The Murder Gang E-Book

Neil Root

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

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

They were an elite group of renegade Fleet Street crime reporters covering the most notorious British crime between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s. It was an era in which murder dominated the front and inside pages of the newspapers – the 'golden age' of tabloid crime. Members of the Murder Gang knew one another well. They drank together in the same Fleet Street pubs, but they were also ruthlessly competitive in pursuit of the latest scoop. It was said that when the Daily Express covered a big murder story they would send four cars: one containing their reporters, the other three to block the road at crime scenes to stop other rivals getting through. As a matter of course, Murder Gang members listened in to police radios, held clandestine meetings with killers on the run, made huge payments to murderers and their families – and jammed potatoes into their rivals' exhaust pipes so their cars wouldn't start. These were just the tools of the trade; it was a far cry from modern reporting. Here, Neil Root delves into their world, examining some of the biggest crime stories of the era and the men who wrote them. In turns fascinating, shocking and comical, this tale of true crime, media and social history will have you turning the pages as if they were those newspapers of old.

Leseprobe

For Trevor DolbyThat fine fellow

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Neil Root, 2018

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

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8721 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword by Duncan Campbell

Introduction

1     A Grisly Jigsaw

2     I Did This Murder to Prove I Could Get Away With It

3     Brutality in the Blitz

4     Life is Cheap on the Black Market

5     The Perils of Having a Go

6     Death of a Car Salesman

7     Mayhem on a Rooftop

8     The Green-Eyed Monster

9     The Good Doctor?

10    Footsteps of a Gunman

11    Murder on the Marshes

12    Darkness at Deadman’s Hill

Coda

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

FOREWORD

BY DUNCAN CAMPBELL

They were, as Neil Root so eloquently describes them:

men in overcoats, camel-hair and Crombie, notepads out, in and out of shops, pubs and cafes, pressing for leads, scanning the street, getting a feel, a taste, led by instinct and experience. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and the Murder Gang are at the crime scene, response time: less than thirty minutes.

The Murder Gang was the name given to the crime reporters of the national press by Hilde Marchant, herself a brave and distinguished journalist, in an affectionate article she wrote for Picture Post in 1947. That thirty-minute response time was to a murder in central London of someone who would now be called a ‘have-a-go hero’: Alec de Antiquis who fatally intervened in a jewellery robbery in London’s West End that year and was shot dead.

This was the heyday of the crime reporter and, indeed, of the tabloid press. By 1956, the News of the World was selling more than 7 million copies every Sunday and its rival, The People, more than 5 million. What did readers want in those days? Not over-egged tittle-tattle about ‘celebrities’ but tales of crime and, especially, of murder. It was the task of those men – and they were almost all men until the 1970s – to provide the who, why, where, when and how of every homicide for a fascinated public as enthralled by true crime as by the novels of Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace.

In his earlier book, Frenzy! Heath, Haigh and Christie: The First Great Tabloid Murders, published in 2011, Neil Root examined the ways in which the press dealt with three of Britain’s most notorious killers: Neville Heath, who sadistically murdered women; John George Haigh, who famously dissolved his victims in an acid bath; and John Christie of 10 Rillington Place who let another man hang for his murders before being caught himself. He also explored the sometimes symbiotic relationship between the crime reporter and the criminal.

While we may feel we know much about murderers and rather less about their victims, what about the people who described them and brought them to life? Root has now focussed on the time and the place where the crime reporter was in his pomp and those characters whose lives revolved around Scotland Yard’s press room and Fleet Street’s pubs, rural murder scenes and smoky newsrooms and the narrow press benches of the Old Bailey and Bow Street magistrates’ court. It was a busy, exciting life if it often tended to be a short one: chain-smoking and beer-drinking were as much a part of the job as shorthand-writing and cultivating talkative mates in the Flying Squad.

There was no shortage of characters: Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express, who had a grace and favour house in Park Lane, courtesy of his admiring proprietor, Lord Beaverbook; Norman ‘Jock’ Rae of the News of the World who helped to unmask the murderer, Dr Buck Ruxton in the 1930s; Duncan Webb of The People, who exposed the Messina brothers and their Soho prostitution network; Tom Tullett of the Daily Mirror to whom a murderer confessed, even producing for inspection a gruesome parcel of body parts of one of his victims.

They were writing at a time when a murder could still be followed by a hanging, despite a growing public unease about capital punishment. It was the Daily Mirror commentator, Cassandra, writing in July 1955, who expressed that disquiet in a column about the execution of Ruth Ellis for shooting her lover in Hampstead: ‘It’s a fine day for haymaking,’ he wrote. ‘A fine day for fishing. A fine day for lolling in the sunshine. And if you feel that way – and I mourn to say that millions of you do – it’s a fine day for a hanging.’

But once the death penalty was abolished in 1969, as the journalist Victor Davis noted in appropriately colourful prose:

much of the buzz went out of crime reporting. The Swinging Sixties swung a little less. No more judge’s black cap, no more execution date planted squarely on the home secretary’s desk as a reminder that there is a yes-or-no decision to take, no more Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen, the deadly duo, overnighting with the prison governor while they tested the trap, rigged the rope and ate a dinner always described as hearty – just like the condemned man’s breakfast.

There were certainly a few more good days for hangings to come after Ruth Ellis was executed and the Murder Gang made sure that their readers were informed about every detail of the killings, the investigations, the perpetrators and the trials. Those days are gone now. Newspapers with declining circulations can no longer afford to cover murder cases in great detail and, in the wake of the scandals of phone-hacking and paying for tip-offs that led to the Leveson inquiry and the closure of the News of the World, relations between police and crime reporters are no longer so chummy. In the meantime, in all their rumpled glory – the Gang’s all here.

DUNCAN CAMPBELL is the author of We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds! The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain and a former Chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association.

INTRODUCTION

This book documents the incredible activities of the ‘Murder Gang’– the elite group of renegade Fleet Street crime reporters who covered the most famous British murders between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, a period in which crime, especially murder, saturated the front and inside pages of the tabloid newspapers as never before or since.

The nefarious collusion of police and newspapers as witnessed over the last few years with phone hacking and bribery has given the impression that we live in a world where corruption is endemic in both the Fourth Estate and almost every part of the ‘establishment’. The impression is that we live in an age of moral turpitude to outstrip anything in our murky history. Delve just fifty years into the past and that impression will be thoroughly disabused. Indeed, the arrogance and greed of the newspapers, along with the establishment that in part nourishes and in part ignores them as they go on their merry money-making way, has its origins in an extraordinary period of British crime journalism where anything went so long as the story landed on the front page and papers were sold.

For the first time and from first-hand accounts this book will explore how the public’s fascination with murder was whipped up by a breed of journalists who would stop at nothing to get the story. If that meant becoming criminals in the process then that was part of the job. It was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, stressful, highly competitive job with long and irregular hours, populated by larger-than-life characters, often using dubious and highly unethical methods. Many of these journalists were on first-name terms with a string of brutal murderers as well as well-placed contacts within the police and court system. They could get information quickly, and get things done. In extremis there was Percy Hoskins (Daily Express) of whom it was said, ‘If you are in trouble you should call Percy before your lawyer.’

Members of the Murder Gang drank in the same Fleet Street pubs and repaired to the same bars and hotels when chasing a story, but they were also ruthlessly competitive against each other personally and any rival newspaper. It was said that when the Daily Express covered a big murder story they would send four cars: the first car containing their Murder Gang reporters, the other three cars to block the road at crime scenes to stop other rival Murder Gang members from getting through. As a matter of course Murder Gang members got the scoop by listening in to police radios, and it was part of the game to remove part of the earpiece of nearby public telephones so that rivals could not phone in a story from a rural location. And those potatoes in the boot of their cars were not for lunch, but for jamming into their rivals’ car exhaust pipes so the vehicle would not start. Then there were far fewer regulatory rules on media reporting. Clandestine meetings with killers on the run from the police and huge payments to murderers and their families were just the tools of the trade.

Revel Barker, who worked on the Sunday Mirror at the end of the period covered in this book, remembers today how Murder Gang reporters dressed and how they operated:

Crime reporters aped the dress of CID detectives – three piece suits, usually a trilby, and raincoats or trench coats, or heavy overcoats in winter. They also adopted copper slang – for instance, referring to suspects as ‘Chummy’. They learnt to talk in pubs without moving their lips. The crime reporters were in the streets and in the pubs; then there were ‘Scotland Yard reporters’ who spent most of their time in the Yard Press Bureau, transmitting information, and sometimes trying to wheedle it out of the police.

TOP OF FORM

This era was undoubtedly the ‘golden age’ of tabloid crime coverage in Britain. There was a huge explosion of violent crime after the war, the whys and wherefores of which will be explored in this book. And not coincidentally did newspaper circulation reach its peak; the News of the World had 8 million regular Sunday readers in the 1950s, with the other papers not far behind. They were fed an unsavoury diet of mayhem and murder. In his famous late 1940s essay The Decline of the English Murder, George Orwell lamented that the ‘quality’ of British crime and its reporting had deteriorated from what he remembered of the 1920s.

The period covered by this book will detail how crime became the tabloid press’s main focus in its quest to sell newspapers. The amount of grisly detail about murders at the time – especially after the Second World War when the British public was desensitised to criminal horrors – would shock even twenty-first-century tabloid readers. As the crime and social historian Donald Thomas has pointed out, this was the time when lurid and violent pulp crime writers such as Mickey Spillane and Hank Janson (both of whom had books banned, even then) were No.1 bestsellers. The threshold of conservative prudery shown by the 1961 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, towards the end of the period covered in this book, was much lower than that shown to crime writing: sex was far more heavily censured than violence.

The stirrings of what became the Murder Gang can be traced to the mid-1930s, and the pack mentality grew from then. Crime reporting became more hazardous after the Second World War, largely due to the risk of new libel laws and the latent fear of contravening the Official Secrets Act. These new libel laws feature in some of the murder cases in this book, and we will see how the Murder Gang sometimes found ingenious ways to circumvent them.

As the reader turns the final page of this book, hopefully they will understand how the reporting of crime in the tabloids developed, and how it is linked to the tabloid press we have today. With many tabloid journalists arrested in the recent phone-hacking furore and the Leveson Report into press regulation that followed, many might have wondered how we descended to this low point of ethics in our free press.

This book attempts to tell the incredible, atmospheric and sometimes jaw-dropping story of how Fleet Street tabloid crime reporting developed from 1935 to 1965, by which time the modern tabloid template we know today came into being. Readers will meet the irrepressible and eccentric larger-than life characters who manned the phones in smoke-filled newsrooms, knocked on unwelcoming doors and walked smog-filled streets and country lanes in pursuit of dangerous killers. At the time some Murder Gang members were household names, as famous as some of the criminals they exposed were infamous.

The core members of the Murder Gang were the legendary Percy Hoskins, Montague Lacey and Len Hunter of the Daily Express; Norman ‘Jock’ Rae, James Howie Milligan and, later, Ronald Mount of the News of the World; Harry Procter of the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Sunday Pictorial; Victor Sims and Fred Redman of the Sunday Pictorial (the latter ironically later the Sunday Mirror’s ‘Happy Homes’ expert); Arthur Tietjen, Sid Brock, Hugh Brady of the Daily Mail, along with Rodney Hallworth, who would later join the Daily Express; Duncan ‘Tommy’ Webb of The People, who actually specialised more in organised crime than murder but was certainly ‘one of the chaps’; Charles ‘Tich’ Leach of the Exchange Telegraph Co.; Jimmy Reid of the Sunday Dispatch; Cecil Catling of The Star; E.V. (Tom) Tullett of the Sunday Express and then Daily Mirror; Gerald Byrne of Empire News; Reginald ‘Fireman’ Foster of the Daily Mail, News Chronicle and Sunday Express; Sam Jackett of the Evening News, formerly of Reuters; Victor Toddington of the Evening Standard; William ‘Bill’ Ashenden of the Daily Sketch and the Daily Graphic; Owen Summers of the Daily Sketch; the veteran Stanley Bishop, Robert ‘Bob’ Traini and W.A.E. ‘Billy’ Jones of the Daily Herald; W.G. Finch of the Press Association; and Harold Whittall of the Daily Mirror.

Most members of the Murder Gang will feature at some point, but it has been decided for reasons of narrative symmetry to focus on some key members to take us from 1935 to 1965, from the first cases on which this group reported to the last murderers to be hanged, by which time the Murder Gang was fragmenting and times changing.

There are no women; the Murder Gang was an exclusively male ‘club’, an echo of the times. Conversely, although absent from the crime beat, women were already distinguishing themselves as foreign and war correspondents in this period: Hilde Marchant, who would immortalise the Murder Gang in her 1947 Picture Post article, had earlier been sent by the Daily Express’s editor Arthur Christiansen to cover the Siege of Madrid from a female perspective; the American journalist Martha Gellhorn covered several wars, of course; and Claire Hollingworth, a young British correspondent, got what has been called ‘the scoop of the century’, breaking the outbreak of the Second World War as Hitler mobilised his tank regiments in Poland, to name but three. It wouldn’t be until much later that Fleet Street gained its first female crime reporters, such as the Daily Mirror’s Sylvia Jones – and even then she had a tough time at first in that still testosterone-soaked world.

The skill set and working methods of Murder Gang members also became increasingly sophisticated over time. Percy Hoskins, the most powerful and well-connected member of the Murder Gang, stalwart of the Daily Express from the mid-1920s right through to the early 1980s, summed this up in a speech he gave to the Medico-Legal Society in London on 8 January 1959, towards the end of the period of the active Murder Gang covered by this book:

When I first came to Fleet Street, the crime reporter was what our American colleagues call a ‘leg man’. In other words, his job was to hang around police stations and to telephone his office with tips of murder, fire or sudden death. Then he could sit back with the confident assurance that someone else would be sent out to cover the story. His responsibility was at an end … Today, despite the doubt that may still persist in the minds of our critics, all this, with very few exceptions, has changed. The ‘leg man’ has disappeared. He has been replaced by the specialist, a man with a much higher degree of education, who by hard experience has acquired a sound grasp of his subject; a man who has sufficient knowledge of the law to know what he can or cannot print; a man who looks upon reporting as a stimulating and socially useful profession in which he is eager to rise as far as opportunity and native ability permit.

It is hoped that this book manages to capture a sense of that development. In the same speech, Hoskins admitted, ‘Like every other profession, we have our black sheep.’ This was certainly true, so underhand and unethical methods employed to get scoops are also documented in the following pages. The murders covered by this pack of Fleet Street journalists are of course often macabre and shocking – the very reason why these cases sold newspapers and the ruthless chase for scoops was on. It was a different world, and definitely a harder, less sensitive one. These journalists operated in that milieu, in those times, under different rules, and sometimes outside the laws of their own era. This is the story of the Murder Gang of Fleet Street.

1

A GRISLY JIGSAW

DUMFRIESSHIRE, SCOTLAND, SUNDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 1935

It was late summer for an optimist, and early autumn for a realist. The sedate landscape of the Scottish Borders, a healthy walk in the fresh air – just what Miss Susan Haines Johnson, a young woman visiting her family from Edinburgh, needed. Little did she know that her gentle stroll that day would soon set the Fleet Street crime sheets ablaze and that what she saw would make a marked entry into criminological history.

While millions all over Britain were wetting fingers and thumbs and rustling the crinkled pages of the Sunday Pictorial, News of the World and Sunday Graphic, Susan had walked alone about 2 miles north from where she was staying with family in the town of Moffat. She rested, leaning on the edge of a bridge overrunning a densely wooded valley with a stream called Gardenholme Linn. The British public would soon come to know this place, below where Susan had stopped, as ‘a ravine’. Susan looked over the bridge at the view. Peace, tranquillity; she’d escaped from the city, seduced by nature. But what then suddenly drew her gaze was most unnatural.

Susan wasn’t far from the Devil’s Beef Tub, which lies a further three miles north, a deep valley surrounded by four hills, a favourite for walkers. The Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, author of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, romanticised this area in his writing, but the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace had made it famous by his actions more than five centuries earlier, when he launched his first attack against the English by gathering the clans in the Devil’s Beef Tub in 1297. Now, in 1935, the very bridge on which Susan Haines Johnson was standing was known locally as the Devil’s Bridge.

It was a sort of package she saw, pushed against a rock in the stream that runs into the River Annan. Her eyes zoomed in on this object so strange to its surroundings, and her easy solitude was destroyed, though Susan could hardly believe her eyes. Poking out of the package was a human arm. Susan ran the 2 miles back to Moffat, to the hotel where her family was staying. Her brother Alfred did his best to calm her down and called the police.

The terrible and unexpected find made the local Scottish newspapers in coming days, and as always Fleet Street’s Murder Gang of crime reporters wasn’t far behind. Exactly a week later, the crime covered half of page 13 of the News of the World. By this time, an extensive search of the area in and around the stream under Devil’s Bridge, under the aegis of Inspector Strath and his right-hand man Sergeant Sloane of the Dumfriesshire Police, had uncovered further dumped bundles, containing various body parts, and this was undoubtedly the catalyst for the crime reporter Norman Rae and his news editor sniffing out the chrysalis of a major murder story.

NEW MOVES IN RAVINE MURDERS RIDDLE

Police Confident Of Solving Gruesome Crime

News of the World, Sunday 6 October 1935

‘Certified Net Sale Exceeds 3,350,000 Copies’, the News of the World then proudly announced under its masthead every Sunday. This was nothing compared to the circulations that this and other British national newspapers would achieve in coming years, for which substantial credit was due to the Murder Gang. These hard-living, intuitive, cunning, manipulative and sometimes unethical or, by twenty-first-century standards, immoral hacks were already building close contacts with the police all over Britain, and especially with London’s Metropolitan Police, and that of course meant Scotland Yard.

Incredibly, until the mid-1930s Scotland Yard had no Press Bureau, and therefore no official conduit between it and Fleet Street. Before the Press Bureau was established in 1936, the year after Susan Haines Johnson saw that arm protruding from that bridge in the Scottish Borders, informal ‘press conferences’ would be held in smoke-filled pubs, often with the Murder Squad detective in charge of the case tipping off favoured hacks. This lack of official channels meant that personal police contacts were imperative.

The early Press Bureau of the late 1930s was also not very helpful to the public. When the first telephone was installed in the Press Bureau in 1936, the duty police officer was incredulous: ‘we will be expected to take calls from the public next!’ In fact, a separate department known as the Information Room had been set up two years earlier, in 1934, to receive calls from the public on Whitehall 1212.

Early stalwarts of the Murder Gang such as Norman ‘Jock’ Rae, Percy Hoskins, Hugh Brady and Stanley Bishop would wait in their respective newspaper offices late into the night drinking Scotch waiting for the notorious Back Hall Inspector to do his rounds. He was a Metropolitan Police inspector who went around Fleet Street at night selling tip-offs. He was never identified by the hacks.

The police, within whose ranks corruption was endemic, did not trust Fleet Street, and members of the Murder Gang had to build individual relationships with key detectives of the time such as Ted Greeno, Reg Spooner, Jack Capstick, Robert Fabian, Bill Chapman and Peter Beveridge. If the hacks betrayed these policemen in any way, the channel would be immediately closed; information given ‘off the record’ had to stay ‘off the record’.

But as the 1940s progressed and gave way to the 1950s, Scotland Yard, provincial police forces and Fleet Street became more professional. When Scotland Yard was based on the Embankment from 1890 to 1967 – where it returned in 2015 – the whole building only had two telephones, but after moving to The Broadway in 1967 there were numerous telephones and contact became easier. Still, some Murder Gang members would spend hours a day working at spare desks at Scotland Yard, so as to be on the spot for a tip-off if something came in.

It was almost definitely a police tip-off that led the News of the World Murder Gang reporters to chase the story of the body parts in ‘the ravine’ at the end of September and into October 1935. Norman ‘Jock’ Rae was first on the case, leading where the rest of Fleet Street would follow. The ‘Sundays’ usually had more resources to follow a case, and of course more time, as the reporters only had to file once a week, although, of course, they would sometimes be making multiple filings when covering several cases at once. Not that the ‘Dailies’ and the evening papers were in any way slouches with regard to workload: the members of the Murder Gang just had to gather sources and leads on a story, go deeper and do interviews, write it up and file to make the next day’s or that evening’s edition.

Rae, working closely with his News of the World colleague James Howie Milligan, would use the extra time they had incredibly well and get the biggest scoop of the case, at that early stage still referred to amongst the Murder Gang as the Ravine Murder. It was to become one of the biggest British murder cases of the 1930s, and in particular was to make Rae’s name amongst the Murder Gang and all over Fleet Street. By the late 1940s he was almost a household name.

Norman Rae, known by most who knew him as ‘Jock’, was a Scot, being born in Aberdeen in 1896. He fabricated his age to serve in the Highland Division in the First World War, and after that conflict moved into journalism and to London. Rae’s tough and bloody-mindedness masked a compassionate nature, his intellect mixed with streetwise instincts, his huge capacity for hard work, real tenacity and staying-power on a story, and his shrewd understanding of human nature and literary ability, made him a natural-born journalist – just as he himself must have sometimes wondered if some of the murderers he came to know over a long Fleet Street career were natural-born killers. Rae was also ‘nobody’s fool’ as they used to say. Ravenously driven, adept at fighting his corner and defending his story by any means, he would sometimes go to extraordinary, near-illegal lengths to get his scoop. And this was of course a time when there was far less press regulation.

An early incident in Rae’s Fleet Street career is enlightening as to his character and working methods. Rae himself had made the newspapers, for once the subject of the story, on 29 September 1927 – exactly eight years to the day before Susan Haines Johnson saw the package with the human arm on Devil’s Bridge in the Scottish Borders, precipitating the rush of ‘Jock’ Rae and James Howie Milligan to Moffat. He had been arrested whilst chasing a story, a fire in Redhill Street in the Marylebone district of London, on 9 September that year, which claimed four lives. The headline, which ran twenty days later in the north-eastern regional paper the Shields Daily News, read, ‘Wrongful Arrest: Police Fail In Case Against Journalist’. Rae was then aged 30, living in Clapham, South London and working in Fleet Street.

Appearing at Marylebone Police Court, Rae was defended by the King’s Counsel barrister Mr J.D. Cassels, a noted brief who had already unsuccessfully defended the brutal ‘ladykiller’ Patrick Mahon, who had murdered and dismembered the tragic Emily Kaye in a cottage on the Crumbles, a stretch of beach close to Eastbourne, Sussex, three years earlier. (Interestingly, Cassels had also defended the culprits in the unconnected murder of Irene Munro in 1920, also on the Crumbles.) Patrick Mahon was hanged, but the prosecution case against him had been extremely formidable, almost watertight. The Mahon case was also forensically very important, as the painstaking work done by the legendary Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury on Emily Kaye’s remains was ground-breaking, and led to the introduction of the ‘Murder Bag’ set of implements by Scotland Yard, which all detectives from then on had to take to murder scenes to preserve vital evidence. The Ravine Murder case, which Rae covered in 1935, would also prove to be forensically highly innovative.

Rae was facing a charge of obstructing the police on the day of the fatal fire, and he had been arrested by an Inspector Simpkin of the Metropolitan Police. Simpkin had testified at an earlier hearing that when he closed the street Rae had been asked to leave the vicinity but had refused. However, the presiding magistrate found that the prosecution had ‘failed to satisfy him that Rae had obstructed the Inspector, or that his arrest was justified’. Rae was acquitted, and awarded 20 guineas for costs, a not insignificant sum then. The magistrate, Mr H.A.C. Bingley, said, ‘The police always ask me to give them costs if they win. Whether my decision is right or wrong this defendant has been put to vast trouble and expense. He was arrested, I think, wrongfully.’ It was a victory for Rae, but he would certainly have to develop far better relationships with the police in the future if he was to get what the 1920s American humourist and sports journalist Ring Lardner called ‘the inside dope’. Above all, though, this incident shows how fiercely determined Norman Rae was in pursuit of a story, a quality which would help make him a leading member of the Murder Gang in coming years.

The News of the World in 1935 was a heady mixture of politics, sport, humour, ‘charming bounder’ love rat stories, household features, advertising and of course crime stories. It was then a broadsheet newspaper, and would remain so until Rupert Murdoch changed it into a tabloid when he bought it thirty-four years later. The Italian dictator Mussolini dominated headlines in the News of the World that summer and autumn, as he threatened to and eventually did march into Abyssinia. Recurring weekly features included the ‘Great Men of Our Time’ series by the Right Honourable Winston Churchill MP, then in the political wilderness without high office, but soon to warn about Hitler’s massive rearmament programme and nefarious intentions, before becoming wartime Prime Minister in 1940.

The heavyweight British boxing champ Jack Petersen, a Welshman who had held the title for some months in 1932–33, relinquished it, but regained and held it between June 1934 and August 1936, told his story ‘Fighting the Big Fellows’ on consecutive Sundays, and Hugh Gallacher, the Scottish footballer of the 1920s and 1930s, a prolific goal-scorer for Scotland who also played for Newcastle United, Chelsea and other top league clubs, had his serial ‘Inside the Football Game’.

A typical love-sex interest story of that year was headlined ‘Pose of a Married Man: eloped with girl and ran up bills.’ Humour also crept headlong into tabloid advertising. ‘Public Enemy No.1 (Stomach Trouble)’ with Maclean Brand Stomach Powder being the tonic, was a sardonic nod to the obsession on both sides of the Atlantic with the successive small-time gangsters thus named by J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI – most famously the bank robber and killer John Dillinger and his gang, who were all over the front and crime pages in 1934 and 1935. Far more dangerous organised crime figures such as Al Capone (already in prison for tax evasion), Dutch Schultz (murdered by rival gangsters), and Lucky Luciano (about to be arrested for pimping and imprisoned, before later being deported) were off the radar.

Back in Britain, on Sunday 22 September 1935, a week before the discovery of the body part in a package beneath the bridge in Moffat, the News of the World reported that Tony Mancini had received three months’ hard labour for stealing a wristwatch from a jewellery shop in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Just ten months earlier, in December 1934, Mancini, whose real name was Cecil England and whose aliases as a petty criminal were the more exotic Hyman Gold and Jack Notyre, had been sensationally acquitted of the second Brighton Trunk Murder, after the body of his lover, the dancer and prostitute Violet Kaye, was found in a trunk at his Brighton lodgings. This terrible discovery was a direct result of a house-to-house search after a dismembered torso of a woman was found in a trunk at Brighton train station in July 1934, known as the first Brighton Trunk murder. Her legs were soon found in another trunk at Kings Cross station in London. She was never identified, her killer was never caught, and no link to Tony Mancini was ever established. The unknown tragic victim had been given the moniker ‘The Girl with the Pretty Feet’ by the Murder Gang. Coincidentally, Mancini was unsuccessfully prosecuted for the murder of Violet Kaye by J.D. Cassels KC, who had defended Norman Rae against his obstruction of a police officer charge in 1927. In 1976, just prior to his death, Mancini confessed to Violet Kaye’s murder, knowing that he could not be tried again for the same crime due to the double jeopardy law. Mancini gave his confession to the News of the World, undoubtedly for payment.

After their initial News of the World article on Sunday 6 October 1935 from Moffat in Dumfriesshire, Jock Rae and Jim Milligan were looking for other leads to follow. There would soon be major developments in the Ravine Murder case.

Other bundles of human remains, eventually reaching approximately thirty in total over the coming weeks, contained various body parts to add to the initial arm packed into the first bundle spotted by Susan Haines Johnson: a torso with no arms, legs, a thighbone, lumps of flesh, and the upper part of two further arms. It was obvious that two bodies were present, and then two skulls were discovered, the faces having been skinned in an obvious attempt to prevent identification of the victims through facial feature ID, although teeth were still present in one skull and dental research would help confirm identification.

Fingertips had also been removed from two hands to avoid fingerprint detection. Fingerprint evidence had then been in use as evidence in murder trials for thirty years in Britain, since it was first used to hang the Stratton brothers in 1905 for the senseless murders of an elderly shopkeeper and his wife in the course of robbery in Deptford, south-east London. A burglar named Henry Jackson had previously been convicted using fingerprint evidence in 1902, just a year after Scotland Yard’s Fingerprint Bureau was established. But back to Moffat in 1935 – this was murder, and double murder at that.

The body parts were soon being examined by prominent Scottish forensic scientists Professor John Glaister from Glasgow University and his colleague Dr Gavin Millar of Edinburgh University, who had to piece together the bodies like a jigsaw. The English Home Office pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was also called from London to carry out post-mortems. He had particular expertise in dismemberment, as he had proved in the piecing together of the victim’s body in the Patrick Mahon case back in 1924.

The first News of the World piece that ran on 6 October 1935 had stated that poison may well have been used on the victims, specifically arsenic. This was obviously what Norman Rae had carefully gleaned from police contacts they had made on the scene, who had been advised after early forensic analysis. It was also reported that the pieced-together taller body was thought to be male, and the shorter one female. Rae described the unidentified ‘couple’ as follows: ‘The man – probably elderly, 5ft 8 or 9in tall, muscular condition and nutrition good, scarcely any teeth. The woman – between 30 and 40 years of age, about 5ft 2in tall, dark brown hair, no wisdom teeth, three vaccination marks on the left upper arm. Feet and hands well cared for, no ring marks on hands.’ Bernard Spilsbury’s post-mortem reports in the police case file confirm this analysis, as he refers to one of the bodies as a ‘he’.

The finding and identification of three breasts showed that both victims were certainly female. Spilsbury also wrote, ‘From the clean method by which both limbs were severed through the knee joints it is a strong presumption that it was carried out by someone having anatomical knowledge.’ Glaister and Millar had also thought this, especially when it was confirmed that a knife, not a saw, had been used to dismember the two bodies, a far more difficult implement to use for the grim task, and one that would have taken real understanding of human anatomy. Their opinions were supported by consultation with Professor Sydney Smith, a leading pathologist from the University of Edinburgh, and several other experts in pathology, dentistry and anatomy from that university and John Glaister’s own University of Glasgow.

It too had been reported that the body parts had been wrapped variously in a blouse (in the case of one skull), sheets, children’s clothing and newspapers. It was the latter wrapping which would break the case wide open as to the identity of the two women and their killer, in an ingenious twist. The newspapers used were not named in the press at that early stage, but in fact they were all national newspapers which came out of Fleet Street: the Sunday Chronicle, the Daily Herald of 6 and 31 August 1935, and the Sunday Graphic published on 15 September 1935.

It was the Sunday Graphic, published two weeks before Susan Haines Johnson made her discovery, which would lead the police, and the News of the World, in the direction of the victims and the culprit. The Sunday Graphic chosen by whoever wrapped two upper arms in its pages was a special regional printing or ‘slip’ edition, published only in a small geographical area: the Lancaster and Morecambe areas of Lancashire in north-west England, around 100 miles (160km) south of Moffat. It was advertising a local festival in Morecambe, and just 3,700 copies had been printed.

Jock Rae of the News of the World had got the jump on Murder Gang reporters on rival papers with their initial splash, but by now representatives of other Fleet Street papers had arrived in Moffat, like aliens invading a small sleepy town. It was now that Rae showed real journalistic initiative and quietly made his way south to the Morecambe and Lancaster areas. So as not to alert the other rival Murder Gang reporters on the scene as to his new lead, Rae let it be known amongst the hacks that he had to return to London for personal reasons. The News of the World strengthened this journalistic alibi by sending Rae’s crime colleague James Howie Milligan to Moffat from London to take his place, as other reporters would have been suspicious if the paper had withdrawn representation at the scene of such a big crime case.

James Howie Milligan was almost eight years Norman Rae’s elder and a fellow Scot, born in Glasgow in 1888. At the time that he travelled to Moffat to cover the Ravine Murder case, Milligan was almost 47 years old, and he’d led an eventful life. On leaving school he went to sea, becoming a Second Mate, and on the outbreak of the First World War served as a navigation officer on troop ships. As Duncan Campbell points out in his seminal history of British crime reporting We’ll All Be Murdered In Our Beds, Milligan was also a gifted comic songwriter in his spare time. He wrote the popular song ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’ for the Scottish music hall and vaudeville singer and comedian Sir Harry Lauder, who also later recorded Milligan’s song ‘Pin Your Faith on the Motherland’.

Milligan entered journalism in 1920, joining the London branch of the National Union of Journalists on 7 November 1925, four days before his 37th birthday. By 1928 he was a crime reporter on the Sunday Express, where he quickly made his mark, securing an exclusive interview with King Carol of Romania that year which misleadingly became known as ‘the interview that cost a throne’. The scandal-ridden King Carol had actually renounced his right to the Romanian throne in 1925 and was living in Paris with his mistress Magda Lupescu by the time Milligan interviewed him. Still, it was quite a scoop, and the first of many for Milligan.

James Howie Milligan moved to the rival Sunday paper News of the World to work alongside ‘Jock’ Rae in 1935, so he was new to the paper when he and Rae travelled up to Moffat in their native Scotland at the very beginning of October. Earlier that year in March, Britain’s first driving test had been taken, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, T.E. Lawrence, had been killed in a motorcycle crash in May, and the publisher Penguin had introduced the first of its famous paperbacks in July.

The small town of Moffat must have been bewildered by these hardened yet courteous Murder Gang hacks arriving from Fleet Street to get the real story behind Susan Haines Johnson’s gruesome discovery, already the talk of every Moffat living room, shop and pub. The two most prominent hotels in the town were the Moffat House Hotel in the High Street, designed by the famous architect John Adam, and the Star Hotel, much later entered into the Guinness Book of Records as ‘the narrowest hotel in the world’, being just 20ft (6m) in width. Rae, Milligan and the other crime correspondents are likely to have stayed in these establishments, or one nearby. In fact, Rae and Milligan would be engaged on the case for the next six months on and off, all the while covering other less sensational murders, too.

James Howie Milligan would soon follow his colleague south once Rae had something concrete to go on, whilst other Murder Gang members stayed in Moffat, where the bodies had been found. Rae was moving where the action was in reality, surmising that as one of the newspapers used to wrap the unfortunate women’s bodies like 1930s butcher’s meat was read in that small area of north-west England, the real story was south of the border.

It has long been widely assumed that Norman Rae came up with the crucial evidence that led the police away from Scotland, as he was so quick off the mark in going there. It’s extremely unlikely, almost certain, that Rae got his information about the newspaper Morecambe and Lancaster slip edition from a police contact, and that in itself shows his, and perhaps James Howie Milligan’s, ingenuity and thorough working of the story. But it can now be revealed that the tip-off about the slip edition came from another source, in fact from another journalist not on the case, down in London, hundreds of miles from Scotland.

Tucked away in the Metropolitan Police files of the case, there is a letter dated 3 October 1935, four days after Susan Haines Johnson saw the first macabre bundle, and three days before Rae and Milligan published their first coverage of the case in the News of the World. The letter was sent from the Press Club, based in St Bride’s House in Salisbury Square, close to Fleet Street, and read:

I notice that it is stated that some of the human remains found in Moffat were wrapped in ‘National’ newspapers. A small point comes to me, which may be of interest, and it is this. All national newspapers print certain editions for various areas. If these papers are by any chance the Mail, Express or Herald, the editorial staff in either case could tell you which area it was printed for by reference to their files. This might help to localise matters. Yours Truly…

The sender of this letter was Colin Cathcart, who had been a member of the central London branch of the National Union of Journalists since 1918, and had worked as a journalist since starting as a reporter on the Daily Express in 1919, when he lived in Catford, south-east London. Born in 1872, Cathcart was aged 63 and nearing retirement, now living in Streatham, South-west London. He died on 8 April 1947, eleven and a half years after he gave the Metropolitan Police the crucial tip off they needed in the Ravine Murder case.

The letter was sent straight to the CID the following day, 4 October 1935. By this time Dumfriesshire Police had called in the then more sophisticated assistance of Scotland Yard and Inspector Jeremiah Lynch of the Metropolitan Police, a tough Irishman already very distinguished for his fearless uncovering of German spies operating in Britain in the First World War, his pursuit of the infamous conman Horatio Bottomley and as a member of the early Flying Squad. In a more administrative role by now, Lynch was tasked with checking all subscribers to that Morecambe and Lancaster slip edition of the 15 September 1935 Sunday Graphic.

At the same time, Dumfriesshire Police were far from idle. Chief Constable Black, the head of that force, had read about the disappearance of a young woman called Mary Jane Rogerson, who worked as a nanny and maid, then called a ‘nursemaid’, in Lancaster, which of course fell within the geographical radius of the slip edition of the paper. By liaising with his opposite number, Chief Constable Vann of Lancaster, it was learnt that Rogerson was the nursemaid to a Dr Buck Ruxton and his wife Isabella, who lived in Lancaster, and, most importantly, that Isabella Ruxton was missing too. Both women had not been seen since 15 September 1935, the very day on which the slip edition of the Sunday Graphic used to wrap one of the bundles was on sale in that area and being sent out to subscribers.

Norman Rae, now down in the Morecambe and Lancaster area far ahead of the Murder Gang curve, got to Dr Buck Ruxton by sheer investigative work, known as ‘legwork’, and local gossip learnt through copious and patient interviews, conducted in a relaxed ‘bedside’ manner that would have made any doctor proud. Colin Cathcart may have provided the tip that led the investigation towards Morecambe and Lancaster, and Rae used a police contact to glean that information, but he still had to follow through and build his story. It took a formidable range of journalistic skills and indefatigability. The indomitable Scotsman was soon making his way straight to Ruxton’s house.

Dr Buck Ruxton lived in a large and imposing Georgian house, 2 Dalton Square, in central Lancaster, close to the town hall. It was actually rented for between £80 and £100 a year, but Ruxton owned the furniture, and he’d done extensive redecoration inside. Rae met and interviewed the 36-year-old Ruxton, who was warm and receptive. But little about Ruxton was as it seemed – including his name.

The doctor’s real name was Buktyar Rustomji Ratanji Hakim, and he was born on 21 March 1899 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. Hakim was Parsi, a religion that follows an Iranian prophet and which fled to India from Persia (now Iran) in the seventh and eighth centuries to escape Muslim persecution. Hakim had French ancestry too, and this explained why he spoke fluent French, actually much better than his English. He first came to London to study at London University, but he’d soon returned to Bombay where with no language barrier his medical studies resumed and he graduated from the University of Bombay.

Probably largely because of family pressure, Hakim married a fellow Parsi, an older woman, in India, almost definitely an arranged or at least family-approved marriage, before joining the Indian Army Medical Corps. After a stint, he returned to London alone, now estranged from his wife. By the time that Norman Rae knocked on his door at 2 Dalton Square, at the end of the first week of October 1935, Hakim had only been in Britain since January 1927, less than nine years, and a great deal had happened since then. Hakim was now called Dr Buck Ruxton, having anglicised his name and changed it by deed poll on 10 April 1929.

Ruxton had flitted between London and Edinburgh between 1927 and moving to Lancaster. In Edinburgh, he twice failed the exams to gain his Surgeon’s Fellowship. He was always short of money, despite receiving funds from his family in India, who unconditionally supported him, although they were unhappy that his Indian marriage had not worked out. In London he was helped by other Indian families, receiving much kindness from that immigrant community.

But it was in Edinburgh that the event happened which would change the course of his life, and the lives of many others. Frequenting a tearoom, he began chatting to the manageress, Isabella Kerr, a tall woman with angular features. They were soon in a relationship, a rare mixed-race partnership then, and obviously very much in love. Ruxton, at that time known as Captain Gabriel Hakim, a nod to his military service and with an added romanticised Christian name, was smooth-talking, interesting and good-looking, a qualified doctor, who was able to find work back in London as a locum.

Isabella had married a Dutch man some years before, but they were estranged and she was able to get a divorce from him. Hakim called Isabella ‘Belle’ and she called him ‘Bommie’. They were soon living together in London, she as his common-law wife. Hakim was, of course, still legally married, and divorcing his Indian wife may well have been too much for his parents.