Read Murder on the Home Front Online
Authors: Molly Lefebure
Without more ado DDI Hatton charged Harry Dobkin with the murder of his wife, Rachel Dobkin.
During the following days Dobkin continued to pester Mr. Hatton with scrawled literary effusions: never, possibly, was a murderer so anxious to write notes to the police. Mr. Hatton, when we visited him in his office one afternoon, brought out handfuls of these “billets-doux,” as he called them, all scrawled on odd scraps of paper, any old scraps of paper, in Dobkin’s big, round, rambling hand. “Always writing to me, always! Thinks I haven’t anything better to do than read letters!” exclaimed the exasperated Mr. Hatton, with an impatient gesture that sent Dobkin’s communications scattering over the floor. Mr. Keeling, grinning, picked them up.
We first saw Dobkin when he arrived at Southwark Coroner’s Court for the opening of the inquest. A stocky, very powerful, somewhat stupid, albeit cunning man, with small, quick, cunning eyes and a big, shovel-shaped, inquisitive nose. He was taken into the mortuary yard to await the inquest, and there he asked to see his wife. This, of course, was an impossibility. Very confident, he smoked a cigarette and offered West one, too.
When he came into court he seemed very easy, almost contemptuous. He looked around at us all, and his expression plainly said, “Now let’s hear what you’ve managed to cook up against me.”
Nothing was said on that occasion to shake his confidence. Mr. Harvey Wyatt merely adjourned the inquest until the trial should be over and Dobkin lurched, with a smug expression, out of the court.
Next time we saw him was at Lambeth Police Court. He sat in the dock there, his hands comfortably resting on his knees, wearing that same smug expression on his face. He remained so until Dr. Simpson began giving his evidence. Then, gradually, a ghastly change came over Dobkin.
Keith Simpson spoke clearly, slowly, sentence by sentence piling the facts. And Dobkin, realizing that the veil had been miraculously torn from his secrets, began to sweat. He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead, the back of his neck, the palms of his hands. His face became white. He shifted in his seat, gripped his knees with his big hands until the knuckles gleamed. If ever a man was shattered, Dobkin was.
On Tuesday, November 17, 1942, Dobkin appeared for trial at the Old Bailey, before Mr. Justice Wrottesley. Mr. (now Mr. Justice) Byrne and Mr. Gerald Howard appeared for the prosecution and Mr. F. H. Lawton for the defense.
Dobkin at the trial was fearfully nervous, impatient, very angry, darting furious glances around the court, and especially at Dr. Simpson, Mr. Keeling, and myself, who sat at a table directly below the dock. Mr. Keeling whispered to me, “If looks could kill, we’d certainly be dead.”
From time to time Dobkin scribbled little notes which he passed to Mr. Lawton. Mr. Hatton, noticing this, grinned. “Still at it,” he commented.
Mr. Lawton put up a magnificent and grimly tenacious struggle on Dobkin’s behalf, but in the face of the prosecution’s overwhelming evidence he could achieve very little. And what he did achieve was successfully sabotaged by Dobkin himself when he went into the witness box.
During the first stages of the trial Dobkin, as I have said, was nervous, but also very angry. By the time he reached the witness box himself he appeared less angry, more apprehensive. He faced Mr. Byrne as if he did not quite know what to expect. Mr. Byrne’s eye flickered as he measured Dobkin with a cold, cold gaze, and then in even colder tones he began, “Were you fond of your wife?”
Dobkin, startled, hesitated and then, of course, had to reply, “No.”
Mr. Byrne questioned Dobkin about his arrears of maintenance money and terms of imprisonment imposed for these arrears, and then asked, “Did your wife tell you that if you did not make peace with her she would make trouble for you?”
“She said if I did not make peace she would make trouble for me.”
“You would have felt much happier if you had never seen your wife again after that?”
Dobkin countered warily, “I would have been more content if she had kept away.”
Mr. Byrne pressed his point. “You had no desire to see your wife again at any further date?”
“No, sir,” replied Dobkin, “I did not want to see her again.”
“And after the eleventh of April,” said Mr. Byrne, again with that sinister flickering of the eye, “nobody saw your wife again?”
Dobkin was obliged to stammer that it was so.
This was the opening gambit of a long and brilliant cross-examination during which Mr. Byrne played Dobkin as a skillful matador plays a bull. Indeed, the simile was singularly apt. The lumbering, massive Dobkin, sniffing suspiciously with his broad, raised muzzle, faced the dark and graceful Mr. Byrne under the bright light, before an audience almost stiff with excitement, in an atmosphere charged with drama over which brooded the ultimate shadow of death. Mr. Byrne, utterly self-possessed, beguiled Dobkin here, goaded him there, incited him to charge full tilt and then brought him to a sickening, thudding halt, by degrees reducing this man, thereby, to a great, bewildered, panting hulk. All the good Mr. Lawton had done for his client was speedily destroyed. Dobkin accused all the witnesses—except the medical witnesses—of lying. Of everybody else, from chapel minister to CID inspector, he shouted, “He’s lying!” He insisted he had never been down in the cellar, had never even known the existence of the cellar; although two reputable witnesses had already described how they had seen him go down into it, and Mr. Burgess, the minister, had been warned by Dobkin not to go down into the cellar as it was dangerous!
In his panic Dobkin scarcely knew what he was saying. Lying, blustering, floundering, sweating, and shaking, he gave us a hideous and unforgettable portrait of terror. The jury stared at him in a kind of hypnotized horror. The strong circumstantial evidence, the astonishing medical evidence, must have weighed heavily with them; the judge’s summing up was a pattern of what a lucid summing up should be, but without a doubt it was Dobkin’s performance in the witness box that set the final seal upon his fate.
The jury took only twenty minutes to find a verdict. The court was packed to its limit with people waiting with truly bated breath for the coup de grâce, the
descabello
. And then word went around that the jurymen were coming back. Dobkin was brought up into the dock again; he stood there, very pale, poking his big, anxious nose into the air, as if trying to smell the verdict in advance, as the jurymen, never looking at Dobkin (a bad sign, this), filed into the court.
“Members of the jury,” cried the clerk of the court, “are you agreed upon your verdict?”
The foreman of the jury replied, in a low voice, “We are.”
“Do you find the prisoner, Harry Dobkin, guilty or not guilty of murder?”
“Guilty, my lord.”
“You find him guilty of murder, and that is the verdict of you all?”
“That is the verdict of us all.”
All eyes were fixed on Dobkin’s face. When he heard the word “Guilty,” falling heavily as a black stone into the solemnity of the courtroom, he turned green, a vomiting green of the sea.
The clerk of the court resumed, after a short pause, “Prisoner at the bar, you stand convicted of murder. Have you anything to say why the Court should not give you judgment of death according to the law?”
Dobkin was always ready to say something, and even at this dire moment he produced a sheet of paper and began reading one of his long rigmaroles from it, accusing the police of having fabricated the case against him and asserting that not all the witnesses had been called. He had witnesses who could prove, he said, who could prove who could prove…but his speech became more and more disjointed, we could not understand what his witnesses could prove, for his words stuck like a cracked record and then gradually whittled away, leaving him lamely and huskily concluding, “I hope I have not said too much.”
Mr. Justice Wrottesley put on his black cap, and Dobkin stared at it helplessly as the judge began to speak, very slowly, very clearly.
“Harry Dobkin, after a patient hearing the jury have come to what I think is the right conclusion on this matter. The sentence is the sentence laid down by law for the offense which you have committed, and it is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be afterward buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been confined before your execution. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
“Amen,” said the chaplain.
There was a moment of utter silence. Then Dobkin turned and walked down from the dock to the cells below, very pale, with a sudden strange vagueness about him, as though his strength and bulk had been driven from him at one blow.
That was the last time I saw Harry Dobkin, alive, though his face as he stood there in the dock listening to the death sentence still haunts me, as no other condemned man’s face has. I wonder if those other people who were there watching also find it so impossible to forget.
The next and last time I saw Harry Dobkin was shortly after he had been hanged.
It was a foggy, cold morning when Mr. Wyatt the coroner, Dr. Simpson, Mr. Rawlings, Mr. Hatton, Mr. Keeling, and myself met in the outer yard of Wandsworth prison. After tolling the dismal doorbell we were admitted within the chilling, escapeless walls, and made our way to the prison mortuary, a small building among coal dumps and outhouses. It was clammy in there, and we stamped our feet and shivered as we waited. Then there was the sound of cartwheels rumbling and clattering (the noise, I imagine, the tumbrils of Paris must have made; creak, clank, and rattle) up to the mortuary door. The mortuary assistant opened the door and there, on a rough handcart, lay the body of Harry Dobkin, clad in vest, trousers, and socks, with the deep mark of the noose around his thick, muscular neck.
They lifted him into the mortuary and placed him on the p.m. table. He looked very peaceful. His debts were settled at last.
The assistant stripped him. Mr. Keeling murmured, contemplating those brawny shoulders and muscled arms, “It couldn’t have taken much of his strength to kill that poor little woman.”
We were told Dobkin had died quietly and bravely, praying ardently.
And that was the end of Harry Dobkin, and the epilogue to the famous Baptist Chapel Cellar Murder, which made medicolegal and CID history, brought promotions to several detectives, set the Guy’s Hospital Department of Forensic Medicine off to a flying start, and added one more great murder story to the list of great murder stories marching gruesomely, but with horrible fascination, down the weirdly echoing corridors of time.
We must now go back to the beginning of October and those days when DDI Hatton was in the throes of arresting Dobkin, and was receiving all those wordy notes: “Divisional Inspector, Dear Sir…”
That was in Southwark, among sooty warehouses and gray old streets. In Surrey, against a background of autumn-tinted trees and windy heathland slopes, another outstanding murder drama came to light.
On October 7, CKS got a call from the Surrey police, saying that a body had been found buried on Hankley Common, near Godalming, and they were anxious for Dr. Simpson to come at once. We canceled all other appointments, and by midday we were driving fast in the direction of Godalming.
Hankley Common was a former beauty spot: all heathery slopes, broken with graceful spinneys of birch and oak, and surrounded by wide vistas of wooded countryside and windswept sky. The army, noting its loveliness, had of course taken it over as a battle-training ground. Camps had been built in the neighboring woods, and every day young men were taken out and toughened up amidst a welter of antitank obstacles, mortar ranges, field telephones, and trip wires.
We arrived at Hankley Common to find a large party of policemen, headed by the Chief Constable of Surrey and Superintendent Roberts, and fortified by Dr. Eric Gardner, the pathologist, awaiting us in a muddy hollow. Greetings were exchanged, and then off we set to climb a windy ridge which reared itself, rain swept and dismal, ahead of us.
(It is odd how it invariably begins to rain when one reaches the scene of a crime. Up till that time, for instance, it had been quite a bright sunny day.)
As we struggled up the ridge, Superintendent Roberts told us how the body was found. The previous day two marines, busy training, had discovered an arm sticking out of a mound of earth on the top of the ridge and had immediately reported this to the police. The body had been left buried until the pathologists could arrive.
The top of the ridge was gained, and there was the mound of earth with a withered arm sticking out from the side of it. Rats had gnawed away parts of the fingers. We stood contemplating it, shivering a little in the wet wind, and trying to warm ourselves with cigarettes, while the Chief Constable, Dr. Gardner, Dr. Simpson, and Superintendent Roberts held a quick consultation. Below us a party of soldiers were busy at mortar practice, their shells whirling and whining over our heads every few minutes.
The two pathologists now took shovels and began very carefully uncovering the rest of the body. They had not been long at the job before a great stench of rotting flesh set everybody else busily judging the direction of the wind and then moving accordingly. The pathologists continued to dig, oblivious of everything but their task, and I was obliged to stay beside them, taking from them specimens of beetles, maggots, earth, and heather, which I placed in the famous buff envelopes. And so the work went slowly on, until there lay exposed the sprawling, badly decomposed body of a girl.