The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (55 page)

Hannah Tailford’s passing would have been mourned by those who knew her – and dismissed as one of the professional risks of being a prostitute by those who did not – and then forgotten about if a death with eerie similarities had not occurred two months later. On 8 April 1964, the body of 26-year-old Irene Lockwood was found among the tangled weeds and branches on the river bank at Duke’s Meadow. She was naked.

The pretty young redhead also worked the streets of Bayswater and Notting Hill. She, too, was small like Hannah and had attended kinky parties. She also performed in blue movies. Both girls solicited cab drivers late at night. And both were pregnant when they died.

In both cases, it was impossible to determine how they had died. Marks on the back of Irene’s head showed that she could have been attacked from behind and the police believed that she had been killed elsewhere, then brought to Duke’s Field.

The police also suspected that both girls were mixed up in a blackmail racket. In Hannah’s flat, they found an address book and photographic equipment. Irene’s flatmate Vicki Pender, who had been found battered to death a year earlier, had once been beaten up after trying to blackmail a client who had been photographed with her without his knowledge or consent.

But the most striking similarity between the two killings was that the victims were found naked. There was no sign of their clothes, which were never found.

On 24 April, another naked female body was found – this time in an alley off Swyncombe Avenue in Brentford. The victim, 22-year-old Helen Barthelemy, had been strangled, probably from behind.

Three of her front teeth had been extracted after death. It was also established that her body had been stripped of its clothing after her death and fresh tyre marks in the alley way indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped there.

Helen was also a prostitute. Educated in a convent, she had become a stripper in Blackpool. In Liverpool, she had served a prison sentence for luring a man into an ambush where he had been robbed. When she was released she came to London and went on the game. She was known to cater for any sort of perversions, though she would often entertain local black men for free because they were more sympathetic than her kinky clientele. One Jamaican man admitted being with her on the night she disappeared, but he had a strong alibi and was quickly ruled out as a suspect.

With three similar killings, the papers caught on to the story. The victims’ nudity was obviously the most sensational aspect and the Sundays quickly dubbed the mysterious murderer “Jack the Stripper”.

Looking back in their records, Scotland Yard found another case that fitted Jack the Stripper’s modus operandi. On 8 November 1963, three months before Hannah Tailford’s murder, the body of 22-year-old Gwynneth Rees had been found buried in a shallow grave in an ash tip near Chiswick Bridge. She was naked except for one stocking. At first, the police thought that she had been the victim of an abortion racket. Then it was discovered that she had been the target of a sexual attack. The body had lain there since May or June and it was thought that she may have been sunbathing when she was attacked. Now, though, it looked like she was another victim of Jack the Stripper.

Kenneth Archibald, a 54-year-old caretaker, walked into Notting Hill police station and confessed to the murder of Irene Lockwood. He was already a suspect. His card had been found in Irene’s flat. He said that he had met her in a pub on the night of the murder. On open land near Barnes Bridge they had quarrelled over money. He had lost his temper and put his hands around her throat so she could not scream. He had strangled her accidentally. When she was dead, he had taken her clothes off and rolled her into the river. Then he took her clothes home and burned them.

Archibald, however, said he knew nothing about the murders of Hannah Tailford, Helen Barthelemy or Gwynneth Rees. He was charged with the murder of Irene Lockwood. But when he appeared in the Old Bailey, he retracted his confession. As there was no other evidence against him the jury acquitted him.

The forensic scientists paid special attention to Helen Barthelemy’s body. It had not been buried like Gwynneth Rees’s, nor had it been in contact with water. However, it was filthy, as if it had been stored somewhere dirty before it had been dumped.

A minute examination of her skin showed that she was covered from head to toe in tiny flecks of paint. Home Office scientists concluded that her naked body had been kept somewhere near a spray-painting shop.

It was clear that the man who had killed Helen Barthelemy and the other victims sought the company of prostitutes in the Bays-water area. The police organized an amnesty for girls working the streets in that area and appealed for anyone to come forward who had worried about odd or eccentric clients, especially those who made them strip naked. The girls’ response was overwhelming.

Policewomen went out on the streets, posing as prostitutes. They carried tape recorders in their handbags. The experiences they recorded were often unpleasant, but they failed to move the enquiry forward.

On 14 July 1964, another body was found. At around 5.30 a.m., a man driving to work down Acton Lane had to brake hard to miss a van speeding out of a cul-de-sac. The police were called. At the end of the cul de sac, outside a garage, they found the naked body of Mary Flemming.

Again the murdered girl was a prostitute who worked in the Bayswater area. Her body had been kept for approximately three days after her death. Once more, her clothes had been removed after death and there were tiny flecks of paint all over her naked body.

Mary had been warned of the dangers of continuing to work the streets where Jack the Stripper was on the prowl. She took to carrying a knife in her handbag. It did her no good. Like the other victims, she had been attacked from behind. And no trace of her handbag, the knife or her clothes were ever found.

Pressure on Scotland Yard, by this time, was intense. Over 8,000 people had been interviewed, 4,000 statements had been taken, but the police were still no nearer to finding the culprit. Plain-clothes policemen blanketed the area the murdered girls had worked. But on 25 November 1964, the body of 21-year-old Margaret McGowan was found on some rough ground in Kensington. The hallmarks were unmistakable. McGowan was a prostitute and an associate of society pimp Dr Stephen Ward, who stood trial during the Profumo scandal. She had been strangled and her body was left naked. Her body had lain on the open ground for at least a week, but had been stored somewhere else before being dumped there. Again her skin was covered in tiny flecks of paint.

The evening she went missing, McGowan and a friend had talked about the murders in the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road. The two of them had gone their separate ways, McGowan with a client. McGowan’s friend gave a good enough description of McGowan’s client for the police to issue an identikit picture of the man. But no one answering the description was found. The police also noticed that McGowan’s jewellery was missing, but a check on all the pawn shops also drew a blank.

Christmas and New Year passed uneventfully, then on 16 February 1965, the naked body of 28-year-old Bridie O’Hara was found in the bracken behind a depot in Acton. Like the other victims, she was short, five foot two, and worked as a prostitute. Her clothes had disappeared along with her engagement and wedding rings. They were never found. Again, her body was covered with tiny flecks of paint. But this time there was a new clue. One of her hands was mummified. That meant it had been kept near a source of heat that had dried the flesh out.

Scotland Yard threw all their resources into the case. Every premises in an area of 4 square miles was to be searched and samples of any paint found compared to the flecks on the victim’s bodies. The police also worked out that all the victims had been picked up between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., and dumped between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. This meant that Jack the Stripper was a night worker, probably a nightwatchman who guarded premises near a spray shop.

They also worked out that he was a man of about 40 with a high libido and curious sexual tastes. The police dismissed an earlier theory that the culprit was on a crusade against prostitution. They now believed that the culprit could not satisfy his bizarre requirements at home, turning to prostitutes who would do anything for money in order to indulge his craving. Detectives now realized that, during orgasm, the man went into a frenzy which resulted in the girls’ deaths. He could not help himself and had learned to accept that murder was the price he had to pay for sexual satisfaction.

All this was little enough to go on. But the police held regular press conferences saying that a list of suspects had been drawn up. They were working their way through them and the killer would soon be behind bars. In fact, the police had no list and were not nearly as confident as they pretended, but they felt that it was best to keep up pressure on the culprit.

The murders fell into a ten-week cycle and the police were determined to prevent the next one. They threw a police cordon around a 20-square mile area of central London and every vehicle entering or leaving it at night was recorded. Anyone moving in or out of the zone more than three times was tracked down.

The police would visit their home under the pretext of investigating a traffic accident – to spare the embarrassment of those who were where they were not supposed to be. The suspect was then interviewed out of the earshot of his family.

Weeks of searching paid off. A perfect match was made between paint found under a covered transformer at the rear of a spray-painting shop in the Heron Factory Estate in Acton and the paint flecks on the victims’ bodies. The transformer itself generated enough heat to mummify flesh left near it.

Every car entering or leaving the estate was logged and all 7,000 people living in the vicinity were interviewed. At a specially convened press conference, the police announced that the number of suspects was being whittled down to three, then two, then one.

Despite the huge amount of man-hours put in, all Scotland Yard’s detective work was a waste of time. It was these press conferences that worked.

In March 1965, as the detectives continued their meticulous search, a quiet family man living in south London killed himself. He left a suicide note saying that he could not “stand the strain any longer”. At the time the police took little notice.

By June 1965, Jack the Stripper had not struck again. The ten-week cycle had been broken. The police wanted to know why. They began looking back at the suicides that had occurred since the murder of Bridie O’Hara in January.

This particular suicide victim worked at a security firm and his duty roster fitted the culprits. Despite an intensive search of his house and extensive interviews with his family, no evidence was ever found that directly linked him to the murders. Nevertheless, the murders stopped and the police were convinced, from the circumstantial evidence alone, that this man was Jack the Stripper.

By July 1965, the murder inquiry was scaled down. It was wound up the following year. In 1970, Scotland Yard confirmed that the South London suicide was Jack the Stripper. But they have never named him and, officially, the file on the Jack the Stripper case is still open.

England and Wales – Operation Enigma

In Britain the Police Standards Unit set up Operation Enigma to re-examine unsolved cases involving the murder of prostitutes and other vulnerable women. The files on numerous cases have been reopened and police will be harnessing the skills of criminologists at home and abroad, including the psychological profilers of the FBI.

One series of killings went back to January 1987 when the half-naked body of Marine Monti, a 27-year-old prostitute and heroin addict, was found on waste ground near Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. She had been beaten and strangled. Next the partially clothed body of 22-year-old prostitute Janine Downes was found in a hedge alongside the road leading from Telford to Wolverhampton in February 1991. She had also been beaten and strangled. The other seven victims over the next seven years followed a similar pattern. They too had been strangled or beaten to death. Nearly all were prostitutes and their bodies found partially clothed or naked on open ground. Cleverly, each had been dumped in a different police district, minimizing the chance that the authorities would tie them together.

According to FBI profiler Richard Ault a single killer is likely to be at work. The perpetrator is the type that the FBI categorizes as an “organized killer”. He would be someone of above-average intelligence, socially competent, often living with a woman and driving a well-maintained car but, after some stressful event, he kills.

“Such an individual is likely to be personable and not stand out,” he says. “He is able to blend in because he can approach and solicit victims.”

However, although the Assistant Chief Constable of Essex Police James Dickinson, who is co-ordinating Enigma, acknowledges some common traits in the nine murders, he points out that the investigating teams do not feel think there were sufficient grounds to link the nine inquiries formally. But nobody has been brought to justice for the murders of Gail Whitehouse from Wolverhampton in October 1900; Lynne Trenholme, who was found dead in Chester massage parlour in June 1991; Natalie Pearman from Norwich on November 1992; Carol Clarke, who was abducted from Bristol and found in Sharpness Canal, Gloucestershire in March 1993; Dawn Shields from Sheffield, who was found buried in Peak District in May 1994 and many, many more.

Ghana’s Assassin of Accra

A serial killer or group of serial killers have been at work in Ghana who may have political connections. In 1999 alone, some 21 women were slaughtered in cold blood in and around the capital Accra. By July 2000, the number had climbed to 25 and, when two murders occurred within a week, thousands of women took to the street in protest. Dressed in black with red armbands, they demanded the resignation of the Minister of the Interior and the Inspector-General of Police.

Angela Dwamena-Aboagye, executive director of the Ark Foundation, an organization that aims to empower women, led the protest after the body of an unidentified young woman wearing a blood-stained skirt and torn underwear was found at Asylum Down, a neighbourhood close to the centre of the city. A condom was found close by.