Crime correspondent Duncan Campbell asks what crime can tell us about the times we live in.
In 1946 in Kent, the strangled body of a 46-year-old former telephonist known as Dagmar Peters was found by the side of the road.
In the same year, not far along the south coast, in Bournemouth, a hunt was launched for a handsome pilot by the name of Neville Heath, suspected of a foul murder in London. And in Eastbourne, another southern coastal town, Dr John Bodkin Adams, a suspected serial killer, was about to "ease the passing" of another wealthy patient with an injection of morphine.
And in that same year, George Orwell wrote an article for Tribune in which he considered just what murder tells us about society. The essay, prompted by a casual killing carried out by an American army deserter, Karl Hulten, and a teenage waitress, Elizabeth Jones, was called "Decline of the English Murder".
Nearly 70 years later, those 1946 cases are being examined in full forensic detail. Are murders a mirror of the society we live in? How much, for instance, can we really learn from the 640 committed in Great Britain last year, and how much do the notorious murders of the past act as a prism through which we can see more clearly the times in which they were committed?
These questions are prompted by a trio of recent books by well-regarded writers that take specific murder cases and place them under the microscope of history.
In Murder at Wrotham Hill Diana Souhami examines the long-forgotten case of Dagmar Petrzywalski, known as Peters because her name was so difficult to pronounce. It was her habit to hitchhike to London, spurning offers from private cars but taking lifts from lorry drivers to whom she would offer the equivalent of the bus fare – fourpence – which they would usually refuse. This in itself tells us something of that pinched and rationed postwar time; it is hard to imagine a middle-aged woman in Kent trying to hitch to London today. Her trust was misplaced; it was a lorry driver, Harold Hagger, a bigamist using the name Sidney Sinclair, who would kill her when she resisted his advances.
Both victim and murderer had seen their lives affected, if not defined, by the second world war. Dagmar's lodgings in London had been bombed in 1941, prompting a nervous breakdown and a move to the countryside. Hagger was an army deserter and black marketeer.
What is remarkable about the murder is the speed with which events moved in those days. The trial was over in two days and less than three weeks passed from a jury delivering the verdict to the hanging.
While the condemned man waited for his end, he was allowed a pint of beer and 10 cigarettes a day. We learn that a strong liberal impetus to end hanging was derailed by the horrors of war; it was felt that hanging was the only way to deal with the Nazi atrocities uncovered and thus it was nearly another 20 years before abolition.
Sean O'Connor's Handsome Brute - The Story of a Ladykiller, tells a much more familiar tale, that of the "war hero, conman and killer" Neville Heath. There have been many books on Heath, including Borstal Boy: The Uncensored Life of Neville Heath by Gerald Byrne in 1946, and, the following year, The Life and Death of Neville Heath, the Man No Woman Could Resist by Sydney Brock. (By chance, Heath was incarcerated with a much better-known borstal boy, Brendan Behan).
O'Connor's analysis of the press of the period is particularly revealing and relevant in our post-Leveson age. We learn that, after the murder of Heath's first victim Margery Gardner, the Daily Mail's Harry Procter was alerted to it by a police friend. Procter headed for Hammersmith mortuary where "he joined a growing crowd of reporters who had all been tipped off that an extraordinary investigation was under way". When Heath appeared in court, the People noted: "Rarely have women been so strangely fascinated by a murder trial." And the detective who cornered him, Detective Inspector Reg Spooner, wrote to his wife: "The job has done me quite a bit of good and I am getting congratulations from high and low. The press say it is one of the best stories for years."
From Brixton prison, Heath asked for copies of Tatler, Life, Esquire and the Illustrated London News and wrote to his mother suggesting that she contact the Daily Mail to see if they would buy his story. "I want £500 and legal aid," he instructed her, remaining, as far as she was concerned, her "handsome laughing son", who had only committed the murders when he was "mentally blacked out". In the end, the Sunday Pictorial carried his account over three weekends after the trial.
Class plays a major role in Heath's life and crimes just as class still played such a great part in postwar Britain. A member of the first XV at his suburban grammar school, Rutlish — where subsequent old boys would include John Major and jazzman Tubby Hayes – he later pretended to be an Eton and Oxford man. He was a shameless petty criminal, broke into a friend's house when he knew he was away, impersonated Lord Dudley and created a fantasy persona for himself with which to impress the 300 women in his address book. He was jailed in 1938 for fraud, bouncing cheques and theft. He did act bravely on one occasion during the war, when he helped a comrade escape from a burning plane, but he invented a much more heroic career for himself; his last pseudonym was Group Captain Rupert Brooke. The two murders he committed, of Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall, were horrific in their callous and sadistic brutality yet he cultivated what he imagined to be the role of the debonair cad of the era. When he was finally arrested, he responded "oh, all right". He tells his lawyer from his condemned cell: "I don't know what time they open where I'm going but I hope the beer is better than it is here."
What effect did the violence of war and our discoveries of the horrors unfolding across Europe have on society? Many servicemen returned to find that their domestic lives had changed. The News Chronicle said of that immediate postwar period: "It would seem from some recent murder trials that the unfaithful wife of a serviceman is an outlaw with no benefit of law whatsoever. She may be murdered with impunity."
At the same time that Heath was lying his way across London, a doctor from Northern Ireland was sharpening his syringe in Eastbourne, "the sun trap of the south", home to many a wealthy widow. Jane Robins follows his case in her book, The Curious Habits of Doctor Adams. He was left his first legacy in 1935 – over £5,000 by Mrs Matilda Whitton – and seems to have got into his stride in the decade between 1946 and his arrest in 1956. He was acquitted at his trial, thanks to a fine defence lawyer, Sir Frederick Lawrence, and died a rich man in 1983. A deference towards the medical profession helped Dr Adams in perhaps the same way that years later it assisted Harold Shipman, who also escaped the notice of the authorities for many years until he was finally caught, tried and convicted in 2000.
Three very different types of murderer from one very tiny period of history. But can any one murderer provide more than a glimpse of the world where the crimes took place, filtered inevitably through our own modern preconceptions? People murder for many reasons – jealousy, greed, rage, lust, revenge, psychopathy – so can any single case enlighten us?
Kate Summerscale's bestseller and genre-setter, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, about the Road Hill House murder, has been described as the 19th-century equivalent of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. It told the story of the murder of three-year-old Saville Kent, stolen from his cot in Wiltshire in 1860. Summerscale has said in an interview that it has resonance because "it was a middle-class child murder and it exposed things about the family that were fascinating and horrifying. Newspaper editorials of the time said that no mother in England could sleep easy until this crime had been solved, so it took on an immediate symbolic importance".
The murders carried out by Fred and Rose West from the 1960s to the 80s told us much about the mores of the period in which they were carried out: young women still moved around and hitchhiked freely, doubtless reassured by being given a lift by a couple with children in the back seat, but they could disappear in large numbers without prompting much official reflection. The murders carried out in the 1970s by Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, inform us of a time when, because some of his victims worked as prostitutes, the police did not pursue cases as diligently as they should have. The HOLMES database, which became a vital tool for murder investigations, was set up after it became clear that a tip-off in the Yorkshire Ripper case had been lost in a filing tray in the incident room. The murders carried out by Dennis Nilsen of young gay men in the 1970s and 80s told us, in the same way as the West and Sutcliffe killings, how some parts of society were regarded as marginal, not requiring quite the same effort of investigation. The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 taught us many of the same lessons on race.
Why do we want to know all this about past murders? How many contemporary murders are likely to find authors a century from now investigating their relevance to 21st-century British society?
Official statistics show that murders in England and Wales rose from around 300 a year in the 1960s to more than 800 a year in the early part of this century but have since dipped to nearer the 500 mark.
Last year, John Flatley, head of crime stats at the Office for National Statistics, noted that two-thirds of murders involved partners or former partners or other forms of familial killing, and it was suggested that a decline in the level of domestic violence is a key factor in the fall. It is no coincidence that in the 1946 murders examined, not to mention the Yorkshire Ripper and West cases, all the victims are women.
Murders can give a snapshot of a country, too, albeit partial and haphazard. In the latest figures compiled by the United Nations and published last year, the murder rate in the United Kingdom was a fairly modest 1.2 per 100,000 population. This compares with a figure of 92 per 100,000 in Honduras, 69 in El Salvador, 57 in the Ivory Coast, 41 in Jamaica, 32 in South Africa, 31 in Colombia, 21 in Brazil, 10 in Russia, 5 in the United States, 1.6 in Canada, 1.1 in France, 0.9 in Italy and 0.8 in Germany. Before the end of this year, another hundred or so people will have been murdered in London or Glasgow or Belfast or Cardiff or Kent. The killers may not warrant a book decades down the line but, if they do, it will be a reminder of a society that still cannot quite take murder for granted.
Duncan Campbell 25 October 2013
Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian for more than 20 years, as crime correspondent. A version of this article first appeared in the Guardian on 15 September.
The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.
For more insights into British murders see the new BBC series A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley.
Cartoon by Gary Edwards