Stephen Wade - Notorious Murders of the Twentieth Century. Famous and Forgotten British Cases

TRUE CRIME FROM WHARNCLIFFE

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths Series

OTHER TRUE CRIME BOOKS FROM WHARNCLIFFE

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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Wharncliffe Books
an imprint of
Pen and Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Stephen Wade 2011

ISBN: 978-1-84563-130-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-84563-130-7

PRC ISBN: 978-1-84563-130-7

The right of Stephen Wade to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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U nfortunately, the crime of murder is extremely common, so much so that the majority of murders happen within relationships or are committed by people who know their victims. The famous murders are the ones that are forever being written about mainly by serial and mass killers. Every daily paper carries murder stories, and they tend to cause a stir, but that is no more than a wave rippling on an ocean. For a crime to really whip up a tempest there has to be an extraordinary element of evil, often with a psychological element. The really famous murders tend to have the adjective changed to infamous and they are a subject of constant fascination. We may theorise endlessly about why a serial killer did what he or she did but in the end, there will be something enigmatic about it.

On the other hand, there have been a number of extraordinary murders which were undoubtedly famous and have remained so, albeit in the media that caters for true crime enthusiasts. Some are unsolved, and so they have their own mystery, others are simply strange and intriguing. They are forgotten in the sense of being out of the public eye, but there they still lie, in books, magazine articles and on the internet. Such are the subjects of this book.

Most murder cases also tend to follow a template which stems from the classic structure from the days of hanging, of:

(1) the crime;

(2) the pursuit;

(3) the arrest;

(4) the trial; and

(5) the closure noose or cell.

Since 1964 this established courtroom drama, in which a trial really was a matter of life and death, has gone, although (as my last chapter shows) there were death sentences meted out from the Tynwald on the Isle of Man in the 1990s. Still, the really compelling famous murders tend to be either the unsolved or the highly sensational. For that reason, I wanted the cases retold here to be either unfamiliar or classically mysterious. The mix selected is composed of four categories:

1. The classic unsolved such as the Wallace case, in which several logistical problems related to Wallace's behaviour remain open.

2. The outright savage and brutal perhaps best represented by Buck Ruxton, whose case was also a forensic first.

3. The issue of a reprieve being given.

4. The bizarre and unexpected in a courtroom triumph the clearest case here being that of Jeannie Donald.

Of course there are many other categories, such as a miscarriage of justice and indeed the most dramatic of all, a reprieve of a condemned woman, in the story of Florence Maybrick.

What persists, in the history of true crime writing, is the fascination of a voyeuristic perspective: the general reader, a lay person outside the professional arena of the detective, the judge or the pathologist, feels the most intense curiosity at the thought of what consequences may follow the taking of a human life. If that murder is by a husband, wife, son or daughter, then the voyeurism takes on another dimension: because most of us know family life and we know the stresses and demands of relationships, we therefore feel a certain level of insight and empathy in these case; and this is nothing to do with the old adage that any one of us could take a life, if pushed too far. That statement is always open to debate and it is far too simplistic.