Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (13 page)

The police were at their wits’ end and were coming in for something of a roasting from the public because of the lack of any significant developments. This brutal murder had excited widespread indignation and people wanted results. Marshall, in desperation, ordered a minute examination of the trackside on the route taken by the train as it approached London. Between Putney and Wandsworth a heavy porcelain pestle was found. It had blood and human hair adhering to it. The hair had belonged to Elizabeth Camp. The police now had the murder weapon. They issued handbills with a picture of the pestle and appeals to anyone who might recognise it. There was no useful response.

Next they appealed for anyone who had been on the 7.42 train from Hounslow to come forward. The only possible lead was provided by a passenger who volunteered the information that he had seen a man leaving the carriage concerned at Wandsworth. A description was provided and soon afterwards a man who was a dead ringer for it walked into Wandsworth police station and told a startled desk sergeant that he need look no further. With an air of swagger and pride he then announced that he was the murderer. He turned out to be a hoaxer with the mental age of a child. No one else came forward.

Gradually the furore over Elizabeth’s murder died down as the popular press found new horrors to feast upon. The police scaled down their enquiries but continued to follow a number of clues. They discovered that Elizabeth had formerly been engaged to a barman called Brown. The relationship had ended very acrimoniously and Brown still resented the way he thought he had been treated. Elizabeth had been receiving a number of anonymous and threatening letters and the police thought that Brown probably wrote them.

One of the issues between the couple had been money. Elizabeth was clearly a very competent financial manager while Brown was a spendthrift. Apparently Brown still owed her money. This would have given him a motive for murder. Having thought that at last they were getting somewhere, the police then had their hopes dashed when Brown turned out to have a cast-iron alibi.

There is a lot of sweat and often little glory in routine police enquiry work. It is their job to uncover information that may be relevant, and in the course of this particular enquiry they found that Elizabeth was something of a moneylender. Such people are, by the very nature of the service they provide, generally disliked. In addition, Berry told them that she frequently carried a substantial amount of money on her person. Could her murderer be someone who had noticed this and had waited for an opportunity to rob her when she was alone?

It turned out that a number of people owed her money. Could it be a robber who was also a creditor? The police turned their attention to Elizabeth’s creditors. One of them turned out to be the ‘friend of the family’ who had joined Elizabeth and her sister for a drink at Hounslow before she had left for what
turned out to be her terminal journey. His name was Stone. He explained that he had accompanied Elizabeth and her sister to the pub in Hounslow to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials and then left them to make their way to the station. He said that he had then gone off to do urgent business elsewhere and had not returned to Hounslow until at least four hours later.

Knowing which train Elizabeth was going to travel on, had he doubled back to the station unseen and entered another carriage? Had he then alighted at an intermediate station and, intent on murdering the woman to whom he owed money, joined Elizabeth in her compartment and then committed the dreadful deed between stations? He had the motive and the opportunity. However, the means were something of a problem. It somewhat stretches the bounds of credibility to believe that he was in the habit of carrying a heavy pestle around with him. Or had he secreted it on his person in the foreknowledge that Elizabeth would be visiting Hounslow that day and returning to London on a little-used train?

We will never know. Although Stone looked to have had the motive, the means and the opportunity, the police questioned him for some time and then let him go because they did not have enough evidence to charge him with anything, or so they said. The newspapers of the time were not satisfied and hinted that the public were being kept in the dark for undisclosed reasons. The story really ends there. The murder of Elizabeth Camp on the 7.42 from Hounslow to Waterloo was never solved and obviously never will be.

An Appointment at Newgate

Louisa Masset lived in Bethune Road, Stoke Newington, London N16. She was half-French, half-English and aged thirty-three when she hit the headlines in 1899. Louisa was single and she lived with her married sister and her husband. She had a small boy named Manfred. He was illegitimate and Louisa had left France because of the stigma attached to the mothers of children born out of wedlock there. The child lived with and was looked after by a foster-mother in Tottenham and Louisa saw him regularly. The boy’s natural father apparently paid the cost of childcare.

Having the child looked after meant that she worked as a governess, receiving a relatively good wage, and she also taught piano. Louisa had a mind of her own and little respect for conventional mores, truly a liberated ‘New Woman’ in that sense. A young Frenchman of nineteen called Eudor Lucas moved in next door. Soon the couple were engaged in a steamy sexual relationship, living entirely for the pleasures of the moment and with no romantic notions about loving each other until the day they died.

Quite unexpectedly in October 1899 Manfred’s father contacted Louisa requesting that he should take over the job of looking after the boy. This seemed like a good idea for all concerned and she made arrangements to meet Helen, Manfred’s foster-mother, and to take him back into her own custody, albeit temporarily. She went out into the garden and took a brick, which she put into a bag, and then she picked the child up on the morning of 27 October and they travelled to London Bridge station. A witness came forward who said that she saw them together in the buffet at about three in the afternoon and the little boy seemed highly distressed. The same witness saw Louisa at around six. She was alone. It transpired that she then went off on a dirty weekend in Brighton with Eudor.

It seems that in between the first and the second time that she was seen at London Bridge she had doubled back to north London. Two ladies entered the waiting room at Dalston Junction on the North London Railway and in the ladies’ lavatory they found the naked body of a small boy. Even to their untrained eye it appeared that he had been battered with a brick and then suffocated. The brick was close by in two pieces. The police were called. Statements were made to the press who regaled their readers with every gory detail, real and imagined, and a murder hunt was launched.

On Monday 30 Helen received a letter from Louisa telling her that Manfred was now in France, safe and sound but missing her awfully. All London was buzzing with speculation about the dead boy found at Dalston Junction. Helen was suspicious that the child’s description matched that of Manfred and she went to the police. She provided a formal identification of the dead child. A bundle of little boy’s clothes had been found at Brighton station and Helen gave these a positive identification as well.

A mass of further evidence was gathered and although Louisa concocted a cock-and-bull story that she had placed Manfred in the care of another foster-mother, the court at the Old Bailey found her guilty and she was hanged at Newgate on the early morning of 9 January 1900 after confessing to the crime. No real reason was adduced about why she murdered her three-year-old son. Perhaps she did it to save on childcare costs. Perhaps she did it because she found her responsibilities for him something of a burden. She clearly did not have a strong maternal streak. Louisa was the first person to be hanged in Britain in the twentieth century.

Caught by the Telegraph

Not a murder on a railway train, nor even a murder on railway premises, but a murder where the perpetrator used the railway in his attempt to escape. Also it was a murder where the telegraph, that new-fangled device used to help
safety and communication on the railways, showed how effective it could also be in apprehending a suspect on the run. Let us briefly consider the genesis of the electric telegraph.

Existing methods of communication used particularly in connection with warfare, such as flags and semaphores, were only effective if they could be seen and recognised, and there were many occasions such as darkness and fog, for example, where this was impossible. The earliest hesitant steps in the direction of using electricity for a high-speed form of communication over long distances did not occur in Britain but were on the European continent and also in the USA. By the early 1840s a modification of Samuel Morse’s Morse code was widely used on the American railroads when messages had to be sent at high-speed.

In Britain William Fothergill-Cooke created an electrically operated telegraph system and early in 1837 obtained permission to conduct trials in a tunnel on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. His Heath Robinson-like apparatus was not a great success. Greater results occurred when he teamed up with Charles Wheatstone. On 25 July 1837 messages were successfully sent and received on the section of line of the London & Birmingham Railway from Euston to Camden. Despite this success the London & Birmingham was not convinced of its efficiency over longer distances and was wary of the cost of installing this system along the whole length of its main line.

Our heroes had been elated by the success of the apparatus on Camden Bank and then deflated by its rejection, but nothing loath they set to work to improve it. They did this so effectively that they were able to convince the directors of the Great Western Railway to install the modified system on their main line out of London, initially in 1839 to Hanwell and extended in 1842 to Slough. Now all kinds of messages could be transmitted to assist the safe and efficient running of the Great Western Railway’s main line to the west. Other railway companies adopted the Cooke and Wheatstone system and it soon became almost universal across Britain’s burgeoning railway system.

Even those who had little interest in railways and no understanding of electricity could not have failed to prick up their ears in 1845 when the telegraph played a vital role in the apprehension of a suspected murderer. John Tawell was a highly intelligent, very personable, persuasive and resourceful man; a devoted worshipper and a social success whose business activities had provided the means for him to have a very comfortable lifestyle. However, as so often happens, behind the respectable veneer there lay a double life.

Those acquaintances who thought they knew him were not aware that when he was scarcely out of his teens he had been sentenced to transportation on conviction for forgery. His behaviour in the Australian penal colony was exemplary and he managed to return to England as a ‘ticket-of-leave man’, essentially licensed to maintain good behaviour. He quickly insinuated
himself into the affections of a rich widow, like him a Quaker, and after they married he had access to her large bank account.

Tawell had a penchant for extra-marital affairs. One of these was with a woman called Sarah Hart who was a former servant of his. After she left his service he set her up in a cottage in Slough, discreetly out of the public eye. He fathered a couple of children with Sarah and accepted financial responsibility for them. He spent the night or occasional weekend at Slough and ensured that she had enough money to buy the things she wanted. The problem was that Sarah, like many kept women, enjoyed spending her keeper’s money, this being some compensation for the social ostracism that went with her way of life.

This was all very well until Tawell retired from business and experienced a significant decline in his ready cash. His cash may have declined but Sarah’s desire to spend it showed no sign of waning. He thought it unreasonable that she should insist on living in the manner to which she had become accustomed when his own income had fallen. Very quickly their relationship went from tranquil to tempestuous.

If Tawell had ever been in love with Sarah, he had now definitely fallen out of love with her. The relationship had become like an albatross and so he resolved to kill her. He made his preparations with care. On 1 January 1845 he bought some prussic acid at a chemist’s shop in the City of London and then cashed a cheque on one of his bank accounts, although he knew he did not have the funds to support it. He called in at a City coffee house where he was known to ascertain what time it closed in the evening. He then headed for Paddington and boarded the four o’clock local train to Slough.

He arrived at Sarah’s cottage about five o’clock. It seems that the couple were getting on reasonably well at the time because Sarah made a couple of visits to a local pub to buy some bottles of stout. Later in the evening the mood between Sarah and Tawell changed and neighbours heard them arguing about the children. Tawell wanted Sarah to agree to have them placed with a baby farmer. Shouts and screams of pain followed and Tawell was seen making his way from the cottage clearly in a state of great agitation. Another witness saw him running in the direction of the railway station.

By this time the neighbour had tried to comfort Sarah, who she thought was dying, and had sent for a doctor. Sarah died just about as soon as the doctor arrived to examine her. A local priest was also called and he took his pony and trap to the station as fast as he could go. He realised that Tawell had been on the station and had left on the return train to Paddington. He persuaded the staff to telegraph to Paddington requesting that Tawell be arrested on arrival there. Police officers were waiting for him, but instead of arresting him they followed him to his lodgings.

Obviously by the time Tawell returned to the coffee house in the morning the police had more information about him; they were there waiting for
him and he was arrested. He initially denied having been in Slough on the previous day or even knowing anyone who lived there. In a rather patronising way he told them that his social status put him above suspicion. He was soon disabused on this matter because he was charged with murder.