‘The stench of putrefaction was strong,’ Simpson reminisced in his Forty Years of Murder. ‘The air was buzzing with flies and the remains of the body were crawling with maggots.’1
Molly Lefebure stood loyally by CKS, making notes, collecting specimens of beetles, maggots, earth and heather and sealing them in buff envelopes. Everybody else moved away from the smell.
The body was that of a woman. She was wearing a shabby green and white summer frock with a lace collar. There was a piece of knotted rope around her waist serving as a belt. Under the frock were wide-legged French knickers, a slip, a vest and a bra. Her ankle socks still clung to her feet but her shoes had gone. Simpson estimated that her skull had been shattered by a heavy, blunt object, perhaps a wooden stake. Gardner estimated that the woman had been buried five or six weeks earlier, so that she had probably been murdered in late August or early September of that year. She was taken to Guy’s, with the permission of the local coroner Dr Wills Taylor, and ‘by tea-time, thousands [of maggots] were struggling for life in a carbolic bath in [the] Hospital mortuary’.
Having examined the body more carefully in laboratory conditions, Simpson moved the probable murder date to the middle of September. The thirty-eight pieces of the skull were painstakingly reassembled by him and Gardner and what was left at the back was a gaping hole, 5¼ by 1¼ inches. The single blow would have caused immediate loss of consciousness and death minutes later, from shock and brain damage. There was also a series of peculiarly shaped stabs to the forehead and the front teeth were missing. Simpson estimated that the victim had been attacked by her assailant from the front, using some sort of knife and had then been finished off with the heavy object from behind. Her teeth would probably have been knocked out because she was already on the ground, face-down, when the fatal blow had been struck.
X-rays of the victim’s bones and teeth, as well as the measurements of the pelvis, told Simpson that the dead woman was between 19 and 20 years old. She was 5ft 4in tall and slim. Her hair, what little of it was left, was a mousy brown. Significantly, it was her missing front teeth that gave the most important clue. Their position in the skull clearly told Simpson that they protruded slightly, rather like the woman in Hagley Wood.
The most common assumption in the finding of a female murder victim is that the killing was sex-related. Yet the girl’s underwear was intact and there was no sign of assault. Neither was there in the Hagley Wood case.
What clinched the identity of the girl on Hankley Common was her clothes, the green and white frock. The sharp-eyed Superintendent Webb remembered seeing a frock like that – and recently. He checked his diary. He had been at the station on 23 July when a constable brought in a girl wearing that very dress. She was 19 and had brown hair and protruding teeth. She was one of those girls who became increasingly common during the war, a runaway. Her name was Joan Pearl Wolfe.
In the days that followed the finding of the body, sixty coppers in uniform trudged through Houndown Wood and on to Hankley Common, elbow to elbow, turning over the leafmould with sticks. On 12 October, they found a tooth, a piece of skull and a tuft of hair. And two shoes, about ninety paces apart. Later that day, more was found, corroborative evidence for Webb’s memory. There was a canvas bag containing a rosary, a bar of soap and a water bottle. Three days later, the most vital evidence of all, an identity card and National Health Insurance card with the name Joan Pearl Wolfe. Ironically, only in wartime would those things exist; nobody in peacetime Britain routinely carried identity information, least of all 19-year-old girls. Six days later, Constable Joseph Armstrong of Surrey police found the murder weapon, a broken branch of a silver birch tree measuring 38½in long. Joan’s hair still clung to the peeling bark.
The police were even able to find two places where Joan had spent her last days. On high ground in Thursley village was an old cricket pavilion, beaten by the wind and rain. Inside was a pair of stockings, an elastic garter and a knitting instruction booklet. And on one of the wooden planks of the pavilion’s walls, a child-like drawing under a smiling sun and the words ‘Our little grey home in the west’. It was a schoolgirl’s dream, of sharing for ever with her lover; with the man who had killed her.
The identification of a victim is a huge step forward in a murder case. It creates a set of parameters within which the police can work. Relatives, friends and colleagues can be located and interviewed. Murder by a random stranger is far rarer than most people think, so the chances are that, during those interviews, the police will happen across the killer they are looking for.
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.
