Wilkes - The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 1999

This revised edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2005

Collection copyright Roger Wilkers 1999, 2005

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that is shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-84529-149-2
eISBN: 978-1-78033-373-1

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Twenty-five years ago, I disturbed the bones of an old murder case. It was unsolved; a man had been convicted but then freed on appeal, and no one else had subsequently been brought to book. Back in 1931, the hot-from-the-hob headlines had blazed the tale. An insurance agent called Wallace had murdered his drab little wife, beating out her brains in their blood-boltered front parlour in Liverpool with such unclerkly ferocity that the walls were streaked, spattered and flecked as high as the picture rail. Wallace was accused of having devised an alibi of consummate cunning, involving the critical synchromesh of logged telephone calls, word-of-mouth messages, at least three tram timetables and a bogus appointment. Picking it over for a radio programme half a century later, a panel of experts agreed that Wallace did not murder his wifeindeed, could not have done so. Moreover, newly uncovered testimony suggested a different solution and buttressed the case against a different suspect, a much younger man who boasted secret CID connections, a propensity to steal and to dissemble, and who nursed a grudge against Wallace. Yet amid the excitement of discovery, we discerned an unexpected note of melancholy. It now seemed a shame to spoil a perfectly good whodunnit. We had, in a sense, performed the reverse of alchemy and transmuted the burnished gold of mystery into dross. Solving the riddle had diminished the story, reduced it to a commonplace. Everyone loves a good murder, but especially a murder that defies solution, that continues to frustrate and ultimately defeat our forensic skills and the constructs of logic. Wed rather our unsolved crimes remain unsolved. What draws us is the magnetic field of mystery.

For more than three hundred years, readers of crime fiction have accorded with the seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne. I love to lose myself in a mystery, declared this strange and curious sage in one of his few homespun moments. But his enthusiasm was characteristically prognostiche had identified a trend that was only to achieve its full flowering a full three centuries later during the Golden Age of the detective novel. The English poet W. H. Auden (19071973) was a self-confessed addict, but viewed the popularity of the whodunnit as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty, the dialectic of innocence and guilt. Auden was anxious to dignify the genre. He described the noir tales of the American Raymond Chandler, a writer of the hard-boiled school, as serious studies of a criminal milieu, to be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art. And yet, detective fiction is imprisoned within a basic formula. It is a ritual, as Auden himself reminds us: a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.

The connoisseur of real-life crime is affronted by this comfortable and threadbare format. He knows that in the real world, not every crime mystery is solved by the arrival of the detective, the knitting of brows and the application of improbable powers of deduction. Murder is always mysterious. Even if (as the American murder scholar Wendy Lesser suggests) we know all the who-what-when facts, the distance between our own lives and the act of murder leaves a space where mystery creeps in. We seem able, though, to accept the full subtlety, the full complexity of the mystery only in a work of fiction, which can give us other satisfactions than The Definite Answer. There is no fiction in the stories that follow; but neither is there a full tally of Definite Answers. Far from it. Here are crimes so puzzling, sometimes clueless, often motiveless, that we can only guess at the truth of them.

The history of unsolved crime is as old as the history of crime itself, but it has only been documented in any coherent form for the last 200 years or so. One of the earliest recorded cases of unsolved murder in London dates from 1678 when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, politician, magistrate and woodmonger, was found dead in a ditch. The crime remains one of the most celebrated of historical British mysteries. Sir Edmund was the magistrate before whom Titus Oates swore the existence of a Popish Plot, by which English Protestants would be massacred, the King assassinated and a Catholic ministry installed in his place. The plot was Oatess invention, but Godfreys murder ensured that the tale gained widespread currency. Whoever did the murder was supposed to have dripped blobs of wax on to the body, possibly in an effort to throw suspicion on to the priests from the Popish Queens Chapel. Three Catholic suspects were duly arrested, tried and hanged for the murder, but the trial was a travesty and the part played by this wretched trio in Godfreys demise (if any) remains hidden. The great essayist in black humour Thomas de Quincey (17851859), applying the principles of aesthetic criticism to murder (as one of the fine arts), judged Sir Edmunds assassination the finest work of the seventeenth century precisely because no one knew who had done it. In the grand feature of