Taunted by an unsolved case
Taunted by an unsolved case
Coffee, the biggest miscarriage of justice, and the case for and against true crime
I had coffee with a former Flying Squad detective near Waterloo Station on Friday.
We had appeared on a 2019 BBC documentary called Dark Son: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. This sprang from my book, The Hunt for the 60s’ Ripper, about Scotland Yard’s failed effort to catch London’s most prolific but unidentified postwar serial killer.
And here we were again, discussing the case that taunts us from the past.
We’d got talking again because of an update I’d had from Anthony Phillips, who had worked in the Met’s forensic science lab in the 1960s.
I covered this in a previous post, discussing Mr Phillips’ revelation that four years after the last of six murders in west London, he had been given evidence to examine suggesting detectives had found the killer’s car.
Why would the killer’s identity be hidden?
Mr Phillips positively identified the paint specks found in that car as the same discovered on four of the victims, all left undressed on the streets and in the River Thames. ‘The [car] owner was the perpetrator of the nude murders,’ he told me.
However, no arrest followed. Why?
Was it possible that detectives had uncovered the murderer’s identity in 1969 but kept it quiet for some reason?
Mr Phillips had been given no further details at the time. In the ensuing 50-odd years he had told no one apart from his family about this strange, unexplained development.
Even he had wondered about the possibility that the car harbouring incriminating evidence had belonged to a former police officer or someone prominent in society, prompting a cover-up.
My detective contact and I agreed that if what Mr Phillips had revealed was true and accurate, his account threw doubt on the other rumoured suspects for the murders.
Child killer Harold Jones
The killer had asphyxiated six women and left their bodies in public places – the river, a Kensington car park, an alleyway in Brentford. He had met the women on the street (they were sex workers), kept their bodies on a trading estate, before using a vehicle, probably a grey van, to drive them to the deposition sites.
The original investigation looked at a gamut of suspects – pimps, sugar daddies, a disgraced former cop, various kerb-crawling punters, a flagellant, a seaman, trading estate employees, boyfriends.
Detectives never turned up one convincing, forensically compelling suspect.
Dark Son had focused on a revolting character called Harold Jones as one man that Scotland Yard should have scrutinised closely. As a 15 year old he had sexually assaulted and murdered two little girls in his native Wales.
He had been paroled from his life sentence and pushed into military service during World War Two. Afterwards, he changed his name, married – of all things – a policeman’s daughter and settled in the Hammersmith area.
Though he lived within a few streets of a couple of the victims, he never came to the attention of the police.
However, if it was his van that was discovered and tested by Mr Phillips in 1969, why had the police not announced the fact?
That year, the man heading the investigation, Det Ch Supt John Du Rose, hinted that he had known all along that the killer was a man called Mungo Ireland, who had worked on the Heron Trading Estate and later committed suicide.
But again, if he had been identified as the owner of a vehicle containing the incriminating paint specks, why would Scotland Yard not announce it?
My detective contact suggested we use a network of former detectives to put out an appeal for anyone who had knowledge of the vehicle tested by Mr Phillips, and who owned it!
I said I couldn’t believe that a former officer who had kept quiet about this for so long would suddenly want to talk about this, but we’ve sent out a request for information anyway.
Watch this space…
Mr Bates vs the Post Office
As UK miscarriages of justice go, they don’t come bigger than the hundreds of subpostmasters and postmistresses wrongly convicted of theft and fraud.
Lives were destroyed and families split by what looks to me like the vindictive pursuit of innocent small business owners implicated thanks to computer errors. This agony has lasted more than 20 years, with innocent people being sent to prison or getting convictions, their lives and livelihoods trashed.
I’ve been listening to the BBC podcast The Great Post Office Trial and almost had an aneurysm several times as the tales of cruelty unfold.
But that won’t stop me watching the new ITV four-part drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, running from Monday 1 January until Thursday 4 January (9pm).
The series is clearly an attempt to draw one uplifting story from a catalogue of misery and injustice. This comes in the shape of subpostmaster Alan Bates, who, with others, led the fightback against the unfounded accusations.
A wonderful cast includes Toby Jones, Monica Dolan, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Lia Williams, Alex Jennings, Ian Hart, Katherine Kelly, Shaun Dooley and Will Mellor.
What’s wrong with true crime?
The New York Times has just covered the story of Liz Flatt, who fell foul of a couple of podcasters in the US.
Liz’s sister, Debbie, had been murdered in 1975 and the case was unsolved. She hooked up with a couple of podcast ‘investigators’ to drum up new leads in the case.
However, when Liz challenged how the case files she supplied the podcasters with were being used, she fell out with the podcast team and found herself being targeted online.
Flatt was even accused to trying to ‘sabotage’ efforts to find her sister’s killer – even though she had effectively initiated the effort.
Read the full twisted tale here.
What’s right with true crime?
That’s a question a number of non-fiction members of the Crime Writers’ Association, including myself, tried to answer in an online post.
Dean Jobb (author of Times Book of the Week The Case of the Murderous Dr Cream), Denise Beddows (The Forgotten Forty-Four), and Sarah Bax Horton (One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper) are among those writing about how true crime inspires a lot of great fiction and can ask questions about society and justice, and provide the occasional insight.
Read all about it on Cross Examining Crime here.