On the night of 31 September, the killer struck twice. His first victim was Elizabeth Stride, known as Long Liz, whose body was found by a passing carter in Dutfield’s Yard off Berner Street. It is likely that the arrival of Louis Diemschutz, with his pony and trap, interrupted the killer who hid until the coast was clear, then moved west, probably out of his comfort zone. This brought him out of the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan police and into that of the City force.
In Mitre Square, the Whitechapel murderer came across Catherine Eddowes, whose particular patch that was, and he killed her. This time, there would be no interruptions and despite the frequency of police patrols in the area, ‘Jack’ cut the woman’s throat, slashed her cheeks, earlobes and eyelids, ripped open her abdomen and removed a kidney and ovaries. Where he went then must be conjecture, but a piece of evidence came to light which has an indirect link with the Hagley Wood killing.
Constable 254A Alfred Long of the Met was patrolling his usual beat along Goulston Street, to the east of Mitre Square, and he noticed a scribbled sentence, written in chalk, on the black brick facia of Numbers 108–19 Wentworth Model Dwellings, a tenement block typical of dozens all over the East End. Lying in the basin of a stand pipe below it was a piece of bloody cloth which had been ripped from an apron. Subsequent research proved that the cloth – and the blood – came from Catherine Eddowes. In all probability, the murderer had a considerable amount of blood on his hands and had taken the cloth away to wipe them. Heading to what was almost certainly his home in Whitechapel, he chanced upon the stand pipe and washed his hands more thoroughly.
Had he also written the chalk message of the wall nearby? Unfortunately, detectives who arrived to view the scene did not record accurately what the words said; neither, although the technology was available, were they photographed. According to the official police line, backed by the Home Office, the words read ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ The misspelling of ‘Jews’ was noted but changed at least three times by the time of the coroner’s inquest. Fearing that this overt anti-Semitism would inflame the non-Jewish population of the area (where over 90 per cent were Jewish) the Commissioner of the Met, the clueless Charles Warren, ordered the words erased.
As with the writing that appeared in the Hagley Wood case, the Goulston Street Graffito opened a can of worms and has itself reached iconic status in the febrile world of Ripperology. A number of detectives at the time did not believe that the words had any connection with the Whitechapel killings, and this, of course, is the problem with all sorts of evidence at crime scenes. To take another example from the Ripper case, a leather apron was found near the body of another victim, Annie Chapman, in a yard behind No 29 Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. This ‘evidence’ was leaked to the press who brazenly asserted that the apron belonged to the killer. Accordingly, a local named John Pizer, who not only, as a shoemaker, owned such a garment but actually had the nickname ‘Leather Apron’, was attacked by a mob and had to be rescued by the police. It was later discovered that the apron belonged to one of the seventeen occupants of No 29 who had washed it and left it out overnight to dry.
I have not been able to pinpoint the first appearance of the Hagley Wood graffito but it was certainly there by Christmas 1943 when the message was reported on an external wall of Upper Dean Street, Birmingham. It was written in block capitals in chalk, each letter approximately the height of a brick. It read ‘Who put Bella down the Wych elm – Hagley Wood’. There was no question mark, implying perhaps that the author was not much of a writer, but ‘wych’ was spelled correctly, as it usually was in later editions of the question. One, slightly nearer to Hagley – Old Hill, Birmingham – read ‘Who put Luebella down the Wych Elm?’ and was followed by ‘Hagley Wood Bella’. The most common form of the dozens that appeared in the weeks and months that followed read ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?’
The first reference (of many) in the police files is dated 28 March 1944, eleven months after the body was found and nearly three years after she died. Detective Constable Frank Kedward wrote to Superintendent Hollyhead at Stourbridge to tell him that Wilfred Lawson White, a 40-year-old fruiterer of Beale Street in the town had seen some wall writing that morning on his way to work at Smithfield Fruit Market in Birmingham. The inscription was on the wall of Messrs Francis Nicholls Ltd, but the confusion over the address – ‘either Pershore Street or Dean Street, Birmingham’ – is a cause of confusion itself. The words were identical to those found in the same area since the previous December – ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm Hagley Wood’.
Both DI Williams at Worcester and Birmingham City Police were informed. Worryingly, Williams’s version of the same incident on the same day reads differently – ‘Who put Bella in the Wytch Elm tree at Hagley Wood?’ The devil, as is the case with all murder enquiries, was in the detail. And the detail was careless and confused. Detective Inspector Dillon of the Birmingham force was to look into the matter.
Three days later, DI Williams was in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham with the local officers Chief Inspector Davis and DS Renshaw. The writing was on the wall of empty premises next to those of Messrs Williamsons. The manager was helpful, as were the Boffeys, father and son, who worked as warehousemen on the premises. Raymond Boffey, the son, had his attention drawn to the writing by a lad named George Bond (both boys were in their teens). Boffey had written ‘No parking here’ nearby, obviously tired of the world and his wife blocking the Williamsons’ yard. Boffey denied writing anything else, but admitted he had read about the Hagley Wood murder recently in an old newspaper. Under pressure from the police, the 16-year-old cracked and admitted his writing the ‘Bella’ message. He subsequently withdrew this statement, so Williams got him to write it down. This proved to be a disaster. ‘He is absolutely,’ the inspector wrote in his report, ‘an illiterate youth, having only reached the third standard at school.’ Boffey’s scribble is still attached (one of four made) and only in one was the spelling correct, simply because Williams had told him how to spell the words!
Enquiries in the area drew a blank. No one in the markets and coffee houses knew anyone called Bella. The next day, Williams had a phone call from Sergeant Renshaw; another message had appeared, on the wall of Messrs Whites near the Williamson buildings. This time it just read ‘Hagley Wood Bella’ and must have been written late on 29 March or early on the 30th. So, back Williams went on the next day, a Thursday.
The enquiries at Whites’ included interviews with lorry drivers who came from all over the Midlands, as far away as Shrewsbury in the west. Out of this came a possible suspect, for the writing if not the murder itself. On Saturday, 25 March, a man had called at the offices of the Birmingham Gazette and asked to see the file on Hagley Wood. He was between 30 and 40 years old, wearing work clothes and an overcoat, had dark hair and was 5ft 10in tall. He spent half an hour perusing the cuttings, and Frederick Anderson, the desk reporter, asked if he could help. He told him that he had been passing Hagley Wood at about the time of the murder and felt that ‘something terrible was going to happen’. He had been talking this over with workmates and wanted to check on the dead woman’s wedding ring. Anderson was naturally suspicious and asked to see the man’s identity card. The name was John Jones, of Reservoir Road, Selly Oak but Anderson had not written down the National Registration Number nor the actual address.
Williams took Anderson to Reservoir Road but he could not identify ‘Mr Jones’ at all. There were two hundred houses along the road but the local fire-guard officer was very helpful and whittled down the likely address to 264 or 266. No one was in at either house, so Williams called it a day; by now it was 8.30 p.m. and getting dark. In wartime, of course, with a blackout in force, that meant very dark indeed.
When Williams reached the station, he got a phone call about yet another outbreak of graffiti, this time in Old Hill, Staffordshire, with the phrase ‘Who put Luebeller in the Wych Elm’.
The next morning saw him with Detective Constables Kedward and Venables looking at the writing on the wall of an old cottage on the Old Hill to Halesowen road. Williams believed the handwriting to be identical to the others he had seen. He contacted an old teacher friend of his, John Cox, head of Old Hill School and asked his professional opinion. Contrary to the report that Williams had only received the day before, Cox told him that the graffito had been there since before the previous Christmas. Still following his hunch about Jones of Reservoir Road, Williams conferred with Inspector Bache of Halesowen in respect of a firm, Gaskell and Chambers, who had recently moved premises from Dalesend to Hayseed, only a quarter of a mile from the Old Hill writing. Williams was sending telegrams in all directions, keeping everybody in the loop, including the journalist Anderson, in case the elusive Mr Jones should call back. He suggested keeping watch on various premises in the area for a possible return of the graffiti writer.
Two days later, on what was, ironically, April Fools’ Day, Sergeant Renshaw was letting Williams know that he had taken photographs of the Upper Dean Street writing and had taken scrapings of the chalk itself, trying to pinpoint the origin of the material.
The previous day, teacher John Cox of Haden Hill, Old Hill, made an official statement to Detective Archie Venables. His involvement went way back, in fact to the previous summer (1943) which, if correct, makes it the closest graffito we have relating to the finding of the body. At the time, Cox did not equate it with Hagley Wood. But he was not the only eyewitness to this. Venables also interviewed James William Rowley, a laboratory assistant aged 18, of High Haden Road, Old Hill. Rowley was walking to work on 30 March 1944 carrying a copy of the early edition of the Birmingham Gazette and had just read of similar writings. There it was on a cottage wall – ‘Who put Luebeller in the Wych Elm’. Venables’ search of the Burgess List, a sort of street directory, revealed no one called Bella, Luebeller, Christabella or any other likely variant. Enquiries at the Food and Registration office also drew a blank.
Venables added in this report that he had heard of a conversation in the Star pub in Halesowen on that day, in which one of the men concerned said that he knew who the murderer was. Inspector Bache, whose manor this was, was dealing with it. We have already noted the paranoia of wartime Britain and ‘guilty’ conversations of any sort were taken very seriously by the authorities. As a footnote, are Messrs Rowley and Cox the actual origin of McCormick’s duo who reported the screams in Hagley Wood? Cox was a teacher and even though Rowley, as a laboratory technician, hardly equates with a company executive, it is easy to see how one member of an establishment could be confused with another. They had both gone to the police with information linked with Hagley Wood, although not as directly as McCormick would have us believe.
On 12 April, another graffito was reported and this one had a cynical, if sinister, twist. At some time after 10 a.m., the following words appeared on a wall at Mucklow Hill, Halesowen. It was, as usual, in white chalk and read ‘Who put Bella in the wytch elm, Hagley Wood. Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper. Anna Bella. Died in Hagley Wood?’
Bearing in mind the Goulston Street Graffito (see p49) and its red-herring goose-chase by the police in 1888, this one underlines the point of the Bella writings; virtually all of it was a joke. Jack the Ripper was – and remains – the best-known unknown murderer in the world; and Bella’s killer was unknown too. Two things, however, emerge from the Halesowen daub of 12 April 1944 – the second name Anna (later to have sinister echoes) and the valid, unanswerable question, did Bella actually die in Hagley Wood? Detective Constable John Lee was to follow this one up.
He reported that the lettering was very roughly done about 5ft 6in from the ground. It had appeared soon after a group of lads from local factories had been seen loitering in the area (as they did routinely during their lunch break) and one of them was likely to have been responsible. DI Williams had seen this message too, on his way to a detectives’ conference in Birmingham with Sergeant Skerratt from Clent. In his opinion, the writing style was nothing like the others he had seen.
There seems to be a lull in the graffiti outbreak because the next police reference is dated 1 August. Williams reported that the writing had been photographed on a wall in Wolverhampton and read ‘Hagley Wood – Luebella – her address was opposite the Rose and Crown, Hasbury’. Hasbury is a village on the road to Halesowen, about four miles from Hagley. Inspector Bache told Williams that a similar message had appeared on a gate opposite the Shelton Inn, Belle Vale, Halesowen and that DC Lee had seen it. Was this, at last, a breakthrough?
PC231 Albert Pitcher, on Bache’s instructions, visited Hasbury the next day. On a bridge wall near the gate was the incomprehensible ‘I use to Hagley Wood’ but the next part of the sentence was more interesting. ‘Lubella was no pross[titute]’.
The ever-diligent Constable Pitcher visited all the houses opposite the Rose and Crown and dutifully recorded details of all the residents (although the report is somewhat garbled). He had gone back six years. The Willetts family (four adults and one child and no known relation to Tommy who had helped find Bella’s body) had lived at Number 390 for forty years. Ernest and his wife had one child; Walter and his wife had no children. Harry Moore had lived four doors away for thirty years, along with his wife and four daughters. Mrs Withers lived at 396 with her small child; her husband Colin was serving with the armed forces and the family had lived there for five years. Hilda Argent’s husband had been killed by enemy action in 1941; she lived with her child at 398. At 400 lived Alfred Hardwick, his wife and three children. Next door was Albert Allsopp, his wife Annie and daughter who had lived there for thirty-five years. Their son, Samuel, was a leading Aircraftsman based in Suffolk. At 406 lived Arthur James, his wife, daughter and son-in-law. They had been there for twelve years. Number 408 was the home of the widow Mabel Basterfield and her son. John Laight, his wife and three small children lived at 410, except that the husband was somewhere with the armed forces. None of them knew anyone called Lubella.
The only Bella that Pitcher came across was a woman – Bella James – who occasionally visited the Allsopps who were distant relatives of hers but they had heard nothing of her for over four years and she was aged between 60 and 70. Subsequent enquiries found her alive and well in Kidderminster.
On the same day that Pitcher was knocking on doors in Hasbury, 24-year-old chemist Stanley Ray, employed at Mander Bros by the Ministry of Supply made a statement to DC L. White to the effect that he had seen another Rose and Crown graffito the previous day in Sun Passage, under an archway belonging to the railway. Chief Inspector Penderel visited the site with the words in white chalk and believed that they had been recently done. Penderel made sure that DI Williams was kept in the loop but by now everybody involved in the case must have been heartily tired of pranksters’ work appearing all over the place. The Wolverhampton Express and Star reported the latest outbreak on 7 August – ‘it can only be supposed that these chalkings are yet another hoax.’
Williams’ visit to Halesowen, however, elicited some potentially useful information. Opposite the Rose and Crown were the premises of J.T. Willetts (Pitcher had talked to the family at 390). This was a timber yard and Mr Willetts senior knew Hagley Wood well. He told Williams that either the wych elm was a piece of luck for the murderer or that the tree was known to him in advance. Willetts believed ‘that the woman was taken to the Wood and that some person attempted to have intercourse with her against her will and that her death occurred as the result of some violence being used’. He was convinced that Bella was not local. Williams knew the Willetts family and knew he could trust their knowledge. Against that, however, was Professor Webster’s assertion that the presence of the woman’s undamaged knickers precluded rape or any attempt; Willetts obviously did not know that.
In his report, Williams had been talking things over with Inspector Bache and they agreed that using local papers, especially the Express and Star with its big circulation, would be a good vehicle to prompt the public and elicit any information. Most CID units did this by the 1940s, but some were reluctant to give too much away as it brought out the prurient and frankly deranged – as would be the case with Bella.
One of these was the mysterious Mr Jones who had called at the Birmingham Gazette’s offices in search of the paper’s Hagley Wood murder file. He had been traced back in April 1944 and Williams had interviewed him. He was ‘a peculiar youth, over 6ft, protruding ears and teeth and looked abnormal’. John Jones lived at 106, Reservoir Road, Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham and worked as an electrician in the BSA works in Small Heath. Somewhat bizarrely, bearing in mind Williams’ opinion of him, he was attached to the Intelligence Section, 26th Battalion, C Company, Birmingham Home Guard. As to his sense that ‘something was going to happen’ near Hagley Wood Lane, Williams concluded that he had ‘either been reading too many detective novels’ or had read a journal called Armchair Scientist and saw himself as an amateur psychologist/sleuth. Jones had rung Digbeth police station over twenty times offering his advice and assistance. Williams got Jones to write out the Hagley Wood message found in Upper Dean Street (the first one that appeared) and believed he was responsible; Professor Webster disagreed although he was not an acknowledged graphologist. Attached to the police file on Jones is an extract from Armchair Science, August 1939 which attempts to identify murderers from their glandular peculiarities. When a certain type of man turns to crime, reads the section annotated in pencil by Jones:
… his will be the ‘perfect crime’ of fiction, carefully planned and carried out without a hitch. He’ll rob, but only for six-figure sums, and when he kills, you’ll find that love or its step-sister [hate?] was the motivating impulse … And if the police don’t catch him in the act, they’re hardly likely to catch him in the next six months. But when they do and if they’re glandularly minded, they’ll put him in a cell with a ream of paper and a dozen pencils. Then he’ll give himself away. Oh, no, he won’t confess. He never confesses. But he can’t resist the urge to write.
It is difficult to say who was more ‘peculiar’; John Jones or the author of Armchair Science!
Again and again, we come back to that first wall writing in Upper Dean Street. Later ones were almost certainly the work of hoaxers – and if the purpose was to distract the police and lead them in the wrong direction, it worked – but why Upper Dean Street? And was that first one actually written by someone who genuinely knew something? The street was a short one, just over 300 yards long, in the heart of the city centre, near the Rag Market and the Bull Ring. Tat of all kinds was sold in the area, as it had been for centuries and the Bull Ring itself rang to the shouts of costers and the rumble of their carts in the 1940s. There was a synagogue there and among its once more opulent Georgian homes, a pub called the Coach and Horses. The police determined that the chalk used for the graffiti was the bog-standard type, universally used in schools on blackboards and in pubs to mark up darts’ scores. What could be easier than for someone to sneak a piece into his pocket after a pint and use it to pose the question on nearby brickwork after closing time?
At the heart of the graffiti was the name itself. Later assertions (see Chapter 14) were that the name was associated with witchcraft, but this is an almost nonsensical generalization. It means ‘beautiful’ (as in ‘belle of the ball’) but this is a much later interpretation. ‘Belli’ is the plural of bellum, a war. A Bellatrix was a female warrior (largely, in Roman times, a literary convention). All of it came from Bellona, a war goddess. So, there was something appropriate about Bella’s body being found during the biggest war in history. The ‘beautiful’ meaning comes from belle, meaning well or nicely and is a far more Italian convention.
As an English name in the 1930s and 1940s, it was unusual, a derivation of Elizabeth, alongside Eliza, Isobel, Lubella and the commonest version, Betty. Today, Bella is rated sixty-second among popular girls’ names; in 1940, it is not even in the first hundred. Was the scrawled name on that wall in Upper Dean Street a generic one, almost like the Australian ‘sheila’ which fitted any female? Or did the writer know exactly who had been hidden in Hagley Wood and was that actually her name? If the writer of the original graffito knew Bella and was concerned that she had not, by Christmas 1943, got justice, why did he not contact the police with what he knew? Or was it just a matter of taunting the authorities, who had so far failed to catch anybody? In the case of the Whitechapel murders, the police and the press received upwards of 220 letters and postcards, most of them chiding the Metropolitan and City forces for their incompetence. What we do not have, unlike the Ripper killings, is anyone coming forward to admit responsibility. Often, the higher the profile of a murder and the more coverage it gets in the press, the more the pressure is on some people – usually men – to confess. In the case of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper who battered women to death in Leeds in the 1980s, the most blatant – and damaging – of these was the spurious confession on tape from ‘Wearside Jack’, whose identity would only be discovered years later and who had nothing to do with the Leeds murders at all. As far as we are aware, no one came forward to say ‘I put Bella in the wych elm’ and the police were no further forward.
But in October 1944 came an unusual twist. At Halloween, a letter was sent to the chief constable at Newton Street, Birmingham:
Sir,
Just a line you are letting me Be at ease I mean about who put Bella Down the Wych Elm in Hagley Wood, you know the writing on the wall in Smithfield St. some months Back that was me Mr Wood. Well here is your chance to meet me in Market St of[f] Collshill St tomorrow Nov 1 at 5.30 and you shall hear the truth all for Now.
Yours truly
Mr Wood
Needless to say, the police followed this up and needless to say, no one turned up at the rendezvous. Neither could anyone called Wood be located in the area. Wood was the ‘Wearside Jack’ of his day, an oddball who probably took delight in taunting the police.
The war undoubtedly added to the complexities of the case. While it is true that no one could wander the countryside as freely as they had before 3 September 1939 and everybody and his wife was on the lookout for fifth columnists and suspicious activity, police forces were stretched and records were not kept. There was, for instance, no national census for 1941 because so many people were serving overseas in the armed forces and administrative units were needed elsewhere. Likewise, in Birmingham, there were no updated electoral rolls between 1940 and 1944. And the shady characters of the underworld had a knack of staying firmly under the radar, even given that it was Britain that invented it!
Grim as it was, the Second World War was a golden opportunity for some people. Professional criminals saw the openings at once. They became Black Marketeers, thieves and pilferers, getting around the restrictions of rationing. The unscrupulous factory worker could sneak out of his workplace with metal goods, fabric, machine parts under his coat. The dodgy stevedore could ‘mislay’ whole crates of imports. And there were ‘larks’ everywhere. The bomb lark saw people still living in untouched houses claiming compensation for bomb damage that had not happened. The billeting lark witnessed landlords and landladies claiming expenses for troops in their homes who had long moved on. After any air raid, the rate of looting was horrendous. Who knew how many peopled trudged past the Coach and Horses in Upper Dean Street, casually reading the chalked question that somebody had posed, with a few jars of jam in their pockets or a fur coat rolled up in an otherwise empty pram? The penalty for looting was fourteen years at His Majesty’s Pleasure, but it was a risk worth taking because the police could not be everywhere.
Women like Bella – the name stuck; the media and the police widely used it – were particularly at risk. A London magistrate warned about air-raid shelters. ‘The things that are going on now in those public shelters are very dreadful. For a young girl to go into a … shelter … without her father and her mother is simply asking for trouble.’ Because of the war, there was, at any given time, a sizeable number of missing persons. Some had been blown to pieces in the Blitz and their bodies never found. Others, down on their luck and deprived of the financial support of husbands and fathers, wandered the cities and the peripheries of army camps. The arrival of the Americans, with their gum, their nylons, candy, smart uniforms and, above all, their money, made this worse.
Let us look at the women we know were victims of murder in the same period. We have already met Joan Wolfe, whose body was found in Houndown Wood, Hankley Common in October 1942. She was the product of what today we would call a broken home, her mother Edith marrying three times. The man assumed to be Joan’s father suffered from what at the time was called sleeping sickness. He gassed himself while Joan was still at school. Edith’s letters to her daughter constantly carped about the girl’s behaviour – she stayed out late with older men and, at 16, began to ‘go with soldiers’. She was already engaged but broke off her relationship and went first to Aldershot, the ‘home’ of the British army, then to London to work, for a month only, in an aircraft factory. Edith was appalled, believed that her daughter had venereal disease and was probably a nymphomaniac. When she became involved with a number of Canadian soldiers, including August Sangret, who eventually killed her, she lived rough, in ‘wigwams’ in the woods, and was infested with lice. She only owned one set of clothes, the ones she was wearing when she died. She spoke French, wore a crucifix and did not, in her own words, understand men.
When Superintendent Fred Cherill, the fingerprint expert at Scotland Yard, first saw Nita Ward, she was ‘lying across a bed … with not even a sheet as covering … She was a ghastly sight. She had been the victim of a sadistic attack of the most horrible and revolting nature.’ She had been strangled and her killer had mutilated her with a tin-opener and a piece of broken mirror. Her real name was Evelyn Oatley, aged thirty-six. She had been an actress and a Windmill girl, performing nightly in the famous theatre that refused to close even at the height of the Blitz and she had left her husband. Lack of cash drove her to prostitution. There were 143 brothels operating in London in 1942 before the Met closed some of them down. Many more were in business two years later and the majority of their customers were Americans who were being ripped off by their outrageous charges. The ‘Hyde Park Rangers’ and ‘Piccadilly Commandoes’ as they were called, flashed torches at would-be clients in blacked-out alleyways. Some of them serviced fifteen men a night and the money was good. The fact that Evelyn had a flat in Wardour Street, London, on the edge of Soho, implied that she was a cut above the usual street girl.
Margaret Lowe was 43, ‘a handsome and finely built woman’ according to Cherril and everybody knew her as Pearl. She was widowed and had once kept a boarding house in Southend. Her body was found in her flat in Crosfield Street off Tottenham Court Road. She was working as a prostitute and there was a darned silk stocking tied tightly round her neck. Her naked body was hideously mutilated.
Doris Jouannet was the wife of a French hotel manager. Her husband had taken British citizenship in the 1930s and the couple lived in Sussex Gardens, already known for its availability of cheap rooms, often by the hour. Henri Jouannet had an alibi for the time of his wife’s death and had no idea that she was ‘on the game’. She had been strangled with a scarf and ripped open like the others. Her killer had nearly sliced off one of her nipples with a razor blade.
The three women above were all victims of the man dubbed the ‘Blackout Killer’ by the press – Aircraftsman Gordon Cummings. He was an extraordinarily inept murderer, leaving fingerprints, items of uniform and a gas mask behind at scenes of crime. Two failed attacks on women sealed his fate and he was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth on 25 June 1942.
It is true that Cummins’ first victim was the respectable Evelyn Hamilton, a 42-year-old pharmacist who was about to move back home to the north, where it was safer than much-bombed London. She had £80 on her when she met Cummins in an air-raid shelter (despite the caveats of the magistrate quoted above) and he strangled her, ramming her silk scarf into her mouth to stop her screams. But it is also true that the maniac’s other victims were all ‘good time girls’, as the Americans called them, as were the lucky pair who got away from him. The risks that these women took were huge.
‘Nita’, ‘Pearl’ and ‘Mrs M’ and ‘Mrs H’ (Greta Haywood and Mrs Mulcahy, also known as Kathleen King) were aliases used by women who offered their bodies to men for money. Was that also true of Bella?
Chapter 7
