Great Unsolved Crimes Read online

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  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE: MEDIEVAL UNSOLVED CRIMES (BEFORE 1500)

  The Burning of Rome: Nero or the Christians?

  William Rufus: A Hunting Accident?

  Edward II

  The Princes in the Tower

  PART TWO: UNSOLVED CRIMES OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD (1500–1800)

  The Suspicious Death of Amy Robsart

  Kirk O’Field: The Assassination of Darnley

  Fighting for the Succession: The Gowrie Conspiracy

  Death of a Leveller: The Assassination of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough

  The Chipping Campden Mystery: The Strange Disappearance of William Harrison

  The Murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey

  The Man in the Iron Mask: Criminal or Victim?

  The Appin Murder: The Shooting of the ‘Red Fox’

  PART THREE: UNSOLVED CRIMES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1801–1900)

  The Ratcliffe Highway Murders

  Not Proven: The Death of Emile L’Angelier

  A Family Affair: The Killing of Saville Kent

  The Tichborne Claimant

  A Balham Mystery: The Poisoning of Charles Bravo

  The Pimlico Mystery: The Death of Edwin Bartlett

  Jack the Ripper

  Gave Her Mother Forty Whacks: The Lizzie Borden Case

  PART FOUR: UNSOLVED CRIMES OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY (1901–1950)

  The Murder of Marion Gilchrist: Sherlock Holmes to the Rescue

  Sinking of the Lusitania

  The Man from the Pru: The Murder of Julia Wallace

  The Brighton Trunk Murder: Another Perfect Murder?

  The Sinister GP: Dr John Bodkin Adams

  The Gold-digger, the Duke and the Playboy: Sir Harry Oakes

  PART FIVE: UNSOLVED CRIMES OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1951–2000)

  Death at the Roadside: Sir Jack Drummond

  The A6 Murder: Was Hanratty Guilty?

  The Murdered Sussex Schoolboy: Keith Lyon

  Ten Years in San Francisco: The Zodiac Killings

  The Vanishing Earl: Lord Lucan and the Murder ofbSandra Rivett

  Death in Jeddah: Helen Smith

  I Thought I Was Doing You Guys a Favour: The Green River Killer

  A Miscarriage of Justice: The Death of Sheila Bamber

  The Missing Estate Agent: Suzy Lamplugh

  Death on Wimbledon Common: Rachel Nickell

  I’m a Celebrity: O. J. Simpson

  Death of a Pageant Queen: JonBenet Ramsey

  Death on the Patio: The Murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins

  PART SIX: RECENT UNSOLVED CRIMES (2001–PRESENT)

  Walking Home From School: Milly Dowler

  Killing the Cricket Coach: Bob Woolmer

  Introduction

  Of all crimes, the most worrying is the crime that is never solved. The perpetrator of the crime goes free, unpunished, often unidentified. Justice is not done. The friends and relatives of the victim – crimes always have victims – are left without closure. Often the parents, children and siblings of a murder victim live out the rest of their lives in a state of uncertainty, and sometimes fear or anger, because the crime went unpunished; their lives are often seriously damaged. Another unsatisfactory aspect of unsolved crimes is that whoever committed the crime is free to commit another. Police are very properly concerned about unsolved crimes for all of these reasons. Their concern has sometimes led to an excessive eagerness and haste in finding a suspect. The wrong person is suspected, and even convicted; so some crimes that at first appear to have been solved later turn out not to have been, and a double injustice has been done.

  In past centuries, before forensic techniques and before the mass media, it was relatively easy for powerful people to commit large-scale crimes with impunity. In some societies, such as the absolute monarchies of the middle ages and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century dictators, judicial murders were commonplace. But there were also crimes that were concealed, crimes that were presented as accidents; spin is not an invention of the Blair government.

  With some crimes, the mystery is the age-old, central question: Whodunit? Many of the stories told in this book are whodunits. To find out who committed a crime, we need to examine the events that led up to the crime and investigate the lives, personalities, interests and motives of the various actors. Then, just as in an old-fashioned detective thriller, we need to assemble the suspects in the drawing room – and with a flourish expose the murderer. Each major unsolved crime story has the basic structure of a Poirot mystery, a Miss Marple or a Morse. Somewhere behind each crime lurks a criminal, a culprit waiting to be exposed. Where possible, I shall attempt to expose the villain and give my reasons for thinking that he (or she) is guilty. But there are many cases where, however hard we may try, the tidy ending of a well-tailored detective story, with its satisfying final scene, is not possible. Sometimes, no matter how many times the evidence is sifted through, it is impossible to establish who committed the crime.

  The great unsolved crimes are of three major types. One is the crime that went unsolved at the time, and went unsolved for ever after – this is the ultimate crime mystery. The second type is the crime for which someone was blamed at the time, often punished, and the case was closed. Only later as new information became available did it emerge that the person blamed, convicted and sometimes executed was innocent of the crime, or alternatively had accomplices who were equally to blame or more to blame but went unpunished. The third type is an unexpected minority type – the crime that turns out not to have been a crime at all. Occasionally an incident is interpreted and presented as a crime when actually it is a legitimate act of war; occasionally a killing is not a murder but a legitimate act of self-defence; occasionally things simply happen by accident. And there are some unusual cases where it is assumed from circumstantial evidence that a crime has been committed when there has been no crime at all. Perhaps the most peculiar and spine-chilling case of this kind is the Chipping Campden mystery of 1660.

  At the time when a particular crime is committed, forensic science is developed to a particular point where it may not allow the crime to be detected, or it may not allow the perpetrator of the crime to be identified. As time passes, forensic science moves on, new tests become available, and so-called ‘cold cases’ can be solved, sometimes years or even decades after the crimes were committed. Crimes that are initially unsolved, and may seem insoluble, can therefore be solved later. Equally, crimes that seemed once to have been solved conclusively, can turn out later not to have been solved at all, if it emerges that the convicted person could not have committed the crime after all. This is what has been emerging about the
assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of his murder.

  The question ‘Whodunit?’ forms a major part of this book. But there are also crimes where there are other significant and highly charged questions. Often behind an assassination there is a conspiracy, and it is not always easy to find out who exactly was involved in that conspiracy. The classic political assassination has a mastermind, an originator who stands well back from the action and hopes to remain undetected, untraced; there is also a middle organization to act as a conduit (and a barrier) to information; then there is the assassin. The reasons for this structure are obvious. The assassin’s presence at the scene of the crime makes it likely that he will be caught and identified, whereas the person who has ordered the assassination can, and nearly always wants to, remain unidentifiable. The only way of achieving this is to have an intermediary organization, which takes the contract from the originator and hires the killer. So, with many historic murders we know the names of the assassin, though we have to dig very deep indeed to discover who was behind them.

  The failure to bring culprits to justice also generates many questions. Sometimes, when they fail to find or convict criminals, it can look as if the officers of the law or the judiciary are incompetent. Sometimes it can look as if they are conspiring to fail, as if there is some establishment conspiracy to obscure what has happened.

  There are alarmingly large numbers of unsolved crimes, even today, when very sophisticated forensic procedures are available. There are still disturbingly large numbers of cases of disappearing boys and murdered girls that remain unsolved. There is often a suspicion, not only among the public but among the police officers concerned, that many may be linked, that they are the work of serial criminals. In Britain, now, there are teams of detectives working towards finding the links, identifying the serial crimes.

  In the last few years we have entered a new phase of crime detection. The arrival of DNA testing has allowed some unsolved crimes, decades old, to be cleared up. Perhaps the most spectacular success resulting from the introduction of DNA profiling was the solving of the twenty-year-old Green River murders near Seattle, Washington. Many other cold cases, cases where the investigation has run out of steam or even been closed, can now be reopened and solved, thanks to DNA.

  The DNA profile of convicted criminals is now routinely stored for future reference, in just the same way that fingerprints used to be taken. But in the UK there is some disquiet that the code of conduct relating to the keeping of DNA records is shifting towards the overriding power of the state and away from the rights of the individual. Until 2001, DNA profiles taken from people who were arrested but then not prosecuted, or prosecuted, tried and acquitted, had to be destroyed. Since 2001, any DNA profiles taken at the time of an arrest has been kept and permanently added to the National DNA Database (NDNAD). The result of this shift has been a huge expansion in the number of profiles acquired. The UK NDNAD is the biggest in the world, with more profiles in absolute numbers and more in proportion to the population than any other country. At the time of writing, the British government has 3.5 million DNA profiles on its database. This amounts to the DNA profiles of 5.2 per cent of the population, compared with 1.1 per cent for the European Union as a whole, and 0.5 per cent for the USA. This quantitatively defines the UK as a surveillance state.

  Governments argue that the larger the database is, the better the chances of clearing up crimes, and the argument is hard to refute. The enthusiasm for resolving not only current cases but some long-closed cases by applying the new technique has raised some major ethical questions. How do we balance the need to conserve individual civil liberties with the desire to bring criminals to justice?

  One cold case that might be solved in Britain is the 1963 murder of George Wilson in Nottingham. George Wilson was the landlord of the Fox & Grapes pub. He was unlocking the door to his pub when he was attacked and stabbed thirteen times. It was an apparently motiveless murder, and it prompted a large-scale investigation. Over 60,000 people were interviewed. Every dustbin in Nottingham was searched for the murder weapon. After nine days two boys playing in a ditch on the Nottingham to Radcliffe-on-Trent road found the knife in its sheath. At the time, forensic science was unable to extract from the knife the crucial information. Now, it may be possible. The knife is waiting to be examined using the latest DNA testing techniques.

  In 1969, Annie Walker was battered to death in her home at Heather in Leicestershire. She had recently gone to her bank in Coalville and withdrawn £1,000. Probably she was followed from the bank to her home by her killer. The next day she was dead on the floor in her night clothes. The weapon she was struck with was never found, but police have now been able to extract DNA samples from the killer, left on items collected at the crime scene. All that is lacking is a match for the DNA profile.

  In October 1970, a twenty-four-year-old teacher called Barbara Mayo hitch-hiked north from her home in London. Six days after she left, her body was discovered in a wood beside the northbound carriageway of the M1 motorway, within sight of Hardwick Hall. She had been raped and strangled. There were reports that a woman of Barbara’s description had got into a Morris Traveller. No-one was ever caught for this crime. Then in 1990 detectives confirmed that Barbara was killed by the same man who raped and strangled eighteen-year-old Jackie Ansell-Lamb near the M6 in Cheshire in March 1970. So the DNA profiles from the two crime scenes confirmed that these were serial crimes. Detectives tried criminal record profiling to identify likely suspects. In 1997, they examined the DNA profiles of 250 ‘possibles’ and were able to eliminate all of them. They are still waiting for the DNA profile that matches. Even after all this time, the killer of Barbara Jackie may be identified and brought to trial.

  Clearly, the police have a marvellous tool for detection, and they would like to have a much bigger DNA database. As Prime Minister Tony Blair has indicated, if everyone in Britain was on the database, tens of thousands of cold case unsolved crimes could be solved.

  But the successful solving of crimes is not just about the latest forensic techniques – it is about a lot of other things as well, such as comprehensive crime scene examination, and above all about objectivity and open-mindedness. In one case after another, the wrong suspect is pursued from the outset and, even if the right suspect becomes visible later on, the police are unable to backtrack and admit that they were wrong. Classic cases include the Rachel Nickell and JonBenet Ramsey murders. Not only did the murderers get away, but the wrongly accused prime suspects, Colin Stagg and the JonBenet’s parents, had their lives ruined.

  The determination of police officers to find a suspect, a single suspect, and ensure that all the evidence points unerringly towards that suspect’s guilt, has caused unending misery and trauma to those wrongly accused. It has also led to the systematic wearing down of the suspect using refined interrogation techniques to force a confession. The worst (most meaningless) confessions are those extracted with some sort of promise of leniency in the courtroom – the practice known as plea bargaining. People are told they will get lighter sentences if they plead guilty, and many do. This is not the path to truth or justice. Although it may improve the clear-up rate as far as the police are concerned, it does not mean that the crimes are really solved. All too often the wrong people are sent to prison as a result. The most extreme example of the distorting effect of plea bargaining was the deal done between the Prosecuting Attorney of King County in Washington and Gary Ridgway. In exchange for confessing to more than forty murders in King County, he was offered his life. A statement of confession written under those conditions has no meaning, except to illuminate what Gary Ridgway understood the law officers wanted him to say.

  PART ONE: Medieval Unsolved Crimes (before 1500)

  The burning of Rome: Nero or the Christians?

  The great fire that burned down most of the city of Rome broke out during the night of 18-19 July AD 64. It started in the commercial district, in the shops at t
he south-eastern end of the Circus Maximus. Town fires were not uncommon in cities, then or in later centuries. This one took its particular place in history because of its severity and because it was alleged, both then and subsequently, that the emperor himself had started it.

  The flames were fanned by a strong summer breeze and spread quickly from district to district, burning down the wooden shops and tenements. The blaze raged for six days and nights before finally petering out. When it was over, ten out of Rome’s fourteen districts were destroyed, seventy percent of the area of the city. Rome was a smouldering ruin.

  Rumour spread, equally quickly, that the emperor Nero himself had ordered the city to be torched, and that he had stood watching the fire from the top of the Palatine Hill, playing his lyre as the city burned below and all around him. It was a powerful image, and one that has stuck to Nero’s memory ever since.

  The reality was that Nero was in his palace in Antium (Anzio) when the fire broke out. When he heard about the fire he rushed to Rome and ran about the city without his guards for the whole of that first night, personally directing the fire-fighting operation. But people preferred to believe that Nero had started the fire, and he looked for someone to blame. He used the Christians as scapegoats. The Christians were a small, fringe sect, and their obscurity laid them open to accusations of inexplicable antisocial behaviour. The perennial fear of the foreign meant that Nero’s strategy worked. This led to a major persecution of the Christians. In spectacular ‘games’, Christians were fed to lions, crucified or burned as human torches to entertain the masses – and to remind them who started the fire. But suspicion that Nero had indeed been behind the fire grew when a lavish new building programme replaced the ruins with a city of marble, with wide streets, arcades for pedestrians and a newly designed water supply system. Debris from the ruins was cast into the surrounding malaria-ridden marshes. It began to look as if the clearing of a large area of the city for redevelopment had been carefully planned.