Leicester Murders E-Book

Ben Beazley

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Contained within the pages of this book are the stories behind some of the most notorious murders in Leicester's history. From the brutal murder of John Paas in 1832, whose killer became the last man in England to be gibbeted, and the poisoning of a seventy-year-old widow by two young men, to the failure to convict Archie Johnson of the murder of Annie Jennings in 1912 due to the inability to identify blood groups at that time, this is a collection of the most dramatic and interesting criminal cases that have taken place in Leicester between the mid-1800s and 1950s. Ben Beazley was a policeman for almost thirty years. His experience and understanding of the criminal justice system give authority to his unbiased assessment and analysis of the cases in this book. His carefully researched, well-illustrated and enthralling text will appeal to anyone interested in the shadier side of Leicester's history.

Leseprobe

Leicester

MURDERS

Ben Beazley

First published in 2008 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

© Ben Beazley, 2010, 2012

The right of Ben Beazley, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 8423 5

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 8422 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1. The Last Man in England to be Gibbeted

James Cook, 1832

2. As Much as Would Lie on a Shilling

Mary Barnes & Charlotte Barnacle, 1842

3. The Unsolved Drowning

Constable William Henry Wells, 1906

4. ‘I Shall Shoot Her Tonight – and Somebody Else’

James Stevens, 1911

5. The Archdeacon Lane Murder

Annie Jennings, 1912

6. A Gambler’s End

Arnold Warren, 1914

7. Does a Dying Man Always Tell the Truth?

Joseph Drury, 1941

8. ‘Move in Again and I’ll Give you Another!’

George Buxton, 1942

9. Killed By the Man She Befriended

William Cowle, 1944

10. To Stop a Woman’s Complaining Tongue

Darshan Singh, 1957

11. ‘He Had Been a Bit Cheeky to Me’

Roy Riddington, 1957

12. ‘She Took My Annie Away From Me’

Adolfas Rastenis, 1960

13. ‘You’re Dead Now Bill’

John Crosbie, 1966

Postscript

INTRODUCTION

Any collection of murders, such as those contained in this volume, needs to be put into the context of the resources available at the time when the murders were committed. With this in view, I have set out in the following pages a brief outline of the detective department which was established in the early years of the Leicester Borough Police, evolving later into the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the City Police, along with some comments on the forensic assistance to which they had access.

In many of the cases, while the circumstances of the crime may not have been in dispute, the decisions reached by both judges and juries can be somewhat perplexing. A man deliberately cuts the throat of a two-year-old child (Arnold Warren, 1914), and the jury recommends leniency, ‘because the crime was not long planned’. In a gangland dispute, the killer armed with a .45 revolver seeks out his victim and deliberately shoots him – not once, but twice in the body, and is found guilty of manslaughter (George Buxton, 1944). For this reason, where available, details of the trial and the judge’s summing up – which essentially guides the jury to make their ultimate decision – are available, they are included. Perhaps surprisingly over time, there is in a variety of ways a consistency which has led to many of these decisions becoming what in law are known as ‘cases stated’, and are used in the present day by the legal profession as benchmarks upon which to base decisions.

The first case reviewed is that concerning the murder in 1832 of John Paas by James Cook. This crime was particularly chosen because, in the days prior to the existence of any organised police system, it is the last of its kind in the Leicester Borough to be investigated by an officer of the local authority – the town clerk, Thomas Burbidge. Not only did this occur at a time when there was no police force as such in existence, but also, any proposal to create one was viewed by both the good and the bad with a deal of opposition. This attitude was based very much on the fact that a police force had for some time been in existence in France, where it was universally regarded with suspicion due to its oppressive nature, and as often in modern times, dedicated more to spying on the individual rather than on the detection of crime. (As in Germany during the period when Hitler’s Third Reich was in power, the Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst were used as a means of instilling terror and obedience into the everyday life of Germans, as were the various secret police organisations such as the NKVD and KGB in Russia during and prior to the Stalinist era. For many years the much vaunted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover devoted much more of its energies to compiling internal dossiers on the activities of American citizens than it did to fighting organised crime.)

In his summing up at the trial of Mary Barnes and Charlotte Barnacle in 1842, Mr Justice Patterson first expressed annoyance that the women had been questioned ‘by a posse of police’, and then demanded of the arresting officer whether or not he personally had questioned the accused. When assured by the man that he had not, his lordship congratulated him, saying that, ‘he was glad to hear it. . . It was not the duty of a policeman to do so and he hoped he should not hear of it again.’ In relation to the same crime, at the inquest on the victim, the coroner, touching with some apprehension on the alleged confessions made by the two accused women, declared:

We have been told on credible authority that on the day they were apprehended, both made confessions to a Constable, admitting their guilt to the fullest extent. We always look with much disgust on such declarations of this kind, and there is generally a degree of sympathy for the parties when guilt is proved by conversations with a policeman or a turnkey. It savours too much of the French system for an English taste.

It was against this background of ignorance and prejudice that after its inception in 1836, the Leicester Borough Police Force began an uphill battle to bring law and order to the town and to persuade those responsible for local government that one of the roles of its officers was the investigation of crime.

One difficulty from the outset was that, in common with all of the other forces being established across the country, the management of the police devolved upon the Watch Committee, which was comprised primarily of hard-headed businessmen. As such, a rule of thumb was quickly implemented that a crime would continue to be investigated only so long as the culprit remained within the force area. If a suspect were to be identified as having moved outside of the borough, then further enquiries would only be made if the complainant was prepared to pay for the expenses incurred in continuance of the enquiry.

It was not until 1847 that, with a public acceptance of the presence of a police force in the town, it was possible to form any sort of detective department. The first reference is in February of that year when the Watch Committee notes contain a minute that; ‘the two Sergeants of the Detective Police Force have silver badges.’

The officers referred to were Sergeants Thomas Haynes, who joined the force in 1838, and Francis Smith, both of whom in 1858 were promoted to the rank of Inspector.

As time progressed, so the department gradually expanded and officers of the rank of Constable were admitted. Soon after the turn of the century, the rank of Detective Superintendent first makes an appearance as Head of the Detective Department, and seemingly by default, the assistant to the Head Constable. (It was not until 1915 that the term Chief Constable was used in the borough, although both in Leicestershire and elsewhere the senior officers in county forces were referred to as Chief Constable.) In the Leicester Borough the first such reference was in 1906 to Detective Superintendent Herbert Allen who, upon the retirement of John Hall-Dalwood at the beginning of 1913, became Head Constable.

Resources were at this time still very limited. Photography as a science was well established; however, its practical applications in relation to police work were limited. Following the famous Houndsditch murders in 1910 which led to the Siege of Sidney Street, in order to take a post-mortem photograph of the body of one of the murdered officers, Sergeant Bentley, the body was dressed in his greatcoat and strapped to a stretcher – which was then propped up against a wall – and his helmet was firmly fixed on his head. The resulting image was, to say the least, macabre.

During the investigation in 1912 into the murder of Annie Jennings, which took place in her room in Archdeacon Lane, Sergeant Hart told the Coroner’s Court that due to poor lighting, he could not take a photograph and instead produced a hand-drawn sketch.

Although photographs were obtained from the early years of the twentieth century, it was not until 1932 that the Leicester City Police Force established a proper Studio (Scenes of Crime) Department. In June of that year, Detective Constable Eric Pym was sent away to Wakefield in Yorkshire to attend a photograph and fingerprint course. On his return, the princely sum of £13 15s was spent on a Kodak camera and two stands, along with developing equipment.

One of the earliest logistical problems to be addressed by both the police and the local authority was what to do with the bodies of those unfortunates whose remains could not be disposed of until after the due processes of law had been completed. This of course applied not just to murder victims; anyone who had met a violent or unusual end could not be decently buried until a coroner’s hearing had been convened. This difficulty was not merely one of accommodation, which was the least problematic. The most difficult issue in the days prior to refrigeration was the actual preservation of the cadaver.

Following the opening of the New Town Hall as the headquarters for the Police and the Fire Brigade in 1876, reference is made in March 1893 to the new mortuary building and the appointment of a ‘keeper’. This building appears to have been situated at the rear of the town hall near to the drill yard and in close proximity to the Head Constable’s living quarters. That the arrangement was most unsatisfactory is evidenced during the summer of that year when the presence in the mortuary room of the body of a woman who had been found dead in a house in Oxford Street was the cause of a spate of complaints from staff working in the building. John Watkinson, the chief clerk wrote:

. . . the stench from her corpse was of such a sickening nature that it made me unwell for several days, and upon two occasions since that time when men have been killed on the railway, the smell issuing from their mutilated remains has made me feel sick every time I passed through the yard to my office . . .

The matter was not properly addressed for some considerable time – in fact, until 1923 (although in the interim period, conditions were addressed). At one point in 1903, Dr C. Killick Millard suggested that the authorities might wish to consider a device which he had encountered in London:

I have ascertained at Battersea where a new mortuary has recently been erected [that] they have an iron tank on wheels, about the size and shape of a coffin, fitted with an airtight lid. A portion of this lid is glazed so that bodies can be identified without disturbing them. The tank is filled with a solution of formalin – the lid of which is heavy [and] is raised by a chain and counter poise.

Such an arrangement must be desirable where decomposed bodies have frequently to be dealt with, especially in hot weather. In Battersea a considerable number of bodies are recovered from the Thames – It is a question for your Committee to decide whether there would be a sufficient use to justify a similar provision in Leicester. – I am informed by the Chief Constable that during the present year, (10 months), only four bodies have been brought to the mortuary in a decomposed state. Last year the number was only two.

In 1923, a temporary mortuary was established at Lansdowne Road in the branch fire station which remained in use until 1927, when a brick-built facility was made available on Welford Road near to the cattle market gates. In 1960, it was once more re-sited to its present location at the Leicester Royal Infirmary.

The science of fingerprinting, which is central to the detection of crime, has been recognised since ancient times. One of the first specific references to the unique nature of prints was by Marcello Malpighi, a professor at Bologna University in 1686. In a treatise that he wrote on the subject, he discussed the ridges, spirals and loops that are present in an individual’s prints, although he did not appear to make the link that these could be used to identify a person.

A similar discourse by John Evangelist Purkinje, a professor of anatomy at Breslau University in 1823, referred to his identifying nine fingerprint patterns, but again, he did not appreciate the implied potential. By the middle 1800s, interest in the subject was beginning to grow and Sir William Herschel, chief magistrate of the Jungipoor District of India, made a collection of people’s prints (which he used in the signing of contracts), with the specific intention of being able to identify the person at a later time, thus for the first time making a practical use of fingerprints.

In 1882, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk at the Préfecture of Police in Paris (who later became chief of the Department of Judicial Identity), instituted what became the Bertillon System of Anthropometry. This, although very flawed, used various measurements of a suspect’s body (head size, arm length, etc.), and fingerprints to establish identities.

It was Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist and cousin of Charles Darwin, who in the late 1880s made one of the most significant discoveries. Galton was interested in hereditary factors and quickly eliminated fingerprints as being indicative of genetic links. What he did realise, however, was that a person’s fingerprints do not change throughout their lives. He also classified the characteristics by which fingerprints can be identified, which today are known as ‘Galton’s Details’.

Meanwhile, under the direction of Sir Edward Richard Henry in India, the Calcutta Fingerprint Bureau was opened, using what became known as the Henry Classification System. Immediately after the turn of the twentieth century, New Scotland Yard, discontinuing the Bertillon System which was considered (correctly) to be unreliable, implemented Henry’s Classification System, and in July 1901 the first fingerprint department was opened by the London Metropolitan Police.

There is only one drawback with a fingerprint system. It is reliant upon a known database for unidentified samples to be checked against. While at the beginning of the twentieth century the skills were available to obtain and read fingerprints, the appropriate databases with which to compare them did not exist and would not be in place for many years to come.

The other forensic tool that again did not become available to police until well into the twentieth century was the ability of forensic scientists to identify different blood groups. In 1901, Austrian Karl Landsteiner discovered that not all human blood was of the same composition, but it was to be another eight years (1909) before he was able to classify the constituents into specific groups. The purpose of Landsteiner’s research was originally to resolve a common problem at the time: people dying after being given blood transfusions (which occurred unwittingly, as he found, due to a mixing of the wrong blood groups). Again, the potential of this knowledge in criminal investigations was not immediately apparent.

As the twentieth century progressed, so did the strength and experience of the Leicester Detective Department, though the days of modern technology and improved communications were still around the corner. The two-way radio system, for instance, did not come into use until the mid-1960s, and then, being dependant on signal strengths and location, it was not an efficient tool until some time after that. While the Borough Police had telephone links between the central and branch police stations as early as 1893 (with the Central Station at the Town Hall additionally being connected to ‘the national system’), it was not until February 1947 that, in common with the rest of the country, the Leicester emergency services – police, fire and ambulance – could be contacted by the public through the ‘999’ system.

During the 1960s, a new strategy in the fight against major crimes saw the setting up throughout the country of Force and Regional Crime Squads, dedicated to the pooling of resources in an attempt to effectively focus police investigations. This was to some degree facilitated in April 1967 by the enforced absorption of many Borough and City Forces into neighbouring County Forces, massively concentrating the manpower available.

What was perceived to be the ultimate step in the investigation of crime was the unravelling in the middle of the twentieth century of the mysteries of Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA – the scientific makeup of the human body which can be linked to an organic forensic sample, such as blood or saliva, and can be allocated to an individual with almost pinpoint accuracy. The ensuing process of DNA fingerprinting, developed in 1985 by an English geneticist, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University, has been used since then to solve many homicide cases worldwide and is now regarded, along with fingerprint evidence, as achieving as near a positive identification as is humanly possible.

The cases outlined in this book cover a period of 134 years, and in many of them the question that must be asked is if even one of these facilities had been available to the investigators of the time, just how much difference would have been made to the outcome?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following for their generosity in allowing me to include in this work photographs from their personal collections and archives: Edna Welford, for items from her late husband, Eric Rourke Welford’s collection; Eric Selvidge; Geoff Fenn; Noel Haines; Leicestershire Constabulary. I would also like to thank County Archivist Carl Harrison and his staff at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland for access to and assistance in locating so many documents and other research items; the National Galleries of Justice, Nottingham; Ian Coutts for his tireless efforts in keeping my computer system functioning despite my best efforts to thwart him; and to John (Jock) Coutts for his first-hand knowledge concerning the investigation of the murder of William Johnstone. To each of these people and to any others who I may have inadvertently missed, I extend my most sincere thanks.

Unless otherwise stated, all other pictures are from the author’s own collection.

1

THE LAST MAN IN ENGLAND TO BE GIBBETED

James Cook, 1832

It is our distressing task to exhibit to the public one of the most extraordinary facts that ever disgraced the criminal annals of any civilised country in the known world. The fact of which we speak is MURDER attended by circumstances of the most diabolical and barbarous nature such as the wildest and most fanciful imagination could scarce have dreamed of. In the heart of our town and close to our own firesides, it has had like a piece of ordnance, the effect of paralysing the thoughts and wholly occupying the minds of every individual within the reach of the report . . .

So began the article in the Leicester Journal of Friday 8 June 1832, which described the brutal murder by James Cook of John Paas at Cook’s workshop in the busy town centre of Leicester ten days earlier on Wednesday 30 May 1832. The killing is particularly worthy of note, not merely for the horrific circumstances which accompanied it, but for other attendant factors.

In the final days of the Georgian era, this was the last crime of any great significance to be resolved in Leicester prior to the establishment of a Borough Police Force. The pursuance of Cook by the head constable, in his headlong flight to Liverpool in an attempt to take ship to America, along with his subsequent apprehension – taken from a rowing boat in the dawn light after a fierce sea chase, befitted the most imaginative of Victorian melodramas. Mystery was to continue to surround much of what happened in the hours following the murder, prior to Cook making his getaway – a mystery which his final confession, rife with lies and half truths, did little to resolve.

At forty-nine years of age, the victim John Paas was a partner in the firm of Messrs Paas & Co., Engravers of High Holborn, London. He was by profession a bookbinder’s tool cutter, engraver and stationer, and one of his functions was to act as a commercial traveller for the company, visiting clients up and down the country, taking orders and collecting money for goods that had been supplied.

In March 1832, bidding his wife farewell, Paas left his home at 44 High Holborn to set off on a round of visits that would take him well into the summer to complete. When he arrived at Leicester on the evening of Tuesday 29 May and booked in at the Stag and Pheasant in Humberstone Gate, John Paas had been on the road for two and a half months, and had collected some £50, a respectable amount of money for the time, from customers he had visited en route. Although the licensee of the inn did not know his guest by name, he later identified him as being ‘the gentleman with a portmanteau and writing desk’, which he used after breakfast the following morning to write a letter before going out about his business.

That business was for him to visit several booksellers and bookbinders in the town, leaving samples with each and returning later to collect their orders. The first client upon whom Paas paid a call was Richard Tebbutt, who had a bookshop a short distance from the Stag and Pheasant in the Haymarket. Having left some samples with Tebbutt, the commercial traveller obtained from him directions to the workshop of James Cook, and duly set off in the direction of Wellington Street.

James Cook was expecting the visit, and had laid careful plans for what was now to take place. An ambitious young man in his early twenties, Cook had served as an apprentice to a man named Johnson, a bookbinder in Albion Street, until his employer had died the previous year. On Johnson’s death, in September 1831, the young man rented a workshop over a cowshed in Wellington Street from John Sawbridge, a local milkman, and set up in his own right.

At this point, we encounter the first puzzling aspect in this case. Cook’s business appears to have flourished from the outset, so he was not in any financial difficulty. A comment was made by Mrs Johnson to John Paas when he had visited her just hours prior to his death that, ‘there had been no turnover of debts to Cook from her husband’s business’, indicating that the young man either bought the business from her, or simply took Johnson’s customers and began trading on his own. The former is probably the case, as all of the tools in Cook’s Wellington Street shop were marked ‘Paas’, and as he had not bought them from the manufacturer, they had most likely been transferred from his original place of work. The fact is, though, that Cook was very busy fulfilling orders – he already employed an apprentice – a fourteen-year-old boy named Charles ‘Joe’ Watkinson – and there is no mention of him owing money to either Mrs Johnson or anyone else.

That the murder of John Paas was premeditated is clear. Charles Watkinson later stated at the inquest that during the week prior to the event, his employer had brought into the workshop a cleaver and a saw, and on the Saturday (although it was early summer), a hundredweight of coal for the fire was delivered.

At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, according to the young apprentice, a tall gentleman whom he had never seen before, dressed in black with grey whiskers and a reddish face, came in and said, ‘Good morning Mr Cook,’ to which Cook replied, ‘Good morning Sir’. The gentleman then asked where Mrs Johnson lived, and was told, ‘in Albion Street’, by Cook, who then turned around to the lad and whispered, ‘Joe, you may go home now – and stay until I fetch you.’

Watkinson’s statement is significant in that it gives clear evidence of plans being laid prior to the murder. The first thing that struck him was that, ‘when the gentleman came into the shop, Cook turned very pale’, which made the youngster think he had come for money, and later when he got home he mentioned it to his mother. It is more likely that at this point the enormity of the moment hit Cook, and his loss of colour was due to the knowledge of what was later to be done.

It was something of a surprise to the boy to be sent home because in his own words, ‘at that time we were exceedingly busy, having more work than we could get through . . .’ However, in the course of the previous week, his master had promised him a holiday for two or three days, saying at the same time that he himself intended to go out of town. Thus the murderer ensured that he now had the premises to himself, and any subsequent absence could be explained by the boy.

The workshop where the murder of John Paas took place, taken from a wood cut published in the Leicester Journal.

The apprentice also made some other important observations. It was he who mentioned that in the last week, his master had brought a saw from home and a cleaver with which he chopped some sticks and afterwards sharpened on a stone in the shop. Also, a few days previously, he had fetched three pennyworth of laudanum from Mrs Lewitt’s shop for his master, who said he wanted to try an experiment, and the bottle was hanging on a nail on the wall for two or three days after.

James Cook had a brother, Michael, who lived at Queniborough and often came to the Wellington Street shop in a gig to help out with work; in fact, a supply of hay was kept by his employer to feed his brother’s pony. Charles Watkinson told the inquest that Michael Cook had visited the workshop on the Saturday prior to the murder, and that he and James had left in the gig to go to Queniborough. In view of the later certainty that Cook had assistance, if not in the actual killing of John Paas, then certainly with the disposal of his body, the purpose of this visit is open to conjecture.

After passing the time of day for about fifteen minutes, Paas left two invoices with Cook for items that he had purchased last September, whereupon Cook asked him to return later that afternoon when he would settle up with him. Paas asked once more where he could find Mrs Johnson, the widow of Cook’s old employer, and being directed to Albion Street, he set off to pay his respects and collect his dues.

En route to see the widow, the traveller first crossed over into Bowling Green Street to make a visit to another bookbinder – Robert Fisher Plant.Arriving at his premises around half past ten, John Paas left some samples with Plant, saying that he would return for them ‘after dinner, when he had been back to see Mr Cook again’. If Cook thought that by luring Paas back to his premises late in the day he was being clever, exactly the opposite was true – the victim was inadvertently laying a clear trail back to his intended killer.

John Paas was next seen at around four o’clock in the afternoon when he returned to Richard Tebbutt’s bookshop in the Haymarket to secure his order. The order, however, was not ready, so he told Tebbutt that he would make his way back to Wellington Street.

It is apparent that whatever his intention, on leaving Tebbutt’s premises in the Haymarket, John Paas changed his mind and returned to his lodgings, where he was seen by the landlord sometime between five and six o’clock standing in the gateway of the inn, talking with two or three other commercial travellers. After a while, he walked off along Gallowtree Gate. This was the last time that he was seen alive.

The events which followed, and the circumstances of the murder, can be pieced together; first from the confession that Cook made while awaiting trial, and secondly from the statements made at the inquest by neighbours.

When John Paas returned to the workshop in Wellington Street, he and Cook were alone. Cook paid his victim the 12s that he owed, and Paas bent over the workbench to make out a receipt for the money. There now follows a contradiction between the evidence and Cook’s version of what happened.

During the subsequent search of the room by the authorities, the invoice in question was found with John Paas’ initial ‘J’ followed by the first letter of his surname, ‘P’, spoiled by a sudden and involuntary line dashed across the paper, indicating that he was struck a violent blow while signing his name.

John Paas’ signature.

Later, at the enquiry, Paas’ brother-in-law attested that the deceased never signed with just his initials – always his full name. Cook, however, insisted in his confession that this was not what happened, that in fact, he struck him after he had signed the document, while Paas was looking at some bindings, and that a fight of sorts ensued before he finally struck the fatal blow with a press bar.

Cook’s confession, which will be examined more fully later, was fraught with patent lies, of which this is undoubtedly one. John Paas was a fairly tall man, standing 5ft 9in, and although Cook was taller, at just over 6ft, he would certainly have taken his best opportunity to strike the deceased a fatal blow – which would have been while he was bent over, concentrating on signing the bill. The involuntary scrawl, as the victim’s hand jerked, makes the conclusion inescapable.

With the murder committed, the killer now needed to dispose of the body as expeditiously as possible, and it was here that the weakness in his planning began the chain of events leading to his downfall.

At seven o’clock on Wednesday evening, on leaving the workshop, Cook spoke to Mary Sawbridge, his landlord’s wife, in the yard of their premises (his shop adjoined the Sawbridge’s home), and told her that he would be coming back later that night to work for three or four hours, as his boy was poorly and he had some work which needed to be finished by Saturday, and consequently, he had made a fire in the grate of the shop.

By this time, Cook was obviously already engaged in getting rid of some of the more easily disposable body parts by burning them, although to leave them unattended was, as he later discovered, a risky business.

It was three hours later when he returned, much to the annoyance of John Sawbridge, who had waited up for him in order to let him in through the gate to the entry which separated the workshop and Sawbridge’s living quarters. Giving Cook the key to the gate, he told him to lock up when he left and push the key back under the gate.

From this point on, it is certain that James Cook was assisted in his grisly task, and the prime suspect is his brother Michael. About three o’clock the following morning, two men, one of whom answered Cook’s description, were seen in Rutland Street carrying between them a box, which it was later speculated contained the larger part of the dead man’s remains. This reported sighting is frustratingly vague – it was published in the Leicester Journal, but the source is not given. If it is correct, however, it is crucial.