Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders (3 page)

One of the most horrific murders to occur in North Wales took place on Christmas Day, 1909.

Forty-nine-year-old William Murphy was a retired corporal with the Royal Anglesey Engineers. After his military service concluded, he found work as a general laborer in Holyhead, the largest town in the county of Anglesey. Although he could be violent when drunk, Murphy was popular and admired for his fearless disposition.

Like most bachelors who could afford to do so, he employed a local woman to do his laundry. His laundress was Gwen Ellen Jones, an attractive married woman in her early thirties. She had left her husband, Morris, and needed money to support herself, her seven-year-old son, and 13-year-old adopted daughter.

She and Murphy supposedly fell in love, but when drunk or angered, he would beat her unmercifully. Although afraid of him, Gwen stubbornly persisted in seeing his good side. She even lived with him twice for three weeks at a time, but after one especially violent assault, she fled and went to live in nearby Bethesda with her father, John Parry.

Gwen evidently stayed in touch with William Murphy. When he took a temporary laboring job in Yorkshire, he periodically sent her money. Unbeknownst to him, however, in early November, 1909, she left her father’s house and went back to Holyhead to live with a man named Robert Jones at 51 Baker Street. It was a poor area of town, and Gwen was often seen selling cheap goods door to door or simply begging for bread money.

In mid-December, Murphy returned to Holyhead, suspicious because he had not heard from Gwen in so long. He went to her father’s house, but the older man lied, saying she had gone to Llanddona to live with a female friend.

Murphy suspected he was being misled, and reddened in anger. He told John Parry that if he found Gwen with another man, he would kill her. Then he stormed away, saying he was going to get a drink.

At the Bethesda pub near Parry’s house, one of the regulars told him that Gwen had actually gone to live with another man in Holyhead. The former soldier exploded and hastened to the town, where he tried to track her down. He even asked police officers about her, saying that she had used him and that he would, in his words, “give it to her.”

Finally, he found her. Their reunion must have been tumultuous. Probably to appease him, she agreed to start seeing him again, behind Robert Jones’ back. He moved into a room at 40 Baker Street, and they saw each other every day for the entire week before Christmas. When he pressured her to leave Jones, she showed a rare defiance and refused. As a witness at the murder trial later but it, Murphy “thrashed her until she was black on the Thursday.”

On Christmas Day, Gwen had recovered enough from her injuries to go for a drink at the Bardsey Inn in Newry Street with her friend Lizzie Jones. She had agreed to meet Murphy at 7:00 p.m. but reneged, making him furious. By some accounts, she and Lizzie saw Murphy through the window as they were on the verge of entering the Bardsey Inn and turned to leave, but one of his drinking cronies saw them first. Other versions say that the two women were already there when he arrived. The latter is probably true, because Gwen was definitely drunk by that point. All sources agree on what happened next.

Murphy followed her outside and demanded, “Where have you been?”

Gwen tried to say that she’d gone to the rendezvous point and failed to see him, but he knew she was lying. He’d waited for her for over half an hour.

“Well, will you come with me now?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she said, presuming that Lizzie Jones would accompany them. Murphy, however, turned to the other woman and said darkly, “On our own.”

Lizzie hesitated, but when the burly ex-soldier’s scowl deepened, she slipped away. She probably believed that Gwen would be beaten again at worst, and had no idea that she would never see her friend again.

******

“We had a walk by Captain Tanner’s house,” Murphy would later say. As they went along, Gwen kept stumbling against him and slurring, “I like you.”

If she were trying to placate him, it was a case of too little too late. When they reached an isolated section of Walthew Avenue, he stopped and touched the fur muff around her neck.

“Why don’t you pull this thing off?”

“It’s hooked underneath,” she demurred.

Those may have been her last coherent words. Murphy seized her by the throat with his left hand, threw her down on the freezing ground, and squeezed until she stopped moving. Then he drew a knife out of his pocket, cut her throat, and dragged her limp body toward a drain.

“She was still alive when I got her into the drain, so I started to cut her throat again from ear to him,” he testified over a month later. “Then I turned her face downwards and shoved her underneath the water to drown her.”

When he was satisfied that she was dead, Murphy dragged her corpse out of the water and tried to lift her up the steep embankment. She was too heavy, so he resorted to dragging her by the hair, a move that widened her already-gaping throat wound. When his strength gave out he dropped her, sending the body sliding back into the water. Swearing, Murphy gave up and returned to the Bardsey Inn, where he ordered a drink.

The barmaid stared and asked why his face was all scratched up. Gazing in a mirror, Murphy saw dark red scratch marks everywhere. Blood also covered his topcoat. Pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his face, he told her that he had been in a fight with two men. He drank his pint of beer and hurried back to his lodgings at 40 Baker Street, where he sold his remaining food provisions to an old man for a half groat (2d) and supposedly talked someone into offering a three penny bit (3d) for his bloody topcoat. Before going back outside, Murphy said to a fellow lodger, John Murray, “Speak of me as you find me.”

“I can’t do anything else,” Murray replied, puzzled.

“I have done wrong tonight,” the ex-soldier exclaimed. Then he left.

******

Lizzie Jones, Gwen’s friend, had gone back into the Bardsey Inn to resume drinking, probably believing that the other woman would come back soon. When Gwen failed to show, she went back to her rented room, where her friend’s seven-year-old boy was waiting.

To her shock, William Murphy was sitting on a bed on the building’s ground floor, face and hands smeared with blood. When she asked where Gwen was, he grumbled, “You have seen Gwen-Ellen for the last time. You will see her no more.”

The little boy, who had appeared, began to cry. Murphy gave him a penny and asked a friend, Johnny Jones, to give him a piece of bread. When Jones complied, Murphy asked if anyone in the house was willing to do a job for him.

“Go and fetch a policeman for me,” he directed.

“You haven’t had enough drink for me to fetch you a policeman,” Jones joked.

Murphy replied that he was guilty of worse than being drunk, and invited the other man to come and see. He led Jones to the trench where Gwen’s body lay.

It was a horrible sight. Her eyes were bulging, bloody froth flecked her lips, and the fur muff around her neck was saturated with blood. The throat wound extended from ear to ear, so deep that her windpipe, muscles, and arteries had been severed down to the spine.

Johnny Jones froze in shock. Then he turned and ran, so quickly that the nails in the soles of his shows struck the paving stones and sent sparks flying. (For years afterward, his whole family was nicknamed “the Flame family.”) When he found a policeman and blurted his story, the officer took him to the police station.

To their surprise, Murphy was already waiting outside the building. He said he had come to give himself up, and searched his pockets to produce the murder weapon, but it was gone. It was subsequently found at the crime site.

When he was brought before the Holyhead justices, they committed him for trial in Beaumaris Court on January 26th, 1910. He bowed and said, “Very good, sir. Another fortnight of peace.”

When his trial began at the Anglesey Assizes, the area was wild with excitement. The death sentence had not been passed at the Assizes since 1862, and those who had been following the case were positive that the dry spell was about to be broken. Public feeling against the self-confessed murderer was so strong that when he arrived at the courthouse in a closed carriage, people yelled threats and threw things.

The courtroom was packed within minutes of being opened to the public. Spectators occupied every available seat and window sill, and soon it was standing room only. Those unable to gain entry hovered at the windows, listening eagerly. One man actually managed to stick his head inside, prompting the judge to comment, “If that gentlemen with his head through the window wants to listen to the case, he will have the goodness to remove his hat.”

Murphy was defended by Austin Jones, a court-appointed solicitor. Jones did not have much to build his case with. Murphy had admitted freely to the crime, and there was no evidence that he was of unsound mind. The prosecution, on the other hand, had an easy job.

Dr. T.W. Clay, who had examined Gwen’s body at the Holyhead police station, testified that in addition to the slashed throat, the woman’s larynx had been crushed, and her internal organs were bloodless due to massive hemorrhaging. It was his opinion that the primary cause of death was strangulation, with heavy blood loss being a contributing factor.

After the judge provided a fair summation, it took the jury only three minutes to find William Murphy guilty. When the judge passed the death sentence on him, he smiled and said, “Thank you.”

Afterward, he was hustled out of the courthouse in handcuffs and taken to Holyhead police station to spend the night before being transferred to the prison at Caernarfon. During the train ride, he pointed out the window to a farm about a mile and a half out of Holyhead and told his police guards, “I meant to do the job on the shed... but she had her little boy with her, and I didn’t want him to see it.”

This unnatural calm followed him throughout his stay at the Caernarfon prison. When his appeal for clemency was denied, he merely shrugged.

He was executed on February 15, 1910, wearing the same clothes and boots he had on when arrested. As the executioner was binding his arms, he asked curiously, “Is this easy?”

The hangman, Pierrepont, confirmed that it was. Murphy then stood on a chair and jumped to the floor, asking, “As easy as this?”

Pierrepont humored him. “Yes.”

“I can do that.”

As the hanging commenced, the bell of St. Mary’s Church started tolling, but stopped after two strokes. The crowd waiting outside thought a last minute reprieve had been granted, but the sudden silence had occurred because the bell’s clapper fell off. At about a quarter past eight, the notice of Murphy’s death was posted on the prison door. He now holds the dubious honour of being the last man to have been hanged at the prison.

William Murphy was buried within the walls of the prison, his grave marked by a simple slate stone bearing his initials and date or death. When the building was closed during the 1930s (it was later converted into offices), the stone was removed as a curiosity. Today, it is on the display in the Gwynedd Council's headquarters complex on Shirehall Street.

As 1920 drew to a close, the United States was in the process of change. For the first time, the census indicated a population of over 100 million people. Women finally had the right to vote thanks to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Prohibition was now law, making it illegal to own, possess, or sell intoxicating beverages, something that didn’t sit well with many Americans.

Fortunately for them, there were bootleggers happy to supply them with beer, wine, and liquor. The prices were hefty and the product quality was often in doubt, but people gladly paid. Small-time gangsters became bootleg barons in a matter of months, creating a competitive greed that made some even richer and left others dead.

******

The early morning of December 26, 1920, was bitterly cold in New York City. Two policemen named Malloy and Morelock were making their rounds near Union Square when they came across a man’s body sprawled in front of the subway entrance on the south side of Fourteenth Street. A small group of taxi drivers hovered over him.

It was nearly 5:00 a.m., so the officers presumed the man, who appeared to be in his early fifties, was a drunk from one of the nearby cabarets. It wasn’t until they came closer that they were able to see blood soaking his coat and puddling on the icy pavement. A later examination showed that he had been struck by five bullets, all issued from a thirty-two caliber pistol subsequently found on the steps of the B.R.T. subway entrance at Union Square.

One of the policemen reached inside the victim’s coat and thought he could detect a faint heartbeat, so a quick call was placed to St. Vincent’s Hospital. An ambulance arrived speedily, but before it could reach the hospital, the man died.

Now that they had a murder investigation on their hands, the police searched the body at the morgue and found a label on the suit marked “E. Eastman. Oct.22, 1919. No. 17434 W.B.” When approached by detectives, Henry Witty of Witty Brothers Tailors confirmed that he had made that suit for Edward “Monk” Eastman.

It was a name that the New York Police Department knew well. Monk Eastman had once commanded over a thousand of the city’s most vicious thugs, leading them into battle against other gangs with colorful names like the Five Pointers, the Yakey Yakes, and the Red Onion gang. Even Teddy Roosevelt admitted that Eastman was one of the most fearless individuals he had ever encountered. The bulky gangster had been shot, stabbed, and knifed so many times that his body was a roadmap of scars, but none of it had ever stopped him.

Monk Eastman, 1903. Photo from Author's Collection

He had been born Edward Eastman in December, 1876. His parents split up when he was three years old, and his maternal grandfather tried to provide a positive influence on him, but Edward persisted in getting into trouble. He ran with juvenile hoodlums, stole anything he could lay his hands on, and hung out with older criminals who taught him that being one of the respectable working poor was a route only a sucker would choose.