The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale

 

... "everything in life is but a peep-show"

9781526660480

Bloomsbury Circus, 2024

300 pp

hardcover

Before I get started here, let me just say that the entire month of February was just horrible.  My very sweet spouse had three  surgeries during that time, one of which was unexpected and directly on the back of the second after his blood pressure dropped so low during recovery that I actually thought that this was it.  The good news is that it wasn't his time, apparently, and little by little as he's been regaining his physical strength, I've been working on getting back to some semblance of mental normalcy, not always an easy feat.   But here I am again after this sort of forced hiatus, ready to get on. 

Most of my reading was done via audiobooks for passing long, quiet hours, but I did manage to get my hands on a physical copy of Kate Summerscale's newest book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place.  I bought mine at Blackwell's (postage to US included in price!) because the US release isn't until May 6th and I didn't want to wait.  I've read several of this author's books, including The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (which I loved), The Wicked Boy (which I didn't love) and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, and I think with The Peepshow she brings much less of the extraneous detail she usually brings to her books for the reader to wade through, and more of an opportunity to draw connections between that time and our own.  It is both a true crime sort of read and a social history and really, I believe it is her best work yet. 

You can look up 10 Rillington Place online if you've not heard of the crimes that occurred there, but in a nutshell, it was the address in the Notting Hill section of North London that was the home of John Christie, who lived there with his wife Ethel in the ground-floor flat.  In 1948, Timothy Evans and his wife Beryl arrived at this place and lived upstairs from the Christies, and in 1949, Beryl and their baby Geraldine were killed, with Timothy being charged with and tried for the baby's death.  John Christie served as a witness against Evans at his 1950 trial, and Evans was found guilty of and hanged for the crime.   Later, after Ethel had supposedly gone off without him, Christie eventually left the flat, another tenant who had permission from the landlord to use the Christie kitchen started cleaning and found a space to hang a shelf for his radio.  He discovered that the wall where he wanted to put his shelf was hollow, and there he discovered a hidden cupboard. When he used a light to look inside, he made the horrific discovery of what seemed to be the body of a naked woman. Eventually the police would find the bodies of several other women both inside and outside the Christie flat, along with evidence that would point to Christie as their killer.  Christie by this time was on the run, and would eventually be found, charged and tried for his crimes.  

In putting her book together, Summerscale tells of events through the eyes of  two reporters: Harry Procter, a successful and highly-driven tabloid journalist,  and author Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who approached events from a much different perspective, and whose analysis of the case would eventually appear in the volume of the Notable British Trials series featuring the trials of both Timothy Evans and John Christie in 1957.  

contemporary headlines, from Murderpedia

Procter, as she quotes another journalist here,  

"did not just report a story; 'he infiltrated it, embedded himself, then owned it, then manipulated its protagonists as puppeteer-in-chief so that everything fell into place, as, and when, and exactly how, he wished.' " 

In the book that had inspired him to become a reporter, The Street of Adventure, author Philip Gibbs wrote  that "everything in life is but a peep-show," and that reporters felt like "the only real people in the world."  When he got wind of the story at 10 Rillington Place after the first bodies had been discovered and Christie had gone on the run, Procter went to the scene only to realize, "with a shock," that he had been there before when he worked for The Daily Mail.  It was during the time when Tim Evans had been charged with murder, and Procter had interviewed Christie about his neighbor.  Christie had been polite and soft spoken, and at the time, Procter saw no reason at all to suspect that Christie might have had anything to do with the deaths.  Now though, he not only "cursed himself for not having questioned him more closely" at the time, since it was obvious that Christie must be behind the current murders, but as Summerscale writes, Procter considered it possible that Christie just might have framed Evans for something Christie himself had done, and may have helped to send an innocent man to the gallows.  His personal stakes were high in getting Christie's story, both in terms of somehow making Christie feel the need to confess to the murders of Beryl and her baby and of course, reporting the story that would completely make his career.   Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who had been "gripped" by the coverage of the murders, was, as the author notes, "part of a golden generation of female crime writers. One of her books, Murder and Its Motives focused on (as noted here) "Six spectacular murders of the past century," and she had also written a novel called A Pin to See the Peepshow, which author Sarah Waters described in a Guardian article as "an achingly human portrait;" a  "thinly fictionalised account of the life of ... Edith Thompson, one of the three main players in the 'Ilford murder' case of 1922. "  She had also written essays in the Notable British Trials series.  Summerscale states that Jesse, now sixty-five, was going blind, was "frail" and a morphine addict, and was "afraid that she was being forgotten," so she "hungered for a story that would restore her."  If she could do the write up of the Christie case for Notable British Trials, it would be just what she needed.    Neither Procter nor Jesse could fathom Christie's lack of moral responsibility for his deeds, another factor bringing the two strands of reporting together.  

 What stands out about Christie here is that he was a man who outwardly resembled any number of men his age of the time, looking respectably average in his suit and his spectacles, while speaking softly and serving in a number of respectable positions.  When he was being sought by the police, it seemed that people saw him everywhere because he seemed so ordinary.  Summerscale gets behind that veil of respectability to reveal  a virulent racist who couldn't stand the fact that West Indian people were living in his building, even blaming the horrific odors of decomposition on his upstairs neighbors, an idea that was readily accepted by people who came into his apartment.  He was also a complete misogynist who viewed himself as passive while the women he victimized were the aggressors, and even to the last he  refused to show any sort of remorse for what he'd done.   If this book were only about John Christie and his crimes it would still be very good, but the author goes deeper into the lives of the many victims (doing so with the great care that these women truly deserve) as well as the social, political and economic landscapes of the time, while also diving into the power/machinations of the press  and the readers who lapped up every word. The dustjacket blurb says that her mining of the archives "sheds fascinating light on the origins our fixation with true crime," and although there is no definitive answer behind the biggest question of them all (i.e. who really killed Beryl and Geraldine Evans),  the blurb  also notes that Summerscale does "suggest" a possibility. 

I can only begin to imagine how much research went into writing this book and it shows.  I absolutely did not want to put this book down while reading and when I had to do so, I couldn't get back to it fast enough.  I found it to be an enlightening piece of social history,  a book that I can highly recommend.  

The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery, by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James

9781476796253
Scribner, 2017
464 pp

hardcover

It's very rare that I choose to sit down and read a true-crime account, since it's not my really my thing, so the topic has to be something that piques my interest enough to get me to take a look.  So when I heard about this book last July that involves an axe-wielding serial killer who in the early part of the 20th century  rode the rails and left carnage behind him, that got my attention.  For one thing, this was a case I'd never heard of, and the deal was sealed when I discovered that this all went down over one hundred years ago.

The dustjacket blurb describes this book as a

"compelling, dramatic, and meticulously researched narrative about a century-old series of axe murders across America, and how the authors came to solve them."  

Bill James, who says here that in his "day job" he is a "baseball writer," is also the author of another book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebrations of Violence (2012). In a 2016 interview in The New Yorker', when Evan Hughes asked the author about the book he was currently working on, James said the following:

"You know the story of the murders in Villisca? All right, a hundred and four years ago eight people are found dead, murdered with an axe, inside this locked house, in a quiet, small town in the southern part of Iowa. It's a famous crime, and the reason that it became famous is that at the time it was obvious that it was the latest in a series of similar attacks. I had the idea that I'll bet there are others like this which have not been tied to the same murderer, because at the time they didn't have the methods you have now to connect the dots between unrelated events. So I started looking for them, and I found several."

 James hired his daughter Rachel as research assistant and this book is the result of their work.  As James writes in the preface,

"With modern computers, we can search tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of small-town newpapers, looking for reports of similar events."

And not only did he find them, but he also claims that they even discovered the culprit, the true identity behind person they label as "The Man From the Train."  It's a great premise, to be sure; on the flip side, though, rather than being the "compelling" or "dramatic" book promised by the dustjacket blurb, this has to have been one of the most frustrating, amateurish and utterly confusing true-crime accounts I've ever read.

There are no footnotes or endnotes;  there is no bibliography, and he handles the lack thereof in the acknowledgements section where he says that "it is inadequate to acknowledge in a footnote those whose work you use," and that he feels that "sources should be directly acknowledged in the text." He says that he "tried to do this throughout the book," but that's not always the case. While he does mention things said in old newspaper accounts here and there, and quotes one or two of his sources once in a while, for the most part, there are several places where I found myself while taking notes writing "Source???"  or "Citation?" especially when it came to things like statistics he gives, or phrases that start with "It has been written." In putting together a work involving historical research, the lack of sources is not just astounding, but downright appalling.

Another major issue here is that the author makes assumptions about the killer that have absolutely no factual basis; not only that, but then after he's made one statement, he contradicts himself later.  One huge example of an assumption about the killer is that the author believes that the Man From The Train "likely" lived and worked near Marianna Florida between 1901 and 1903, and then doesn't say why. There is no elaboration on the topic, and frankly, I was flabbergasted.   Another example  of his kind of waffly logic  is found on page 310 where the author is going through a list of "let's say for the sake of argument," about whether or not the killer "stalked" his victims.  There, in a brief paragraph about a murder which happened in Maine in 1901, he states the following:

"The murder of the Allen family in Maine in 1901 is him, but that this was an unplanned event that resulted from an eruption of anger on the murderer's part, when Mr. Allen insulted the murderer and drove him forcefully away from his door.

There is no evidence given anywhere that this scene occurred,  and back on page 226 he implies that one of four factors that "strongly suggest" this murder was the work from The Man From the Train was "the presence of Carrie Allen" (the daughter) since Mr. James claims that many of the murders were based on the killer's "perversion" or his penchant for young girls.  Then, on page 228, he says

"But it may not have been Carrie; it may also be that he knocked on the door and asked for a drink of water, and Wesley Allen came out at him in a bad temper, and told him to get on down the road and be quick about it."

Note the "it may also be" here as opposed to what he says on page 310.  And then he reflects on an episode of Dexter for his statement that The Man From the Train "particularly hated large men who tried to push him around," again, a statement that has absolutely no factual basis.  In fact, the entire book is filled with scenarios like this -- guesswork, lots of probablys, maybes, "it may be thats."   My point is that when you have a whole book filled with speculation it's kind of hard to take anything seriously.

Then there's the pattern that the author has established that is supposed to convince us that these murders are the work of the same man and that they go back further than anyone who's already written about the links between these axe murders has discovered. Admittedly, there do seem to be similarities and these were already noted in 1911; however, when a murder doesn't fit the pattern, the author still finds a reason that it should.  As just one example when he tries to justify including a murder in North Carolina in 1906 when the pattern the author has established here doesn't quite fit, in this case a murder where potential victims were left alive  (301), he says that the killer "heard a train coming."  Not "may have heard a train coming," or "probably heard a train coming," but "heard a train coming" and therefore decided to catch it, implying that he was in a hurry to leave.  There's no evidence for this at all unless Mr. James has a timetable of trains running through that section of North Carolina on that particular day, which he doesn't.    This sort of things occurs more than once; not only that, but he takes us through several murders that have nothing at all to do with the case  that could have been left out all together.  By the end of Section IV (330),  Mr. James notes that so far,  121 murders "have been discussed in this book."  And while the research is impressive, what's frustrating is that after he's taken us through these 121 cases,  he says that while "the authors do not believe that all 121 murders were committed by the same man,"  they do believe that a "substantial number" can be attributed to him; that gets narrowed down on page 336 to "  "perhaps fourteen crimes about which we have enough information to be certain they were committed by the same man."  So why write about all 121 and not focus just on the fourteen? That makes no sense at all and fills the book with a lot of unnecessary details and way more conjecture than fact. 

Honestly, it's enough to make your head spin and I haven't even touched on the writing style which absolutely grates.

This book is actually getting some really great reviews and high ratings, but not from me. I will say that I was impressed with how he pointed out several instances where the police or other members of the justice community were too quick to arrest or judge suspects based on race, opportunity or other factors --  that was done very well.  I also found the subject matter intriguing especially because I'd never heard of any of these murders, but as one of "today's modern readers," a phrase he uses throughout the book, speculation, guesswork, and a lot of "maybes" just aren't enough to make this a convincing story.  It's sad, really, because I had been looking forward to it for months.

the rare true-crime post: Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century, by Peter Graham

9781634505185
Skyhorse Publishing, 2013
originally published 2011
341 pp

paperback

A long time ago, I watched Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures for the first time and found myself captivated by the murder that inspired the film; since then I've watched it a number of times and just recently discovered the uncut version which I watched during a week when my husband was away on business. I'm not really a major true crime person, but there are some cases, like this one, that stick in the mind.  This case took place in the early 1950s in New Zealand, where, as the author tells us, "murder of any kind was a major event," and that at that time, there were maybe two, three murders a year.  He also says that Women who killed were rarities" and "As for teenage girls, matricide -- it was unheard of."

Lately my interest was reopened after reading Beryl Bainbridge's fictional take on the case, Harriet Said (1972), which changed the story but was most certainly loosely based on the Parker-Hulme case of 1954.  Then, one insomniac night a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on a documentary about the case, which made me want to watch Heavenly Creatures again, which then made me look for a true account of the murder, which led me to this book.  I will say that as long as Graham sticks to the subject at hand, it's a book worth reading; it's when he goes off on tangents of details that I could have cared less about that I found myself tuning out.

Graham starts his story in the hours leading up to the actual murder itself, stopping at the point just before poor Honorah Parker's head is bashed in by a brick at Victoria Park in Christchurch.  Honorah Parker (known as Rieper at the time), her daughter Paulette, and Paulette's friend Juliet Hulme had just finished having tea at a tearoom before venturing off down the "east side bush track"; later the woman who served them, Agnes Ritchie, would say that the girls were polite and that there was "Nothing out of the ordinary." Some 30 or so minutes later, Mrs. Ritchie was shocked to see the girls again, this time

 "breathless, greatly agitated, with bloody hands and clothing. One girl's face with spattered with blood and the other's finely speckled."

She then learned that there'd been some sort of terrible accident and that the woman who'd been with them not too long before was now "covered with blood" somewhere "Down in the bushes -- down the track," according to the girls, having slipped on some rocks.  Mr. Ritchie and his assistant went to find the woman but obviously it was too late when they arrived, since Honorah was dead.  While the girls had called it an accident, Ritchie realized that there were "no rocks anywhere near," and not too far from her head lay a "half-brick with blood and bits of hair on it."  The girls were taken to Juliet's home while police examined the scene; the investigators soon knew that this was no accident, but that "the deceased had been attacked with an animal ferocity seldom seen in the most brutal murders."   What was worse, however,  was that they also realized that  "this savagery was the work of two teenage girls," a "thought too shocking for words."

After this beginning, which, coincidentally, mirrors that of Heavenly Creatures,  Graham goes on to examine the lives of the two girls, both separately and together, in order to come to a conclusion as to why Pauline's mother had to die that day.  While I leave his findings for other readers to discover, using a number of different sources, most pointedly Pauline's own diary,  he paints a chilling picture as to what may have led up to that particular moment; he also goes on to look at the aftermath of the crime and its effects on the girls, the families, on the people in Christchurch, and its interest as the "murder of the century" that would later lead to plays, books, much debate, and a movie.   While he's focusing on all of that, the book is captivating and hard to put down, and there are great photos in this book that help bring it to life.  But I started finding my interest waning here and there as he throws in superfluous details that I could have cared less about (for example, the athletic prowess of the Hulme's attorney at his high school and then Cambridge, or the Hulme's psychiatrist's wife's love of theater etc., etc., and more unnecessary stuff down to what people were eating for lunch),  and it became a major skimathon to get back to the meat of the story.  Another thing: this book could have ended some 50-something pages earlier which would have, I think, made it a stronger piece of writing; my final niggle is that there are no footnotes. Sources are listed in the back but there are several spots where quotations are left unattributed and it drove me nuts. I know -- nerdiferous people such as myself are probably the only people who appreciate footnotes, but to me they're important and should be included in investigative pieces.  

from AZ Quotes

My biggest issue here is that I was not at all impressed with the change of title of this book, and in fact thought it a sort of cheap, exploitative publishers' trick. When originally published in 2011, it was called So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World;  when it came to the US it became Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century, which sort of bypasses the fact that there were two girls involved. It's also highly misleading: we don't discover the modern-day of Juliet Hulme as Anne Perry until very late in the book, at which point we also discover the post-prison identity (Hilary Nathan) of Pauline Parker. But where's Hilary Nathan in the title? Obviously the title change was done to sell more copies of this book since there are thousands of Anne Perry fans out there; personally speaking, I think it's a cheap tactic. 

Having said all of that, however, while on topic  it is a book I'd recommend for anyone with an interest in the case who wants to know more about it -- Graham has done a pretty thorough job here that will answer pretty much any question someone  might want answered. It's actually one of the most chilling true-crime stories I've read. 

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum

9781594202438
Penguin Press, 2010
319 pp

hardcover

One day I left this book downstairs in the kitchen right next to the coffee maker intending to take it upstairs later,  and the next thing I knew there's a post on my husband's facebook page with a photo of this book that reads as follows:

"Hmmmmm, first she has me get more life insurance - then I see this book.  #‎eatouttonight‬?"

I didn't really ask for more life insurance, but his post is kind of spot on regarding this book -- one of the main points in Blum's study is that for a very long time, people who were so inclined could get away with murder when it came to poisoning.  With very few exceptions, in this period of time there were a wide range of toxic poisons that were basically undetectable, used as a weapon to get rid of unwanted people.  That all starts to change with the advent of serious forensic medicine during the 1920s, especially under the auspices of two major figures:  Dr. Charles Norris, and Dr. Alexander Gettler.  Norris was New York's Chief Medical Examiner, while Gettler was a brilliant toxicologist -- together the two started to change not only the way in which science was used in crime cases, but also the emphasis on how government should work to protect its citizens.  Beyond being just plain interesting, it's also a very good look at politics of the time, at the failures and dangers of Prohibition, and at the unsuspected dangers that lie hidden in some every-day products and how science worked to study them and ultimately lead the fight in making lives safer.  

Each section is related under a title heading bearing the name of a poisonous substance.  In each there is a case centered around that specific substance that opens the discussion, then a bit about the history, followed by a bit of scientific info and how scientists came to realize just how very deadly these substances could be. Then it's back to the case and the work of Norris and Gettler in trying to solve the many riddles each case presented, along with warnings to the public based on their findings.  Just as an example, let's take the chapter on Cyanides.  This section whets the reader appetite by starting with two deaths attributed to alcohol but which were in reality caused by poisoning by potassium cyanide.  As the author notes, by the time the true cause was discovered, "the killer, whoever he was, was long gone."  We then move into a bigger, more high-profile case having nothing to do with alcohol, but rather with the deaths of two people in an upscale hotel in Brooklyn.  A man and his wife were discovered dead in their locked room,  and while the ME's office realized it was poison, how exactly they died was a true mystery.  Before getting on with the case, though, Blum gives her readers a brief history of cyanides (there's more than one), the science behind them, and how they work on the human body.  Then we go back to earlier scientific attempts at cyanide detection, Gettler's work and the work of the police in trying to solve this strange crime.   Blum  adds in another earlier case from 1898 to further illustrate how a poisoner had escaped detection and justice, finally following the hotel case to its solution, prosecution and aftermath.  Fascinating stuff, actually, and while I don't even pretend to get the actual science of it all, Blum's brief explanations are enlightening and very interesting to read. 

The biggest focus in this book is how science as a tool in bringing killers to justice (and to exonerate the wrongly-charged innocent) began to be taken seriously, especially in the courts where it was previously undermined or derided.  Because of the beliefs espoused by Norris that a medical examiner should take his job seriously, that he or she has a duty to the public and to the course of justice, and that he/she should be a scientist and not an unqualified political appointee who makes money off of dead bodies and granting favors to highly-placed people, forensic medicine and forensic science  in general became a powerful force which is heavily relied on today, nearly a century after Norris & Gettler first got things rolling in this country.   However, beyond that, the author reveals how after Gettler, Norris and a few others took on the science behind some products that people used in their lives on a daily basis and discovered that these things were killing people, one of the most important outcomes was the sharing of their findings with government officials, with hopes that the government would take steps to protect its citizens.   Norris often had to fight not only city hall, but other government agencies whose interests coincided with big business -- for example, in his fight against leaded gasoline and especially against cheap, poisoned alcohol served to the poor during Prohibition.   Sometimes he won and sometimes he wasn't so lucky, but as things turned out, he was right.  One of the most fascinating stories in this book, for example, was about radium -- previously believed to be a substance very good for one's health and bottled in tonics or in "radium water" etc.,   Gettler and another scientist discovered just how very lethal it was and were beyond instrumental in getting these products banned.  

One interesting side note re a case I already know something about: Gettler was the guy who proved that Ruth Snyder was lying about her injuries on the night she and Judd Gray killed her husband, ultimately leading to their conviction, imprisonment and electrocution for the murder. And, as it turned out, he also proved that Ruth's husband would have died soon anyway -- ironically, his "brain was sodden with bootleg alcohol," which not only would have been lethal on its own, but also trashed Gray's testimony that Snyder came at him and he had to defend himself.  Snyder was so out of it, Gettler noted, that he "couldn't have even been propped upright to fight." 

from PBS online 

I first came across this book when one night, I couldn't sleep and decided to watch anything I could find remotely interesting at 2 a.m. and chose an American Experience episode with this title. I was hooked and then discovered that there was a book and that's all it took.  I enjoyed The Poisoner's Handbook -- one thing it did for me was that  it hit home that in some ways a lot has changed (and happily so) since that time but in others, a lot remains the same.  Today, like in the 1920s, many pro-business interests in government continue to represent the interests of corporations at the expense of the people who work in their industries; there are still people who for some reason I do not fathom continue to insist that science is wrong, undermining the work of skilled, brilliant people for some political or financial reasons.  One more thing -- this book takes more of a journalistic approach making it highly accessible to everyone, which is a good thing.  I have only one negative thing to say and that's that each chapter ends in some sort of anecdote which not only adds unnecessary fluff but gets tiresome after a while. A lot of readers might enjoy that, but I'm all about keeping the flow going so I didn't.  But that is just such a nit-picky kind of thing that really did not make my interest flag or prevent me from being absorbed in this book, and I highly recommend it, especially to people who are into historical true crime.  

reading in tandem: The Double Indemnity Murder, by Landis MacKellar and A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, by Ron Hansen

My real-world book group recently read Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain (which, to my surprise,   they didn't care for, leaving me a bit stunned)  and in preparing for the discussion, I learned that Cain's novel had its roots in a real-life crime where double indemnity played a role in a murder.  I love historical true crime done well, and since my little grey cells were tired and needed a thinking break,  I grabbed my copy of  Landis MacKellar's The Double Indemnity Murder: Ruth Snyder, Judd Gray, & New York's Crime of the Century.   Then I discovered that Ron Hansen had written a novel based on the same crime, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, so I read that one right after.  The true crime account is worth reading not so much for the crime, but rather for the dynamic duo (she says snarkily) that decided to do away with a husband for $90+ thousand dollars in the 1920s (almost 1.3 million in today's equivalent).  

As far as murdering goes, housewife Ruth Snyder and corset salesman Judd Gray (shown here on the cover) were hopelessly inept at their craft.  Snyder latched onto Gray via sex and promises of a happy future together, and cooked up a plan to get rid of her husband Albert.  The long and short of it is that they did it, made it look like Albert was killed during a burglary, but they messed it all up and were caught immediately.  That's when the story really starts. Using transcripts, newspaper accounts, personal narratives and interviews,  MacKellar does a wonderful job here of relating "New York's crime of the century," right up until shortly after both went to the chair.  I was caught up in this story, as I said, not so much for the crime, but because of the people. I ended up feeling sorry for Judd Gray, who was definitely no match for Ruth Snyder; yes, I know he took part in a murder, but still. Had she not come along, I don't know if he'd ever kill anyone; she, on the other hand, was more or less a sociopath in the guise of a perfect housewife who canned peaches.  I think whoever she set her sights on would have been in big trouble.  It does move beyond the crime to examine, among other things,  the press and what reporters would do to keep a big story in the news. 

Fictionalizing this story is Ron Hansen, whose A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion also uses the same accounts along with MacKellar's book to tell his version of this tale.  It starts out so nicely, giving readers a Gray who is in ongoing, visible conflict because of his relationship with Ruth Snyder. It also offers a view of Ruth I gleaned from MacKellar's work -- the coldhearted woman who left her kid in a hotel lobby while she and Gray did the do in a room, the would-be killer of her husband who attempted to get rid of him more than once with a series of accidents, waiting for the insurance policy to be processed before she did the real thing.  Had he kept going this route it would have a nearly-perfect novel.  But sadly, after giving us some great insights into Gray and Snyder's characters, 

after the murder his book starts to read more like a book of true crime.  Had I not read the nonfiction version first, maybe things would have been better, but I felt like he could have done so much more with this book considering how well he'd  portrayed Gray up to that point.  Judd Gray is definitely the one to watch in all of this,  since the question really is this:  why did this man allow himself to do what he did when everything about him just screams nice guy? It is a topic I find absolutely fascinating, and it's a bit sad that Hansen was traveling this road for a long time, then just sort of let that ball drop. 

So taken together in tandem, what we have here is the proverbial mixed bag. The nonfiction account, for people who are interested in historical true crime, is well worth the read not just for the crime, but for the aftermath and a look at the police, the courts, politics, the press, the death penalty, and New York during the jazz age.   Hansen's novel could have been great but in my opinion, the book just sort of loses steam at the end.  Having said that, I'm happy to have read both, and I'd heartily recommend The Double Indemnity Murder,  less so Hansen's book, which was just great up until after the arrests.  And don't expect Double Indemnity, as it seems so many readers did going into the novel.  

Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing, by Kate Colquhoun

9781468300567
Overlook Press, 2013
339 pp

paperback

The very first thing I noticed about this book (which in the UK was published as Mr. Briggs' Hat)  is that the blurb from the New York Times on the front cover pretty much gives away the show here, to the point where I almost chucked the book thinking "okay, so I really don't need to read it now."  To me, putting that tiny bit of review there was a bad decision. I don't want to know the meat and bones of a true-crime case right away and then sit waiting for things to materialize -- I'd much rather discover things in the book as they are discovered in the actual case being written about.  Boo hiss. That was definitely not cool.  

The crime under study here begins with a train stop at the "midway point on the line" between Fenchurch Street and Chalk Farm. As a train guard is fretting over being behind schedule while the train is stopped at Hackney Station, he hears a "commotion" at the front of the train. Two bank employees had just stepped into a first-class carriage, only to discover that it was filled with blood, still wet, spattered everywhere. Then he heard complaints from some women who had just exited the compartment next door, whose "dresses and capes had been stained by drops" that had come through their open carriage window while the train was still en route.  Blood is everywhere, but where is the victim? All that remains in the compartment is a "black hat, squashed nearly flat," with the maker's name inside, along with a "thick cane topped with a heavy ivory knob" also containing "a few red spots" and a black bag. No one in the adjoining compartment had heard anything.   The guard instructs the stationmaster to wire the railway superintendent at the end of the line; he then locks the compartment door and the train starts its journey.  When the train reaches its final destination, it is met by the station superintendent who checks out the compartment and calls for the police; the hunt begins for whoever may have done this horrific thing.

What happened to Mr. Thomas Briggs as he sat in his first-class carriage was an "unprecedented" crime; it was "the first time since the invention of the railway" that someone was murdered on a British train. What was more unsettling, it seems, is that it had happened in a first-class carriage and that Mr. Briggs was a "respectable" person.  As the author notes,

"The murder of Thomas Briggs in a first-class railway carriage so close to the centre of the metropolis, with its attendant air of impenetrable mystery, was supra-sensational.. It suggested an implicit threat to the day-to-day safety as a society as a whole, as if the plot of a novel were spilling over into reality."

His murder also was cause for alarm since there seemed to be no suspects and since whoever did this horrible thing was still at large, free to do this again.  It was as the author states,

"a reality that unsettled every member of the public who travelled by train, shattering confidence in the security of their established routines."

The book details the search for the killer by a very determined police investigator, as well as the arrest, trial and sentencing of a person believed to have done it.  Whether or not the person was actually guilty is something the reader can debate -- the author has set things up so that rather than coming to a decisive conclusion, she offers evidence pointing both to and away from the person's guilt.

from The Daily Mail. Do NOT click on this link if you don't want to know the murderer's identity! 

A couple of more points of interest and I'm out of here. First, the author weaves in several literary references into her narrative, noting the popularity of sensation fiction (Braddon, Collins, etc.) and how these took the reader out of the "urban criminal underworld favoured by Dickens" into "the apparently safe domesticity of rural country houses." The murders or crimes in these books, she notes, all ended with "the restoration of order" while in real life, the Briggs case was much more horrific since it took some time for police to come up with a tangible suspect.   Second, not only does this case underscore how very limited options were for defendants in the courts at the time, but it also goes into an examination of executions as spectacle, a topic of great interest to me.

Overall, it's a good book and of particular interest to anyone interested in the Victorian period. There's a lot of cultural detail here around the crime that is quite interesting. On the other hand, it gets a bit boggy in the reading, with a lot of unnecessary repetition and to me some uninteresting bits about how this crime was a diversion from the American civil war, since the Inspector's pursuit of the suspect brought him to our shores.   I am happy to have read it though, since I'm a huge fan of historical true crime.  I'd recommend it to others who are interested as well.

now here's something different: Square Mile of Murder: Horrific Glasgow Killings, by Jack House

1902927419
Black and White Publishing, 2002
originally published 1961
190 pp

paperback

After having read a couple of novels fictionalizing the true story of Madeleine Smith, I was doing a little side reading and came up with a reference to this nonfiction book, Square Mile of Murder.  It's definitely what I call a "niche read," meaning it's probably not a book of interest to the general public but more for people like myself who are fascinated with this stuff.  This book contains accounts of four most infamous murders (for the time) which  occurred within in the space of just one square mile of Glascow between 1857 and 1909.

from Wikipedia -- the "square mile of murder"  in Glascow

This book was made into a BBC production which I would kill to see, but like many other BBC offerings, is not available here.

While he offers readers detailed information about each case, the people involved, the trials and the outcomes, the author's main idea in this book is that "the one thread that links all these cases is respectability."  The first three murders he writes about  took place during the Victorian era, during which time Glasgow was "an intensely respectable city," a place where "respectability ruled the roost." The fourth crime took place in 1909, but the author includes it because "the spirit of his case is also Victorian."  Before even getting into the book then, the reader is clued that much of what he or she is going to read  is going to deal with class, status, money and contemporary morality,  and exactly how these elements all figured into and affected the outcomes of the four cases that happened within this "square mile of murder."  It is a wonderful, informative book and the author's writing style is such that often I felt as if he was actually engaged in a conversation here. For example, in the case of Oscar Slater, he relates the first description given to police by a witness, and says in the next paragraph

"Will you please put a book-marker in this page? As this strange case unfolds, it would be a good idea if you now and then turned to this original description of the man in the lobby."

His commentary is also quite witty at times, and he definitely makes his point stick about respectability and its role in all four of these cases. It is just a stunning book - one I can easily and most highly recommend.

Without going into great detail here about each case, I'll offer just brief summaries about the murders. For much deeper insight, there is a great two-part review of this book at a blog written by ten different crime writers called Murder is Everywhere.  You can also find a lot of pertinent info at another great website called The Murder Tree.

The book begins with the case of Madeleine Smith.  The daughter of an architect living in Blythswood Square, Madeleine fell in love and had a fling with Pierre Emile L'Angelier.  L'Angelier wasn't of Madeleine's class and was ten years her senior, but she fell for him all the same.  She met this man in 1855; by 1857 she was on trial for his murder. Even though she had sex with L'Angelier, it wasn't long afterward that she became engaged to a socially-acceptable and parentworthy man and now L'Angelier had to go.  It seems that she gave L'Angelier massive doses of arsenic in his cocoa more than once, but he ultimately succumbed. Sadly for her, he hadn't got rid of the multitude of letters she'd written to him; there was even a letter from her in his pocket when he died. In the author's opinion, L'Angelier died "because Madeleine wanted to become respectable," and at her trial, as the letters were read in open court, Victorian sensibilities were probably much more offended by her frank discussions of sex than they were by the fact of her lover's death.

The Sandyford Murder case occurred at 17 Sandyford Place in 1862. A servant at this home owned by the "passing rich" accountant John Fleming was found to have been quite brutally hacked by a meat cleaver  enough times to merit a comparison by Charles Dickens to the work of Lizzie Borden. John Fleming had left his elderly father (called Old Fleming) home with Jessie McPherson while he was away over a weekend.   On his return, John Fleming couldn't find McPherson, and his father said he hadn't seen her all weekend. Fleming goes down to Jessie's room and finds her dead.  The floor of the adjoining kitchen was still wet from having been washed, as was part of the bedroom floor; three bloody footprints had also been left behind.  Old Fleming noted that some silver-plate cutlery was missing; some of Jessie's clothes were also found to have disappeared.  At first Old Fleming was arrested for the crime, but the police began to focus their attention on a former servant and friend of McPherson's, Jessie McLachlan who was ultimately arrested just a few days after Old Fleming, who was then released.  

Case number three is that of  "The Human Crocodile," aka Dr. Edward William Pritchard. Pritchard did away with three women, the first in May of 1863. He lived just around the corner from 17 Sandyford Place on Berkeley Street for the first murder (where a servant girl died in a fire), and while people who didn't particularly like Pritchard may have voiced their own suspicions about his involvement, he moved on. His family then moved to 22 Royal Crescent and took on another servant, Mary McLeod, 15, who he ultimately "turned into a concubine."

Pritchard was viewed as somewhat of a quack by his medical peers, and was accused of trying to seduce his female patients.  Moving again to Sauchiehall Street in 1864, by October Mrs. Pritchard started to become very ill.  Her husband put it down to "gastric fever," but funny thing -- while she was away visiting her parents in Edinburgh for the month of November through Christmas, her health greatly improved.  On her return, though, just after the New Year, she became ill again.  Her mother came to take care of her, but ultimately both Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Taylor died.  An anonymous letter to the authorities led to a police investigation, and Dr. Pritchard was arrested. 

Moving now to 1909 and to West Princes Street, less than half a mile from the center of this square mile of murder, the author examines the case of Oscar Slater, who was wrongfully accused, arrested and imprisoned for the murder of elderly Miss Gilchrist, who was beaten to death while her maid was out buying a newspaper. The case turned on a diamond brooch that was missing from Miss Gilchrist's apartment and a tip to the police; some time later a man named Oscar Slater had tried to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch, and then took a ship along with his girlfriend to America.  When he discovered that he was under arrest for Miss Gilchrist's murder, he could have stayed in America, but during his extradition hearing, decided that he would go back home to clear his name. Also going against Slater was the fact that he was a foreigner, but he went back, was arrested, tried and sentenced to hang.  What's interesting about this particular case is that the trial was a joke and that an innocent man went to prison. Although his sentence was commuted to life,  the case was later taken up by Arthur Conan Doyle who went through the evidence, and called for a new trial for Slater.  He published his findings in 1912 sparking a public outcry, but  even that didn't turn the authorities around. A policeman even  risked his career in order to get to the truth and try to get justice for Slater during a secret inquiry, but Slater wasn't released until 1927, and even then without his name being cleared. 

Square Mile of Murder is now one of my favorite books and a prized addition to my home library.  Highly recommended to anyone who is, like me, fascinated by historical true crime.  

Past Crimes Revealed: The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science, by Douglas Starr

0307266192

Knopf

October 5, 2010

320 pp.

My thanks to Amazon Vine for sending this book prior to publication.

Set in 1890s France,  The Killer of Little Shepherds contains two simultaneously-told stories.  First, there's the account of Joseph Vacher, who roamed the countryside of France and left only gruesome death in his wake.  The second story is that of Alexandre Lacassagne, head of the department of legal medicine at the University of Lyon, who pioneered many forensic techniques in the areas of crime-scene and post-mortem analysis, and was what we would now call a criminal profiler. 

Starr begins his story with army Sergeant Joseph Vacher's full-on obsession with a young woman named Louise Barant, a housemaid. After only one dinner, Vacher proposed marriage, and then later told her that if she ever betrayed him, he would kill her. She tried to avoid him and put up every reasonable excuse for not seeing him, but it didn't help. On a four-month leave from the army, Vacher came after her, she refused him, and he shot both Louise and himself. Both survived, and Vacher was put into two different asylums for a total of ten months, then released. With really nowhere to go, Vacher became a vagabond.  As he wandered the countryside, he committed the most heinous crimes, with young shepherd boys and young women favorite targets.  Because he would wander from department to department, by the time the crimes were discovered, he would have been long gone, thus avoiding detection.

Starr then interweaves his account of Vacher with the story of Alexandre Lacassagne, who was a pioneer in the study of forensic methodologies, including criminal profiling. He also discusses others in the field of criminology including Alphonse Bertillon and Cesare Lombroso, and explains developments in science and psychology that aided in the advancements of legal medicine and crime detection. He also examines  the phenomenon of "vagabondage," noting the correlation between unemployment, the increase of people on the move, and the correlating upswing in crime.

Both strands of this book come together when Vacher is caught, imprisoned, and sent to trial, leading to some pretty major questions. For example, was Vacher insane at the time he killed, or was he perfectly rational? And what exactly legally constituted insanity?  Is there any way to know if insanity is based on physical causes? What type of punishment is suitable if a murderer is found to be insane? Many of these questions sparked international debates, but they also led to further developments in the field of psychology, which was growing rapidly, as was the gap between medical science and legal codes.  And when a person is known to be a "monster," even if he is insane, how can the legal system justify putting him in an asylum where, if he's crafty enough, he'd fake being well and be let out to kill all over again?

Starr expertly catches the era surrounding the crimes of Vacher and the work of Lacassagne and others. He acknowledges work being done in other countries around the same time period, such as Italy, the United States and Great Britain so as to broaden the scope of developments in the science of criminology.  He also examines other crimes as well as the limitations of the local rural police departments in the capture of criminals.

I got very caught up in Vacher's story, and I liked the book. The early efforts focused on forensics and criminal profiling are really interesting, and if you're into this kind of thing, you'll be richly rewarded. It's quite obvious that Starr put in immense amounts of original research in the production of this work.  The stories of Vacher's victims are also  lurid enough so that if you're not interested in the field of forensic study, you'll still find something in the book that will interest you.   I do think he could have done without the "postscript" chapter and gone right to the epilogue, but that's nit picky on my part. Overall, it's a good book that will keep you reading.

Past Crimes Revealed: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King and the International Hunt for His Assassin, by Hampton Sides

0385523920
Doubleday
480 pp.
2010

My many thanks to Doubleday, who sent me this book as an ARC some time ago. And my apologies for just getting around to reading it.

On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down & killed with a single shot as he stood outside of his room on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.  It didn't take long until the conspiracy theories began. As the author notes:

In a society already well marinated in conspiracy, it was only natural that every form of collusion would be bruited about.... Johnson had done it. Hoover had done it. Wallace had done it. The Klan, the White Citizens Council, the Memphis Police Department. The Mafia, the CIA, The National Security Agency, the generals who ran the war King had condemned. 

But Hampton Sides believes it was only one man, James Earl Ray, who committed this murder.  From the beginning, he traces the movements of this man (although he calls him Eric Stavro Galt rather than James Earl Ray, going by Ray's alias at the time) starting in 1967 in Puerto Vallarta where he'd hoped to make his mark in the porn industry. Before that time, Ray had been in prison, where he'd escaped in a bread truck some time before arriving in Mexico.

In the first part of the book, Sides puts this year into perspective both politically and socially.  LBJ's in the White House; faced with the Vietnam quagmire and growing social unrest at home, he has decided not to run for another term. He has been criticized by Martin Luther King for funneling money out of the country to finance the war rather than to help the poor in America.  J. Edgar Hoover is still FBI director, caught in a time warp chasing communists in America and expending an enormous amount of effort making Martin Luther King an FBI/Cointelpro target. Younger, urban African-Americans no longer believe that King's policies of nonviolence are effective in their fight against oppression, while King and his associates are  planning a "Poor People's Campaign" to take place in Washington DC.  George Wallace is starting his campaign for the presidency.  It's a turbulent time in American history and Sides captures it well.  He also traces the events that led Dr. King to the Lorraine Hotel, and simultaneously examines how Galt/Ray came to be there at the same time.

The second part of the book focuses on not only law enforcement efforts to find King's murderer, but Galt's efforts to elude capture.  Unlike today, there was no automated fingerprint identification system, nor was there DNA analysis to make the task any easier. FBI agents definitely had their work cut out for themselves. And while they're busy trying to sift through leads, Galt flees the country, making his way northward into Canada and then on to Europe via London and Portugal and back to London again.


The book raises many questions, the most notable being the motivation behind Galt/Ray's actions.  Sides believes that perhaps one reason behind his crime was that Ray wanted to accomplish something truly notable in his life, although we're never really privy to Ray's thoughts about why the death of  Martin Luther King would accomplish that goal. Did he do it for money? And speaking of money, until Ray got to Portugal, he seemed to be flush enough to take care of himself during that year; was someone paying him? How did he manage to always come up with needed funds when he left prison with very little cash?

Hellhound on His Trail may be a bit misnamed -- I never did get the sense that Ray was actually stalking King -- but it's a very readable and credible account of  what led up to a day that made a difference to America on several levels. It's also one I'd definitely recommend.

Past Crimes Revealed: The Murder Room: The Heirs to Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases, by Michael Capuzzo

9781592401420
Gotham Books
2010
439 pp.

The dustjacket blurb of this book notes that

Three of the world's finest sleuths -- an FBI agent turned private eye, a forensic artist and ladies' man who speaks to the dead, and an eccentric profiler known as "the living Sherlock Holmes" -- invited the greatest collection of ace detectives from around the world on a grand adventure for justice: to track down the killers in the toughest unsolved murders... The Murder Room draws the reader into the secret investigations of the crime-fighting Vidocq Society...

so, one would think that The Murder Room is an examination of the world-famous Vidocq Society as a whole and that its readers are going to be privileged to enter into the inner workings of this entire group.  But although Capuzzo does delve into the history of the Society and does offer a peek into a few of its meetings, the book is really dedicated to the lives of the founders of the Vidocq Society: William Fleisher, Richard Walter and Frank Bender, especially the latter two. The other "ace detectives from around the world," are rarely mentioned and their contributions as Vidocq Society Members (VSMs) are pretty much non-existent here.  Even when Capuzzo relates the events of a typical meeting of the Society, Walter and Bender tend to take center stage.


Frank Bender, an artist, although probably not a household name, has been featured on American television on America's Most Wanted, most famously as the man who recreated what John List might look like years after he had murdered his entire family and walked away to a new life.  Bender's sex life and his interest in women takes up a great deal of space throughout the book (and frankly, I got tired of reading phrases like "Chrissie has the cutest little butt") as does his on-again, off-again bickering with fellow Vidocq society founder and profiler Richard Walter over who should have received credit for List's capture. Walter can best be described as eccentric and arrogant, as well as a talented profiler who, according to the author, seems to be able to solve pretty much any crime tossed his way at the meetings, waiting until the very end to toss back the solution based on his profiling abilities. Capuzzo also notes that Walter is known as the "living Sherlock Holmes." Fleisher, who came up with the idea for the Vidocq society, doesn't get nearly as much air time as the other two, and the author often makes statements like “Bender and Walter were the most astonishing investigative team Fleischer had ever seen.”


There are some good moments here -- the dozen or so cold cases which the group examines and attempts to solve are all really interesting. For example, there's the case of the Cleveland Butcher, left unsolved by detective Eliot Ness in the 1930s, the "Case of the Shoeless Corpse," which had gone cold in 1984, in which a young student was found dead missing her shoes and socks. She had not been molested or robbed, and the crime made no sense. Then there's the "Case of the Prodigal Son," in which a young Texas man simply disappeared, and whose father just knows he was murdered. And most people are aware of the John List case, as well as one of the most famous and ongoing unsolved cases in the US, that of The Boy in the Box.  The problem is that when the author starts to discuss these and other cases, he interrupts them to go on to something else, bouncing about in time (and usually coming back to either Bender or Walter) so that the reader is left dangling until he decides to once again pick up the story's threads. It's often very distracting and the style is at times incoherent.

This book seems to be getting really good reviews, but my take on it is that I felt like the author promised something he didn't deliver -- and that was the workings of the Vidocq society as a whole. And while he notes how the society is able to take up cold cases and manage a pretty good success rate for solving these crimes, there's just way too much extraneous stuff in here that could be weeded out. I mean really, who cares if Bender spent three days on Bondi Beach with "bikinis cut low", discussing "the shark net, the killer riptide, the hermit in the rocky cave, the record number of bikinis" referring to a Guiness record for largest swimsuit photo shoot. And why does Capuzzo need to note how many cigarettes Walter lights over and over again or how often he coughs? It might have been a much tighter and more concise account of a group that does incredibly meaningful work if the author had kept a better focus. But in many ways, imho, he seemed to be a bit all over the map.


Bottom line: I really wanted to love this book, but that didn't happen, although I did enjoy the accounts of the cold cases and how some of their perpetrators were eventually brought to justice.

Past Crimes Revealed: Murdering Stepmothers: The Execution of Martha Rendell, by Anna Haebich

9781921401459
UWA Publishing, Australia
2010
217 pp.

The blurb for this book reads as follows:
... Professor Anna Haebich brings to life the people of Perth and the entangled mesh of self-righteous bigotry, slander and unbridled revenge they invoke to propel the trial of Martha Rendell - the last woman in the state to be hanged. Based on a true story and meticulously researched, this compelling novel is driven by passion, imagination and an eerie conjuring up of the past.

This is just the sort of blurb that gets my nosy self's heart pumping. I first noticed this book in a copy of the New York Review of Books, and immediately I had to know who was Martha Rendell, why was she hanged, and  all of the gruesome details, never having heard of this person before. So I bought the book, thinking it was a new historical novel based on a real crime.  After reading it, it's a tough call as to whether it's actually a novel or no. But I'll get back to this later.

In 1909, a 14 year-old boy named George Morris ran away from his father William and his "stepmother" Martha Rendell (in reality the two were not actually married), back to the home of his mother. He had claimed that three of his siblings had died in their home in East Perth, and that he was worried he was next. Within the span of 18 months, all of the children had become ill, and after recovering, were being cared for by Rendell. One by one they began to develop strange symptoms, in particular a "peculiar membranous condition of the mouth and throat..." which the physician had never seen before. And then one by one, they died, except for George, who said that  Rendell had pretended to pour out his brother's Arthur medicine, but then replaced it with "spirits of salts." This caused Arthur to scream in pain, and become deadly ill. As the children began to die, George left, seeking shelter with his mother.  There was just enough doubt to cause authorities to dig up the children's bodies and charge both Rendell and Morris with murder.

Haebich tries to reconstruct the case from four different points of view: a newspaper photographer who followed the trial, a detective whose hero and model was Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, a physician, and a reverend, who ministered to Rendell within the prison walls. She provides a wealth of information about the period, including  past poisoners, the power of the press, and the science of medicine and pathology of the time. In each person's narrative, the reader is left with some doubt as to whether or not Rendell was really guilty. If she was guilty, then perhaps there was some physical, psychological, social or emotional reasoning behind her crimes.

After the four different points of view are completed, the final say is given over to the author in a chapter entitled "the researcher." Here she notes that while trying to put together Rendell's story, she

realised early in the piece that a conventional historical narrative could not possibly convey the nuances of this complex and controversial case. Due to the many gaps in the records there were also many questions that could only answered via imaginative reconstructions of people and events.

She then goes on to provide an analysis of what may have actually happened, and discusses her experiences with descendants of the Morrises.

Although the approach she's taken plays out well, I don't think she needed to go that route. Within the different reconstructions, she provides a wealth of factual information related to the case that could have stood on its own put together in a singular historical retelling. There's very little dialogue in the narratives, the voices are not as distinct as those of different characters should be in a novel, and you never really get the feeling that you're actually reading a novel in its true sense. Now, having said that, Murdering Stepmothers is still a book that will keep you reading and involved. The case itself is interesting -- and you as the reader are left to put together all of the different sociological, psychological and physical threads to decide for yourself as to Rendell's guilt or innocence. Haebich's analysis of the available facts is very well done -- and the book is not just another over-sensationalized true crime account that crowds bookseller shelves. Overall -- it's a good book, with few distractions and a well-grounded sense of time and place.

Past Crimes Revealed: The Magnificent Spilsbury and the case of the Brides in the Bath, by Jane Robins

9781848541085
John Murray Publishers
2010
292 pp.

As England was heading into and then in the opening years of World War I,  within the short space of three years, three women, all of whom had married George Joseph Smith (who used multiple aliases) drowned while taking a bath.  Each individual death had been legally attributed to natural causes after proper inquests, the doctors finding no evidence of foul play.  But early in 1915, Detective Inspector Arthur Neil from the Kentish Town police station was going through his workload and came across an official memo, attached to which were two newspaper cuttings.  The first was headlined as "Found Dead in Bath, Bride's Tragic Fate on Day After Wedding;" the second as "Bride's Sudden Death in Bath. Drowned After Seizure in a Hot Bath." It seems that the father of the now-dead Alice Burnham, who had married Smith in 1913 and died in the bath during  her Blackpool honeymoon, had seen a news article about Margaret Lofty, a young, newly-married woman who drowned in her bath in Highgate, and brought the similarities between the death of his daughter and Margaret to the attention of the Aylesbury police. They brought it to the attention of Scotland Yard, who sent it to Neil. As official investigations proceeded, and the story became public, another police department informed Neil of yet a third possibility, that of Bessie Mundy, who had also been found dead, again drowned during a bath.

Jane Robins recreates and analyzes the case, drawing from a multitude of modern and contemporary sources. One by one she takes the reader through the three victims lives, how they came to meet George William Smith, and why the women may have been drawn to him, considering that this man was such bad news. Interwoven with their stories, Robins sets the stage in terms of historical context, including contemporary social attitudes and psychology, current events, the current state of police procedure, and traces the science of forensic pathology, which was still in its early stages as a tool for crime solving.  She introduces her readers to Dr. Bernard Spilsbury, a forensic pathologist whose work on the Hawley Crippen case of 1910 helped to send Crippen to the gallows after his return from his interrupted escape to Canada. Spilsbury returns to the stand again as a prosecution witness, with his professional theories about what happened in the cases of the Brides in the Bath. As in the Crippen case, his opinions also led the jury to a verdict of guilty and to a death sentence for Smith.  But  was Spilsbury's opinion accurate?  Was it indeed reflective of what had actually happened to these women? Would his evidence hold up in a modern court of law?

The Magnificent Spilsbury is a pleasure to read, both in terms of the period and because of my absolute fascination with historical true crime. It's quite obvious that Robins did a great deal of research, poring over old trial records, letters, documents, police records as well as examining relevant modern sources. Her constant interweaving of contemporary events and writings allows her to analyze her findings, rather than just setting them all down in a purely factual manner, always asking questions and putting forth a great deal of effort to answer them.  She's also able to bring the case and the principals involved to life through her writing, especially Smith and the women he victimized.

I only have a minor issue with this book. At times there may have been a bit too much period detail. One example: the three pages of treatise about the history and use of zeppelins that proved to be a bit distracting, causing me to want to skim and move along to get back to the story at hand. There were a few spots like this where she could have made her point and then moved on, but chose instead to prolong the discussion.  But overall it's a good book and one I would definitely recommend.

As an aside, if you are interested, I found an article about Spilsbury here.