Molly Lefebure - Murder on the Home Front: A True Story of Morgues, Murderers, and Mysteries during the London Blitz

by Keith Simpson

Few young journalists can have had the remarkable experience that befell Molly Lefebure on her translation from crime and news reporter on a London newspaper to a job then quite uniqueprivate secretary to a pathologist engaged in scientific crime detection in and around the Metropolis. These were the days when Spilsbury was fading and the Yard team for crime investigation was plainly due for a reshuffle: a war of chaos was on overhead, and the perpetual war against the underworld of crime had nevertheless to be maintained below.

Miss Lefebure, with her delightful flow of interest in people and things, in humor and pathos, in crime and its personalities, discourses here, with both purpose and an engaging restraint, on the colorful days that flowed by so ceaselessly; on people and on strange happeningsstranger indeed than fiction. She did a remarkable job remarkably well, and the following pages bear no small testimony to her intense interest in her singular occupation.

Guys Hospital,
London

The murdered baby had been discovered in a small suitcase. Dr. Keith Simpson, Home Office pathologist doing the postmortem on the child, wanted it photographed in the suitcase exactly as it had been found. So he asked the Southwark mortuary keeper, West, and his secretary, myself, to take the case, complete with baby, around to Guys Hospital to be photographed.

The case with its pathetic contents was quite heavy, so West carried it while I tripped along beside him. The journey from Southwark mortuary to Guys was a short one across a desolate bomb site. As we were walking across here, West suddenly began to grin and chortle, as if at a marvelous joke. I asked him what it was, and he replied hed like to see a copper stop us and ask to see what we had in the case.

The notion appalled me. We should certainly look a very desperate couple: a suitcase with a murdered baby in it! Luckily, however, nobody stopped us. (It would have been interesting, of course, to have seen the expression on the face of an eager war-reserve constable, say, had he asked to inspect our bag. The radio series P.C. 49 would have been dull entertainment in comparison.)

West and I often joke about this adventure now when we talk over old times; those years when I worked with Keith Simpson in Londons public mortuaries on a nonstop round of postmortems, investigating murders, suicides, manslaughters, infanticides, accidents, criminal abortions, and those multitudinous cases that West calls straight uns.

Besides the nonstop postmortems were the coroners courts, the police courts, the magistrates courts, the assize courts, the Old Bailey. Frequent visits to Scotland Yard. The work in prisons, hospitals, asylums. The never-ending exploration of London: the alleys and filthy courtyards and tenements of Limehouse, Rotherhithe, Poplar, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Stratford-by-Bow, the amazing no-mans-land of the suburbs, the ever-fascinating backwaters of Kensington, Fulham, Walham Green, Streatham, Battersea, Wandsworth, East Ham, Walthamstow. The West End, a complete and intriguing contrast, plushy, well-washed, but with its sordid secrets in Chelsea, Westminster, Marylebone.

The journeys into the country on murder cases with the bodies in ditches, the bodies in spinneys and copses, the bodies among the cabbages and in squalid cottages, the bodies in pubs and on country cricket pitches, the bodies in select little villas and in old tin barns.

Those endless bodies, anything from ten to twenty-eight in a day, five and sometimes six days a week. All the public mortuaries from Portsmouth to Paddington. Five years of mortuaries, prying into the secrets of thousands, literally thousands, of bodies, each with a tale to tell.

There are people who say corpses dont talk, but indeed they do. They talk of easy lives in pleasant homes, of hard, dirty lives in rooms where lice crawl up and down the walls and the ceiling drips, like a decaying skin, in clammy stinking drops to the floor. They talk of hopes that were not fulfilled, joys that ended in sorrow, of tragedy, broken hearts, stupidity, cruelty, depravity, perversion, crime of every kind, and of goodness, devotion, motherhood, sacrifice, every kind of love, everything you have ever thought or heard of, and a great many things you would never have imagined in your wildest moments.

There they all are on the p.m. table: the costers wife who killed herself because her husband sold his pony, the one creature in the world she had ever really loved and been loved by. There is the baby whose mother left it to starve while she had a good time hitting the hay with American soldiers. The little girl whose new party dress caught fire. The old gentleman who lived in Leytonstone sixty years and never departed once from his wife, his job as a railway clerk, his bowls club, and the interminable straight and narrow. The soldier who came home on leave to find his wife in bed with another man and gassed himself. The sailor who came home from sea to find his wife in bed with another man and shot her. The old lady who put her head in the gas oven because she was certain the wireless had given her cancer. The airman who bailed out and his parachute didnt open. The bright young thing who didnt want a baby. The tart who picked up a killer for a client. The pansy who couldnt face life anymore. The treasurer who embezzled the funds, the typist who discovered she was married to a bigamist. Yes, there they all are.

And my goodness, how they talk! Everything about them talks. The way they look, the way they died, where they died, why they died. In the mortuary, under the skilled hands of Dr. Simpson, they yielded up their secrets, talking of everything from natural death to murder.

While sitting beside him at her little table, typing away for dear life, was Miss Lefebure, typing the postmortem reports which the pathologist dictated as he worked. And in the courts there she was, too, taking shorthand notes. There she was in the hospitals, in the prisons, at the scenes of crimes. Carrying her notebook and the little buff envelopes into which she popped the hairs and the fibers, the buttons and the cigarette butts, and all the other small but vital things that are found on or near the bodies and on which a five-day trial at the Old Bailey may ultimately hinge.