Eight years before the body was found in Hagley Wood, a dismembered body was found in a shallow river near Moffat on the Carlisle to Edinburgh road in Scotland. It was 29 September 1935 and over the next few days, no less than seventy body parts were found scattered in the area, as well as clothing and newspaper pages. Tasked with identifying the remains, Professor John Glaister of the forensic medicine department at Glasgow University and Professor James Brash of Edinburgh University’s anatomy department, set to work to produce a milestone success in forensic science.
The remains were of two bodies, both female, and all parts had been found except a right foot. Teeth had been deliberately extracted and hands had been mutilated to disguise fingerprints. The eyes and lips had gone too. Both women were short, one 4ft 10in to 4ft 11in, making her the same height as the Hagley Wood victim. The younger was between 18 and 25 at the time of death and the older, 35 to 55. This woman was taller, perhaps 5ft 6in. Time of death was ascertained as just after the middle of September, because some of the remains, badly decomposed because of the effects of immersion in water, were wrapped in a copy of the Sunday Graphic dated 15 September. This and the clothing led the police to Dr Buck Ruxton, a Parsee general practitioner. There was no sign of Mrs Ruxton or the housemaid, 20-year-old Mary Rogerson, but there was nothing concrete to say that either woman had died in Ruxton’s house.
Brash had a theory. He got a photograph of Isabella Ruxton and photographed the second skull from the same angle. Superimposition showed a near-perfect match and when he made models of the victim’s feet from a gelatin-glycerin mixture, they fitted the dead woman’s shoes. Ruxton was found guilty of both murders and hanged on 12 May 1936. The case even led to a spoof version of a popular love song of the time:
Red stains on the carpet,
Red stains on the knife.
Oh, Dr Buck Ruxton,
You murdered your wife.
The housemaid, she saw you,
You thought she would tell.
Oh, Dr Buck Ruxton,
You killed her as well.
What had the police to go on in the case of the Hagley Wood victim? The problem with wartime, unlike the peacetime Ruxton case, was the presence of many servicemen, not just from the British army, navy and air force but the Canadians, the Americans (from 1943 onwards), not to mention Poles, Free French and any number of hangers-on from the eight foreign governments that were now operating out of Britain. Men in uniform, without wishing to sound too sexist, have always attracted some women, especially young ones and naïve idealists like Joan Wolfe. Conversely, prejudice against soldiers is centuries old. They were ‘brutal and licentious’ even when they were defending the Empire or, as was the case in the Second World War, largely civilians in uniform. ‘Going with a soldier’ was regarded with horror by stately matriarchs and vicars all over the country and the fact that so many did posed nightmarish problems for the authorities trying to keep such girls safe. They often came before harassed police desk sergeants and irascible magistrates, causing nuisances in pubs and cafes and hanging around army camps and railway stations. They might pay a fine or spend a day or two in a cell or at a hostel, but all too often they were gone and the cycle of ‘little girl lost’ would start all over again.
Professor Webster had concluded that the woman in the wych elm had died, in all probability, in the summer or autumn of 1941, so the police search had to extend backwards by between eighteen months and two years. The bodies of Joan Wolfe, Isabella Ruxton and Mary Rogerson were found much more quickly than that, so the trail was far less cold.
What exactly was the situation in the autumn of 1941 and where could the search begin? In June of that year, there were 2½ million men in the army – ‘brown jobs’ as they were known – with 395,000 in the navy and 662,000 in the RAF. The ‘Brylcreem boys’ who flew aircraft were the most popular, with a flair and glamour of their own. Hitler’s invasion of Russia, in Operation Barbarossa, took some of the heat out of air raids on Britain and a kind of lull became the norm. By contrast, there was even more pressure on the Home Front to work harder to produce more materiel to aid Stalin’s war effort, now that Russia was an ally. Pearl Harbor had not yet happened and Churchill and others could get no more out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt than he was already supplying under the lend-lease programme.
Unbeknownst to anyone in Britain, except a few in the Whitehall corridors of power, all Jews in occupied territories were now forced to wear yellow armbands stamped with the star of David. Experiments were being carried out using a gas called Zyklon B in the camp at Auschwitz in Poland. The German war machine swept east, taking Crimea and Ukraine before concentrating on Moscow itself. The RAF’s bomber command was hitting Kiel’s shipyards and the industrial centres of Hamburg and Emsden, but the cost, in planes and men, was high. And the Allies got a bloody nose in August 1941 when the ‘reconnaissance in force’ raid on Dieppe went badly wrong. There were 4,384 casualties out of 6,086. It was a valuable lesson of how not to invade Europe.
The police may well have made a sketch based on the body in Hagley Wood and that had to be seen in the context of what was happening in the area all those months earlier, which was difficult. When I consulted the police files on the Hagley Wood murder in the Worcester Archive (which did not become available until 2005) there was no sign of this sketch. The first time I came across one was in Donald McCormick’s Murder By Witchcraft and, as we shall see, that work is riddled with so many errors and assumptions that it is almost a crime in itself. The sketch, which may have been produced by the Worcestershire CID appeared in newspapers in the year that McCormick went into print. It is notoriously unhelpful. The face is of course left deliberately vague because nobody before Caroline Wilkinson’s work in 2017 had any real idea about the features. The hair, however, is appalling. It is dark (the only versions of the sketch I have seen are in black and white) and medium length but the style does not belong to the 1940s or 1930s and gives a totally wrong slant in terms of identification. A label reads ‘Noticeable irregularity front teeth, lower jaw’, proliferating Webster’s mistake, and the drawing in any case does not show it. The cardigan, which Webster says was sleeveless, has three-quarter sleeves and there is clearly the collar of a blouse beneath it where no blouse was found. The woman has a classic ‘hour-glass’ figure which we cannot determine from a skeleton. The skirt, with its distinctive seams, has none in the sketch and the peach-coloured taffeta underskirt is visible beneath it, even though Webster specifically stated that the skirt seemed rather long for someone who was 5ft tall. Unforgivably, the black crepe-soled shoes are now labelled blue. Is that because some typist was careless with a comma? Should Webster’s note have read ‘black crepe-soled shoes’ or ‘black, crepe-soled shoes’? There is a difference. The belt has a square buckle, although Webster does not specify its shape at all.
The inquest was held at Stourbridge on 28 April, but no details of it have survived in the Worcestershire records. Webster would certainly have been called to give his professional opinion and what he said can be gathered from the minutes of a police conference at Birmingham on 3 May. Along with the pathologist were superintendents J.J. Hollyhead from Worcester and F. Richardson from Birmingham. DI Williams was there too. Webster concurred that the inquest verdict – ‘murder against some person or persons unknown’ – was correct, but everyone knew that such a verdict was a holding exercise only, designed to kickstart a police investigation that was obviously already underway. Because at that stage there was no suspect with a defence team, the proceedings reflected the prosecution angle only – that a crime had been committed – so coroner’s courts in those days were often called police courts.
Webster believed that the choice of the wych elm indicated a previous knowledge of the area. It was the only effective hiding place in the wood. By the time of this conference, the pathologist had had the skull X-rayed and had come to the conclusion that the dead woman’s wisdom teeth had not erupted and probably would not even had she lived into old age. He also modified his observation on pyorrhoea, believing now that it was slight and might have caused bad breath or a dirty appearance of the teeth. Since dental hygiene was low on everybody’s list in wartime, this was not particularly helpful. Webster now acknowledged (at last!) that her top teeth protruded. She had never had ear or sinus trouble.
He then ventured out of his comfort zone. For reasons of televisual convenience (not to mention the cost of employing another actor) virtually all the forensic work in the early Midsomer Murders series was carried out by one man, Dr George Bullard but in reality this has never been the case and a whole team of forensic experts are required to assist. A pathologist’s job is to investigate human remains only, not to speculate on lifestyle, but I suppose the police of 1943 were keen to pick up any small crumbs if they led to identification. Based on her clothing, the Hagley Wood victim was ‘neither in the “higher flight” nor was she a ragamuffin’.2 She was, perhaps, ‘rather neglectful as to her appearance and habits’. One of her teeth was infected, which would have caused pain and ‘given her a nasty taste in the mouth’.
There was nothing in the skeleton to suggest hard manual work with no suggestion of ‘excessive’ muscular development, but she had had at least one child. Webster had been hesitant about this at the inquest (why is not clear) but he was sure now. In terms of the time of death, he retained the timescale but now veered nearer to eighteen months ago, which fixed the murder in late summer/early autumn 1941. It was ironic that there was no actual cause of death, but nothing in the remains (apart from the cloth stuffed into the mouth cavity by Bob Hart) gave any indication of that.
According to Donald McCormick, writing in 1968, Worcestershire CID mocked up a dummy based on Webster’s forensics. A wig and correctly coloured cardigan, skirt and rayon underclothing were placed on a mannequin. Again, there is no mention of this in the police files. The cardigan was, in fact, striped dark blue and mustard colour, which the sketch does not mention and the skirt was also (contrary to the black and white sketch) mustard coloured or khaki. The whole construction was expertly done, bearing in mind how little Webster had to deal with, but it produced very few results. Had the skirt been khaki originally, it might have pointed to one of the female auxiliary units, the Women’s Land Army or Women’s Voluntary Service. Land Army girls – there were hundreds of those sent all over the country to keep the nation’s food supply going – traditionally wore corduroy jodhpurs rather than skirts because the work was hard and messy. There were 43,000 girls in the auxiliary outfits, a third of them (the Auxiliary Territorial Services) with the army, who of course wore khaki.
Just as rape could be ruled out in the case of Joan Wolfe, so could it with the woman in the wych elm. Her knickers were still there – blue – as were her corsets, which tended to suggest a conventional dresser more likely to be mid-thirties than younger.
There is no suggestion that the Worcester constabulary did not pull out all the stops to identify the woman. Unfortunately, there are serious gaps in the records deposited in the Worcestershire Archive when the case was closed in 2005. We have to take the word of later writers, some of them not very reliable, concerning the direction of the police investigation. There is nothing about routine visits to clothiers, haberdashers or shops of any kind in the record, but at the 3 May conference in Birmingham, Professor Webster praised the work of Special Constable Goldfar who had clearly been carrying out enquiries. At that conference, the pathologist produced a number of items including the peach-coloured slip, which he believed was home made from a coat lining. Had the dead woman not tucked this up, it would have appeared below her skirt; her corset probably prevented this. DI Williams, veering in what I believe was the wrong direction, thought that this was in keeping with a woman flinging on clothes over a nightdress in a hurry to escape an air-raid.
Three days after the Birmingham conference, Superintendent Inight was writing to chief constables across the country asking for help with ‘case 17’ (Hagley Wood). He described the shoes found near the wych elm as ‘of a blue semi-chrome Gibson shape, having three rows of pin punchings [eye-holes] on the uppers, with crepe soles and heels. The size was 5½ and stamped with the Maker’s No. D.956 on the inside of each shoe upper.’
These shoes, looking so hopeful in terms of identification, fill the newspapers and anecdotal memories for years and are good examples of the nonsense engendered by unsolved murders. The police themselves were tireless in their search for these shoes, even though it could not be said with certainty that they actually belonged to the dead woman.
Two days after Professor Webster’s report, DI Williams was keeping his boss, Sidney Inight, abreast of events on the shoes. He had been to Bacup, Lancashire, to meet the chief constable, R.W. Priest, who had arranged that the managing director of a shoe company, Maden and Ireland, should be present. They assured Williams that the shoes in question had been made in the Rossendale Valley, but not by them. The tell-tale number D 956 was theirs, but it pointed to distribution by W.R. Wilford Ltd of Leicester, wholesale dealers. From the shoes themselves, it looked to these experts as if the shoes had had at least six months of hard wear.
One typed report without date or signature but probably written by Williams, talks of a visit to Mrs Anne Boles of King Street, Wednesbury, a shoe-shop manageress. She remembered that in 1940 when crepe-soled shoes first appeared on the market, the ‘ice’ colour was very popular, the blue less so. From information now missing from the police files, a Mr Allen provided these shoes in the area, but he obtained them from a variety of makers across the Midlands. Williams and Detective Constable Sutherland traced Leonard Pass of Elwell Street, Wednesbury, who repaired shoes for Allen and Co, specifically for poorer clients who could not afford new shoes or expensive repairs. Pass’s records were excellent, going back five years and among the thousands of invoices were four pairs of the blue Gibson pattern, but none of these was size 5½. Pass knew his customers and was able to assure the officers that they were all still alive at the time of asking. The superintendents of Wednesbury and Bilston were alerted to the shoe problem, especially in relation to missing persons on their respective patches.
On 1 May, just before the Birmingham conference, DI Williams was hunting shoes in the Leicester area. Messrs Wilfords of Charles Street did indeed produce Gibson footwear with stamps 956, 955 and 957 but none of them had the prefix D and none of the soles was blue. With DI Haywood of Leicester CID, Williams traipsed around shoe shops all afternoon. At one point, the police thought they had hit paydirt. The director of Bray Ltd told them that the photograph the police showed him was very similar to those his company made, down to the identifying numbers inside. A tour of the workshop revealed that Brays had made these shoes – D596, blue semi-chrome with three rows of pin-punching on quarter and vamp. The pair was made on a 97 last with leather through crepe sole, Fair-stitched fore-part and crepe heel. The first of these was made in April 1940, Brays were the only company to sell them and the first order was placed in June 1940. This was a remarkable piece of good police work, but it did not end there. Allen’s company in Bilston had sold only six pairs of these shoes in size 5½. There were other firms too, scattered all over the country: Lills of Coventry Road, Birmingham; Ambrose Wilson of London; Darnell and Sons of Shoreditch. Some of these were mail-order, but all kept records and the police were in the process of following this up. Gibson shoes cost 13/11d in 1940 and stood out as perhaps the only expensive item in the dead woman’s possession.
Tracing the manufacturers and sellers of the shoes was important, but the next step – who bought them – was the vital one and it was never solved. Because of this, in the years ahead, all sorts of enquiries were relaunched to pin down the Gibsons’ owner. A number of writers on the case claim, dubiously, that 6,000 such shoes were traced and only six pairs could not be accounted for, sold for cash in a Dudley market. One version has the shoes made by Silesburys of Northampton, although that company appears nowhere in the police files. That same source has a woman swapping her Gibsons at the door with a lady who seemed down on her luck and exchanging them for a cup and saucer. No date, no time, no place – just an anecdote of someone who longs to be involved in something exciting and gruesome.
Then there is the story, covered more fully in Chapter 11, about an impoverished singer who performed at various pubs in the Midlands in the 1940s. A landlady felt sorry for her and said ‘“Go into the kitchen and put your feet up on the fender …” Feeling very sorry for her [the landlady] gave her a pair of crepe-soled shoes which she was not very fond of.’3 This story, complete with dialogue, came from a Brierley Hill resident in his eighties who was reminiscing about humdrum events over sixty-five years earlier.
And the old man remembered something else. He joined the RAF towards the end of 1941 but he was back on leave three years later, when there seems to have been a burst of new activity on the Hagley Wood case. His sister had bought a copy of the national newspaper the Daily Sketch and saw an article by Professor Webster relating to the case and the shoes. The airman and his sister were convinced they were the shoes their mother had given the singer. They contacted the police and the paper, but heard no more. That was because their mother’s shoes were two-tone brown and cream, not the dark blue of Hagley Wood.
In August 1978, the Black Country Bugle carried an article about a Mr Cogzell (no Christian name supplied), a shoemaker who believed he had some answers. Cogzell had seen a television programme which Joyce Coley says was made featuring Professor Webster. The pathologist died in 1973 but had retired by 1955, so this was a very early example of this sort of ‘crime watch’ programme, in which Webster showed the shoes to his television audience (watching of course on small, grainy screens in black and white, 405 lines). As a shoemaker, Cogzell was fascinated and thought he recognized the distinctive stitching. He was adamant that the shoes he was shown by Dr R.T. Davies of Birmingham University’s Medical School and purporting to come from the wych elm were not those he had seen on television. The colour was right, as was the dilapidation, but a particular cut on one of the uppers, which had been stressed on the programme, was not there.
The Bugle was able at least to clear up the fact that the television programme had been aired in 1969 or 1970 and both the BBC and ITV were trying to trace it. Cogzell’s story was that, nursing his sick wife, he forgot about the programme until the Bugle’s article on the case in June 1978 had jogged his memory. He had lived in Lye for years near a cobbler and knew that the girls who worked in a local sheet metal works wore shoes that were damaged by sharp metal. The cobbler repaired them using a particularly distinctive type of stitch and Cogzell believed he could recognize it if he had access to the original shoes.
The wedding ring yielded nothing at all. An expensive piece of jewellery might have led to identification – jewellers keep careful records of such things – and Birmingham of course was linked with the gold and silver trade. But this was cheap rolled gold, worth about half a crown, the sort of ‘cover-all’ that many young women used to con nosy hotel and guest-house proprietors that they were married to the man they had come in with. It was not far above a plain old curtain ring, except that photographs show that it had designs all the way around it.
Inight and Williams probably put most faith in the peculiar teeth. Dentists keep careful records, like jewellers, and not only did the dead woman have overlapping incisors, she had also had a tooth removed within a year before she died, from the right side of her lower jaw. The problem was that many dentists, like doctors, had been called up for military service and we have no way of knowing how accurate record keeping was, given that manpower shortage. Then, there was the problem of amateurs, people who took out teeth with no anaesthetic and only a rudimentary idea of what they were doing. Like back-street abortionists, they kept no records at all.
What is astonishing is that, apart from requests in police newspaper reports, there is nothing on dentists in the Worcestershire Archive. Since it is likely that these would have been in a file unique to that source, an equal likelihood is that this has become separated over the years and subsequently lost. But the reality in 1943 was that, yet again, nothing was forthcoming.
The assumed scene of the crime was slightly more forthcoming, though. While the Surrey force had been able to construct a reasonably accurate thumbnail sketch of Joan Wolfe, only two items, other than scattered bones, were found in Hagley Wood. One was a green glass bottle which probably had no links to the case. It is described nowhere and such bottles, usually with ribbed exteriors, often carried poison. Even in the 1940s, it was possible to buy various dangerous chemicals over the counter in pharmacies. Professor Webster could not find a definitive cause of death, but poison would leave no trace on bones or the limited scraps of clothing found. The problem with any crime scene is that it can be littered before and after the event by just about anybody. According to contemporary reports, Hagley Wood was used widely by courting couples, ‘pleasure seekers’ and evacuees from bombing; the bottle could have been anybody’s.
Altogether more fascinating is the identity card. We know that Mrs Bradley of Hagley made covers for cards like this and it had to be carried at all times to be shown to officials in a country paranoid about a fifth column operating in darkness. This particular one had a woman’s name on it and an address. The police made enquiries.
Actually, they did not. Donald McCormick wrote the first book on the Hagley Wood murder in 1968. Murder by Witchcraft linked Hagley Wood with the killing of labourer Charles Walton in Meon Hill in 1945, a fatal misconception that has dogged both unsolved murders ever since. According to McCormick, whose fabrications are analysed in Chapter 14, the owner of the card lived at ‘an address in the Midlands’4 and voluntarily gave her name. When the police called on her and asked to see her card, she could not find it. She admitted the card was hers, but she had no idea how it had ended up in Hagley Wood, a place she had never been to in her life. At this point, according to McCormick and others who have followed him, the police seem to have shrugged and wandered away.
This defies belief. Not having an identity card was a criminal offence. Being unable to explain how it got to a place where a murder had happened was, to say the least, suspicious. And, surprise, surprise, there is no mention of this incident in the Worcester Archive.
What there is, however, – and this, I believe, is where McCormick’s vague nonsense came from – is the finding of a lady’s handbag in 1944. It was 17 November and Special Constable R. Sheppard of Hagley was in the wood investigating shooting rights when he found the bag ‘some distance below’ the wych elm. The bag measured 9½ inches wide by 6½ and the moss covering on one side indicated that it had been there for some time. So much for the thorough search of the ground in April 1943, although conceivably the bag may not have been there that long. A letter T had been carved into the bark of a silver birch nearby.
Clent police had a record that a handbag had been reported stolen on 16 December from a car parked in Hagley Wood Lane. The woman who reported it was Dr Dorothy Edith Markham of 25, Elgin Rd, Alexandra Park, London N22. Police enquiries revealed that the doctor now lived in Compton Court, Compton Road, Wolverhampton. The bag itself was empty but Dr Markham had said that it had contained about fifteen shillings in cash, a fountain pen and a driving licence. To be fair to McCormick, he had no access to police files when he wrote his book because Hagley Wood was still an open case, so the driving licence morphed into the much more likely identity card.
Constable Jack Pound was sent to interview Dr Markham on 22 November and she identified the bag as hers. Pound was satisfied that the bag had no links with the body in the wych elm but leaving it at that seems just as irresponsible as McCormick’s version in which the police make enquiries of an anonymous woman in a Midlands town (Markham in Wolverhampton) and accept that being without an identity card for months was not unusual and no cause for concern. Few people had driving licences in the 1940s and motorists were not obliged to carry them. Even allowing for the fact that Dr Markham was working in the area in 1939, what was her (vacated) car doing in Hagley Wood Lane? It was December, hardly a time for a nature ramble. The fact is that Jack Pound may have been too easily fobbed off by a professional woman who was unlikely to have been intimidated by the sudden arrival of a policeman. Whatever the links between the doctor and the wood, the actual driving licence was never seen again.
In Murder By Witchcraft, Donald McCormick refers to a man who saw an article on the Hagley Wood case in the papers. Typical of McCormick’s style, we have no name, no date, not even the newspaper in question. He was, McCormick says, and everyone else has followed him, an executive of an industrial company who was living in lodgings on Hagley Common in the summer of 1941. He was walking to his digs, perhaps on 16 July and heard a woman’s screams coming from the wood. Minutes later, he met a teacher walking in the opposite direction and he had heard the same thing. The pair decided to call the police and a sergeant came to investigate. The three found nothing. Was a dead woman already lying, contorted in the confined space of the bole, inside one of the many wych elms they trudged past?
Knowing what we do about McCormick’s habit of running with all the rumours and half-baked truths, this story requires investigation. There is no report of the incident in the police files, no screams in the woods, no keenly searching sergeant. What time of day was this? If the executive was returning home, it was presumably after the day’s work, so early evening. The teacher would have finished his day too, by then, the school term still in operation on 16 July. To call the police, they would either have gone to whichever of their homes was nearest or to find a call box. Buttons had to be pressed and ‘999’ had to be dialled. The operator’s voice would have clicked in – ‘which service do you require?’ – and wires would be pulled to make the police connection. The days are long in July so it would be entirely feasible for a search to be conducted that evening. But if the screams were the last sounds made by the woman in the wych elm, her murderer would still be at large in the wood. Did he stuff the body in the tree and make a run for it while the walkers were finding their red-painted telephone kiosk? Possible, but unlikely.
It is possible that the teacher and the executive are figments of McCormick’s imagination or a misreading of a newspaper article. We shall come across two teachers in the Hagley Wood Archive later, but there is no one who fits the pattern of the executive.
In the end, like so much else in the Hagley Wood murder, it was all smoke and mirrors. Asked for his comments late in 1943, Superintendent Sidney Inight admitted they had no real clue as to the identity of the dead woman. She might as well, as someone in the original investigation put it, have come ‘from another world’.
Chapter 6
The Writing on the Wall
Sixty-three years before the Hagley Wood murder, a series of killings took place in London’s East End which have assumed iconic status. Seven women1 all of them prostitutes, were attacked and mutilated in the adjacent parishes of Whitechapel and Spitalfields by a blitz-style killer who, thanks to over-the-top journalese, came to be known as Jack the Ripper.
