On The House

In the Dark: The True Story of the Blackout Ripper

Chapter One

A dark cramped space of stagnant air, the bomb shelter's interior smelled of cold mortar and stale sweat. A stone seat ran the length of one inner wall, while, on the floor, an electric lantern cast a pallid circle of light across the morbid discovery made earlier that morning. The brick-built shelter was one of several on Montague Place, Marylebone - near Regents Park in Central London - and one of countless similar structures that lined the streets of the capital. It was just shy of nine o'clock, and a harsh winter's sun backlit the city's shattered skyline. Daybreak came hard to London, a metropolis whose landscape had forever been altered by incendiary and high-explosive - but the air-raid sirens had remained silent the night before. The shelter that was the focus of attention was the center one in a grouping of three. Divisional Detective Inspector Leonard Clare of Albany Street Police Station, "D" Division, squinted against the cold. He knelt and stared into the shelters entrance. An electrician, one Harold Batchelor, had found the body at 8:40 a.m. as he walked to work. Batchelor's calls for help had summoned Police Constable John Miles at 8:51 a.m. Senior officers were on the scene within four minutes. Batchelor gave his statement to a trench-coated detective. Clare straightened himself and stepped closer to hear what the man said.

"I was with my mate and I was walking through Dorset Street, across into Montague Street, and along Montague on the left-hand side going to Edgware Road," Batchelor said. "In between two of the shelters I saw the top of an electric torch. My mate went towards it and showed me something inside the shelter. I saw the body of a woman lying on her back."

Clare returned his attention to the shelter and the dead woman within. She lay on her back in the gutter, which cut through the shelters center. Her feet pointed toward Gloucester Place, her right leg slightly raised and resting on an outcropping of brick in one corner of the shelter. She wore a fawn camel-hair coat and a green jumper. The right pocket of her overcoat held a sixpence. Her left leg was lying on the ground with her foot in the entrance. Her head was turned to the left, and her scarf was lying loosely over her face. Her skirt had been hiked up to her thighs. In the dim light, Clare could see the pale skin of the woman's exposed right breast where her white vest had been ripped away. Her underwear was stained with blood, as was the top of one stocking. Her gloves had been placed on top of her body, palms facing upward with the fingers pointing toward her face. Her tongue protruded between her teeth, slightly swollen. Lying near the body were a box of Master's safety matches and a tin of Ovaltine tablets. Her wristwatch had stopped at one o'clock but started ticking again when Clare removed it from her wrist. A green woolen cap lay across the shelter's threshold. Clare ordered that loose scrapings of mortar both inside and outside the shelter's entrance be collected as evidence. Sergeant Percy Law from the Photograph Branch took pictures of the crime scene.

At 9:10 a.m., Dr. Alexander Baldie - the divisional police surgeon - arrived at the shelter. A police constable turned on a crime-scene lamp at the shelter's entrance, burning away the shadows that clung to the brick interior, allowing Baldie to begin his examination. He observed two superficial pressure abrasions across the neck where some skin had apparently been rubbed off. The skin below the left side of her chin showed bruising, with heavy discoloration around her Adam's apple. Her extremities and head were cold, but the parts of her body still covered by clothing were slightly warm. Rigor mortis was in partial onset, indicating the woman had been dead for no more than several hours.

"The appearances here are consistent with death by manual strangulation," Baldie said to Clare as he climbed out of the shelter. "You'll obviously know more following the autopsy."

Clare nodded and turned his head as someone approached from behind.

The voice was that of Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Cherrill, head of Scotland Yard's Fingerprint Department. For more than two decades he had applied his special trade with vigor, searching for murderers in bloody swirls left on knife handles and straight-edged razors; looking for the identities of killers in powdered smudges lifted from furniture and panes of glass. The thrill of such discoveries never lost its appeal to Cherrill who, despite his senior rank, insisted on working murder scenes himself. He was Oxford born and bred, and looked the part in his bowler hat. Wisps of silver hair protruded from under the brim, and in situations like this he thrived. Now, Clare stepped aside and allowed Cherrill to enter the shelter to conduct his own examination. Crouched on his haunches, the fingerprint man gave the body a cursory glance. It seemed to him the woman had been hurriedly dumped in the shelter after being strangled in the street. Like the police surgeon, Cherrill's attention focused on the dark bruising of the woman's neck. From inside his jacket pocket, he withdrew his magnifying glass and bent low over the woman's throat. He slowly passed the magnifying glass - which he carried with him at all times - over the bruises in a back-and-fourth motion.

"Anything?" Clare asked from outside the shelter.

Lost in thought, Cherrill didn't answer immediately. He hoped to find some marking on the neck or a deformity to the bruises that might suggest an irregularity in the fingers of the killer. He found nothing. Still looking intently through his magnifying glass, Cherrill told Clare, "The man who did this is left handed." The bruises indicated as much. The left side of the neck sported one deep purplish bruise, while the opposite side displayed a cluster of discoloration where the remaining four digits had sunk into the flesh, thus indicating the deadly grasp of a left-handed individual. Casting his gaze down the body, he noticed some scratches on the heel of her shoes indicative of a struggle. But aside from the bruising, nothing on the corpse provided Cherrill with any clues. Perhaps some of the woman's possessions now strewn about would yield more helpful information. He ordered a constable to make sure they reached him for analysis that afternoon at the Yard.

Cherrill crawled out of the shelter and straightened himself in the early morning cold. A light snow had fallen the night before and was now turning to a thin slush beneath his feet. He had joined the Yard's Fingerprint Department in 1920 as a constable and rapidly worked his way up the ranks. He had seen death in all its various forms and experienced human nature at its lowest. The London Blitz had given rise to stirring tales of self-sacrifice and heroism - but it also exacerbated the worst of the cities criminal element. How many murders had he worked since the outbreak of hostilities? Too many - and yet, a certain irony could be found in each one. Take this dead woman for example. How many air raids had she survived? How many nights had she been dragged from the warmth of her bed by the wailing of sirens? She had lived through Hitler's bombs only to be robbed of life by something far more petty.

As Cherrill stood pondering the woman before him, detectives and uniformed constables spread out to knock on doors and question residents. They needed to establish a time of death and identify the victim. She was a slender woman with black hair and high cheekbones -- a woman not wholly unattractive. From where Cherrill stood, he could just make out the brown skirt bunched around her thighs. Cherrill's silent reflection was broken by the approach of a constable who identified himself to Clare as Arthur Cyril Williams, a war reserve constable working out of the Marylebone Lane Police Station. Williams reported he had inspected the shelters the night before while walking his beat, but saw nothing unusual.

"I got on duty last night at ten," he said, while Clare scribbled in his notebook. "I'm posted to No. 13 beat, which covers Marylebone Road, Baker Street, York Street, Montague Place and Seymour Place."

Williams said he passed by the bomb shelter at 11:20 p.m.

"I usually look inside these shelters when I pass - and I did last night. I shined my light up and down, but didn't see anyone in the shelters at all. I think if anyone had been lying on the floor, I would have noticed them. I did not hear anything unusual. It was a very quiet night with very few people about and no moon. It was very dark."

Come nightfall, London sank into a black oblivion. Residents extinguished all light to thwart enemy bombers at the expense of wreaking some havoc on the ground. The first campaign waged by British women on the home front was one against illumination, stitching countless thousands of yards of dark-colored material into blackout curtains. The dark blue, dark green and black drapes were now ritually drawn across every window in the capital by sunset. Light could not be permitted to escape any building. The curtains could not be washed, as this made them more permeable to light. Instead, the government dispensed booklets, instructing people to vacuum, shake, brush and iron their curtains to make them more effective. The drill-instructor-like shriek of "Put out that light!" became a common sound on the nighttime streets of London, as Air Raid Precaution wardens roamed neighborhoods in search of blackout violations. It had been that way since the blackout went into effect on Aug. 31, 1939 - three days before the morbid voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain came over the BBC and told an anxious nation it again braved war with Germany. In the business of keeping things dark, public transit received little leeway. Bus and taxi operators had to cover their headlights in a fashion that allowed only the most minimal amount of light to escape. The result was a lot of distraught drivers standing over the writhing - and sometimes still - figure of the pedestrian they had hit in the middle of the street. Nocturnal London had become an alien world of rumbling shadows and fleeting figures.

"What people there were about, were soldiers," Williams told Clare. "Four or five times during the night I was asked where the Church Army Hostel was." Williams waved an arm in some general direction: "It's in Seymour Place, and I directed the person making inquiries on each occasion."

Williams said that just before midnight he was ordered to Baker Street to monitor some shady figures reportedly seen moving in and out of a doorway at No. 114. The surveillance yielded nothing of consequence, and Williams took lunch from 1:15 a.m. to 2:15 a.m.

"I passed by the shelters while patrolling the other side of the street two or three more times during the night," he said. "I didn't hear anything unusual as far I as I can remember. There were no vehicles in the street when I passed, and I didn't see a sentry on duty."

Clare closed his notebook, thanked the constable and sent him on his way. The London underworld had made an overt move above ground, for the blackout provided ideal cover for those who fancied lawless pursuits. It was hard to identify someone passing on the street in black silhouette. Most attention these nights was directed skyward. Firewatchers on the lookout for German incendiaries manned the roofs of factories and other businesses. Fires provided a homing beacon for the Luftwaffe. Blazes, once ignited, had to be put out as soon as possible. ARP wardens hit the streets armed with stirrup pumps ready to battle the slightest spark. Some criminals saw an ideal opportunity in being ARPs. It gave them easy access to bombed homes and office buildings, and the possessions within. Clare shook his head and looked at his watch. It showed 10:15 a.m. as Police Constable Miles - the first officer on the scene - approached. He held something in his gloved hand, a woman's black handbag, wet, torn and empty. Miles said it had been discovered lying on the pavement on Wyndham Street, not far removed from the murder scene. Whether prints could be lifted from it was questionable, but it was bagged with the dead woman's other possessions. Once back at the Yard, Cherrill would dust everything and compare the prints he lifted with those already on file with the Metropolitan Police Department.

Other than the woman's few scant possessions, the crime scene had yielded no useful information - no bloody fingerprints and no identifiable footprints. Now, as the mortuary wagon approached, Clare hoped the door-to-door questioning would offer some hint as to the previous night's events. At 10:30 a.m., mortician workers removed the body from the shelter, loaded it onto a stretcher and placed it in the back of the wagon. It was promptly taken to the Paddington Mortuary, where the pathologist's blade awaited.


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In the Dark: The True Story of the Blackout Ripper Chapter One A dark cramped space of stagnant air, the bomb shelter's interior smelled of cold mortar and stale sweat. A stone seat ran the length of one inner wall, while, on the floor, an electric lantern cast a pallid circle of light across the morbid discovery made earlier that morning. The brick-built shelter was one of several on Montague Place, Marylebone - near Regents Park in Central London - and one of countless similar structures that lined the streets of the capital. It was just shy of nine o'clock, and a harsh winter's sun backlit the city's shattered skyline. Daybreak came hard to London, a metropolis whose landscape had forever been altered by incendiary and high-explosive - but the air-raid sirens had remained silent the night before. The shelter that was the focus of attention was the center one in a grouping of three. Divisional Detective Inspector Leonard Clare of Albany Street Police Station, "D" Division, squinted against the cold. He knelt and stared into the shelters entrance. An electrician, one Harold Batchelor, had found the body at 8:40 a.m. as he walked to work. Batchelor's calls for help had summoned Police Constable John Miles at 8:51 a.m. Senior officers were on the scene within four minutes. Batchelor gave his statement to a trench-coated detective. Clare straightened himself and stepped closer to hear what the man said. "I was with my mate and I was walking through Dorset Street, across into Montague Street, and along Montague on the left-hand side going to Edgware Road," Batchelor said. "In between two of the shelters I saw the top of an electric torch. My mate went towards it and showed me something inside the shelter. I saw the body of a woman lying on her back." Clare returned his attention to the shelter and the dead woman within. She lay on her back in the gutter, which cut through the shelters center. Her feet pointed toward Gloucester Place, her right leg slightly raised and resting on an outcropping of brick in one corner of the shelter. She wore a fawn camel-hair coat and a green jumper. The right pocket of her overcoat held a sixpence. Her left leg was lying on the ground with her foot in the entrance. Her head was turned to the left, and her scarf was lying loosely over her face. Her skirt had been hiked up to her thighs. In the dim light, Clare could see the pale skin of the woman's exposed right breast where her white vest had been ripped away. Her underwear was stained with blood, as was the top of one stocking. Her gloves had been placed on top of her body, palms facing upward with the fingers pointing toward her face. Her tongue protruded between her teeth, slightly swollen. Lying near the body were a box of Master's safety matches and a tin of Ovaltine tablets. Her wristwatch had stopped at one o'clock but started ticking again when Clare removed it from her wrist. A green woolen cap lay across the shelter's threshold. Clare ordered that loose scrapings of mortar both inside and outside the shelter's entrance be collected as evidence. Sergeant Percy Law from the Photograph Branch took pictures of the crime scene. At 9:10 a.m., Dr. Alexander Baldie - the divisional police surgeon - arrived at the shelter. A police constable turned on a crime-scene lamp at the shelter's entrance, burning away the shadows that clung to the brick interior, allowing Baldie to begin his examination. He observed two superficial pressure abrasions across the neck where some skin had apparently been rubbed off. The skin below the left side of her chin showed bruising, with heavy discoloration around her Adam's apple. Her extremities and head were cold, but the parts of her body still covered by clothing were slightly warm. Rigor mortis was in partial onset, indicating the woman had been dead for no more than several hours. "The appearances here are consistent with death by manual strangulation," Baldie said to Clare as he climbed out of the shelter. "You'll obviously know more following the autopsy." Clare nodded and turned his head as someone approached from behind. The voice was that of Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Cherrill, head of Scotland Yard's Fingerprint Department. For more than two decades he had applied his special trade with vigor, searching for murderers in bloody swirls left on knife handles and straight-edged razors; looking for the identities of killers in powdered smudges lifted from furniture and panes of glass. The thrill of such discoveries never lost its appeal to Cherrill who, despite his senior rank, insisted on working murder scenes himself. He was Oxford born and bred, and looked the part in his bowler hat. Wisps of silver hair protruded from under the brim, and in situations like this he thrived. Now, Clare stepped aside and allowed Cherrill to enter the shelter to conduct his own examination. Crouched on his haunches, the fingerprint man gave the body a cursory glance. It seemed to him the woman had been hurriedly dumped in the shelter after being strangled in the street. Like the police surgeon, Cherrill's attention focused on the dark bruising of the woman's neck. From inside his jacket pocket, he withdrew his magnifying glass and bent low over the woman's throat. He slowly passed the magnifying glass - which he carried with him at all times - over the bruises in a back-and-fourth motion. "Anything?" Clare asked from outside the shelter. Lost in thought, Cherrill didn't answer immediately. He hoped to find some marking on the neck or a deformity to the bruises that might suggest an irregularity in the fingers of the killer. He found nothing. Still looking intently through his magnifying glass, Cherrill told Clare, "The man who did this is left handed." The bruises indicated as much. The left side of the neck sported one deep purplish bruise, while the opposite side displayed a cluster of discoloration where the remaining four digits had sunk into the flesh, thus indicating the deadly grasp of a left-handed individual. Casting his gaze down the body, he noticed some scratches on the heel of her shoes indicative of a struggle. But aside from the bruising, nothing on the corpse provided Cherrill with any clues. Perhaps some of the woman's possessions now strewn about would yield more helpful information. He ordered a constable to make sure they reached him for analysis that afternoon at the Yard. Cherrill crawled out of the shelter and straightened himself in the early morning cold. A light snow had fallen the night before and was now turning to a thin slush beneath his feet. He had joined the Yard's Fingerprint Department in 1920 as a constable and rapidly worked his way up the ranks. He had seen death in all its various forms and experienced human nature at its lowest. The London Blitz had given rise to stirring tales of self-sacrifice and heroism - but it also exacerbated the worst of the cities criminal element. How many murders had he worked since the outbreak of hostilities? Too many - and yet, a certain irony could be found in each one. Take this dead woman for example. How many air raids had she survived? How many nights had she been dragged from the warmth of her bed by the wailing of sirens? She had lived through Hitler's bombs only to be robbed of life by something far more petty. As Cherrill stood pondering the woman before him, detectives and uniformed constables spread out to knock on doors and question residents. They needed to establish a time of death and identify the victim. She was a slender woman with black hair and high cheekbones -- a woman not wholly unattractive. From where Cherrill stood, he could just make out the brown skirt bunched around her thighs. Cherrill's silent reflection was broken by the approach of a constable who identified himself to Clare as Arthur Cyril Williams, a war reserve constable working out of the Marylebone Lane Police Station. Williams reported he had inspected the shelters the night before while walking his beat, but saw nothing unusual. "I got on duty last night at ten," he said, while Clare scribbled in his notebook. "I'm posted to No. 13 beat, which covers Marylebone Road, Baker Street, York Street, Montague Place and Seymour Place." Williams said he passed by the bomb shelter at 11:20 p.m. "I usually look inside these shelters when I pass - and I did last night. I shined my light up and down, but didn't see anyone in the shelters at all. I think if anyone had been lying on the floor, I would have noticed them. I did not hear anything unusual. It was a very quiet night with very few people about and no moon. It was very dark." Come nightfall, London sank into a black oblivion. Residents extinguished all light to thwart enemy bombers at the expense of wreaking some havoc on the ground. The first campaign waged by British women on the home front was one against illumination, stitching countless thousands of yards of dark-colored material into blackout curtains. The dark blue, dark green and black drapes were now ritually drawn across every window in the capital by sunset. Light could not be permitted to escape any building. The curtains could not be washed, as this made them more permeable to light. Instead, the government dispensed booklets, instructing people to vacuum, shake, brush and iron their curtains to make them more effective. The drill-instructor-like shriek of "Put out that light!" became a common sound on the nighttime streets of London, as Air Raid Precaution wardens roamed neighborhoods in search of blackout violations. It had been that way since the blackout went into effect on Aug. 31, 1939 - three days before the morbid voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain came over the BBC and told an anxious nation it again braved war with Germany. In the business of keeping things dark, public transit received little leeway. Bus and taxi operators had to cover their headlights in a fashion that allowed only the most minimal amount of light to escape. The result was a lot of distraught drivers standing over the writhing - and sometimes still - figure of the pedestrian they had hit in the middle of the street. Nocturnal London had become an alien world of rumbling shadows and fleeting figures. "What people there were about, were soldiers," Williams told Clare. "Four or five times during the night I was asked where the Church Army Hostel was." Williams waved an arm in some general direction: "It's in Seymour Place, and I directed the person making inquiries on each occasion." Williams said that just before midnight he was ordered to Baker Street to monitor some shady figures reportedly seen moving in and out of a doorway at No. 114. The surveillance yielded nothing of consequence, and Williams took lunch from 1:15 a.m. to 2:15 a.m. "I passed by the shelters while patrolling the other side of the street two or three more times during the night," he said. "I didn't hear anything unusual as far I as I can remember. There were no vehicles in the street when I passed, and I didn't see a sentry on duty." Clare closed his notebook, thanked the constable and sent him on his way. The London underworld had made an overt move above ground, for the blackout provided ideal cover for those who fancied lawless pursuits. It was hard to identify someone passing on the street in black silhouette. Most attention these nights was directed skyward. Firewatchers on the lookout for German incendiaries manned the roofs of factories and other businesses. Fires provided a homing beacon for the Luftwaffe. Blazes, once ignited, had to be put out as soon as possible. ARP wardens hit the streets armed with stirrup pumps ready to battle the slightest spark. Some criminals saw an ideal opportunity in being ARPs. It gave them easy access to bombed homes and office buildings, and the possessions within. Clare shook his head and looked at his watch. It showed 10:15 a.m. as Police Constable Miles - the first officer on the scene - approached. He held something in his gloved hand, a woman's black handbag, wet, torn and empty. Miles said it had been discovered lying on the pavement on Wyndham Street, not far removed from the murder scene. Whether prints could be lifted from it was questionable, but it was bagged with the dead woman's other possessions. Once back at the Yard, Cherrill would dust everything and compare the prints he lifted with those already on file with the Metropolitan Police Department. Other than the woman's few scant possessions, the crime scene had yielded no useful information - no bloody fingerprints and no identifiable footprints. Now, as the mortuary wagon approached, Clare hoped the door-to-door questioning would offer some hint as to the previous night's events. At 10:30 a.m., mortician workers removed the body from the shelter, loaded it onto a stretcher and placed it in the back of the wagon. It was promptly taken to the Paddington Mortuary, where the pathologist's blade awaited.