Maurice Morson - Norwich Murders

O n 1 January 1968 a new police administration erased the border of the city and county forces, a territorial difference much in evidence in this book. Future Norwich murders fell inside the new City Division, their investigation allied to a new force headquarters at Martineau Lane (opposite where Martha Sheward was partly found). And the twenty-first century saw yet another new police headquarters another place known to this book: Wymondham!

The incidence of murders in Norwich had varied considerably over two centuries and a long spell without the ultimate crime looked set to continue to the end of the Norwich City Police, scheduled for midnight, 31 December 1967. In the late evening of Saturday, 30 December 1967, a murder was reported.

Manuel Gomez, a watch repairer on Norwich Market, died on the pavement in Stevenson Road, battered to death with a road rammer after an argument had overflowed from a nearby house. Donald MacLennan, a general dealer, was charged with murder by the city police, a force that within hours would be renamed and integrated into a new force. MacLennan said he was drunk and couldnt remember anything that took place. A jury found him Not Guilty of murder but Guilty of manslaughter, reaching this verdict by a 10 2 majority: another innovation never envisaged by those pioneer policemen.

The latter part of the twentieth century saw investigative techniques moulded into Incident Room systems. National training came through New Scotland Yard and the Police College, the Home Offices love of acronyms exampled by MIRIAM (Major Incident Room Index and Action Management) and HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System). HOLMES survives today, refined and constantly improving, inspired by computer technology. How the police of yesteryear would have marvelled. And what would they have made of the linking of victim and murderer by a magic formula known as DNA?

During the accelerating progress of the latter part of the twentieth century several murders occurred in Norwich but this book is not encyclopaedic and ends, as introduced, with the Norwich City Police, or nearly so, for murder knows no bounds. No person or place is sacred, including hospitals and prisons. In December 1875, a male patient in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital ran amok in the childrens ward and murdered four boys aged between nine and fourteen years and, outside our time frame, in 1980, murder was committed inside Norwich Prison. (There would be another there before the end of the century.)

The 1980 murder demonstrates the utter tragedy of wilfully taking a life. A nineteen-year-old timid and inadequate young man, detained for theft from a linen line, volunteered a confession to rape, finding some sense of importance in the attention he then received. Magistrates remanded him to Norwich Prison. Detectives, uneasy over his confession, interviewed him in prison and, satisfied that he was innocent of rape, arranged for him to be brought before the Magistrates to withdraw the charge. That night a hardened London criminal strangled him in the hospital dormitory for no other reason than he was available. A young innocent man had been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. All the victims in this book were available and innocent, and in the wrong place at the wrong time.