same crime due to the double jeopardy law. Mancini gave his confession to the News of the World, undoubtedly for payment.
After their initial News of the World article on Sunday 6 October 1935 from Moffat in Dumfriesshire, Jock Rae and Jim Milligan were looking for other leads to follow. There would soon be major developments in the Ravine Murder case.
* * *
Other bundles of human remains, eventually reaching approximately thirty in total over the coming weeks, contained various body parts to add to the initial arm packed into the first bundle spotted by Susan Haines Johnson: a torso with no arms, legs, a thighbone, lumps of flesh, and the upper part of two further arms. It was obvious that two bodies were present, and then two skulls were discovered, the faces having been skinned in an obvious attempt to prevent identification of the victims through facial feature ID, although teeth were still present in one skull and dental research would help confirm identification.
Fingertips had also been removed from two hands to avoid fingerprint detection. Fingerprint evidence had then been in use as evidence in murder trials for thirty years in Britain, since it was first used to hang the Stratton brothers in 1905 for the senseless murders of an elderly shopkeeper and his wife in the course of robbery in Deptford, south-east London. A burglar named Henry Jackson had previously been convicted using fingerprint evidence in 1902, just a year after Scotland Yard's Fingerprint Bureau was established. But back to Moffat in 1935 – this was murder, and double murder at that.
The body parts were soon being examined by prominent Scottish forensic scientists Professor John Glaister from Glasgow University and his colleague Dr Gavin Millar of Edinburgh University, who had to piece together the bodies like a jigsaw. The English Home Office pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was also called from London to carry out postmortems. He had particular expertise in dismemberment, as he had proved in the piecing together of the victim's body in the Patrick Mahon case back in 1924.
The first News of the World piece that ran on 6 October 1935 had stated that poison may well have been used on the victims, specifically arsenic. This was obviously what Norman Rae had carefully gleaned from police contacts they had made on the scene, who had been advised after early forensic analysis. It was also reported that the pieced-together taller body was thought to be male, and the shorter one female. Rae described the unidentified 'couple' as follows: 'The man – probably elderly, 5ft 8 or 9in tall, muscular condition and nutrition good, scarcely any teeth. The woman – between 30 and 40 years of age, about 5ft 2in tall, dark brown hair, no wisdom teeth, three vaccination marks on the left upper arm. Feet and hands well cared for, no ring marks on hands.' Bernard Spilsbury's post-mortem reports in the police case file confirm this analysis, as he refers to one of the bodies as a 'he'.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2018 Neil Root.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Duncan Campbell,
Introduction,
1 A Grisly Jigsaw,
2 I Did This Murder to Prove I Could Get Away With It,
3 Brutality in the Blitz,
4 Life is Cheap on the Black Market,
5 The Perils of Having a Go,
6 Death of a Car Salesman,
7 Mayhem on a Rooftop,
8 The Green-Eyed Monster,
9 The Good Doctor?,
10 Footsteps of a Gunman,
11 Murder on the Marshes,
12 Darkness at Deadman's Hill,
Coda,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,
Index,