On September 17, Harold made a written confession to Florence’s murder.
“I, Harold Jones, do confess that I willfully and deliberately murdered Florence Irene Little on 8th of July, causing her to die without preparation to meet her God. The reason for doing so being a desire to kill.”
The trial began at Monmouthshire Assizes on November 1, 1921, with the judge being Justice Bray. The prosecution claimed that Harold committed the murder because he had enjoyed the attention he received from his previous trial and acquittal and that he had made attempts to conceal the evidence in his home, suggesting he knew what he did was wrong.
The trial only lasted for one hour. Jones was detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. As he was fifteen, he was too young to be sentenced to death. (Capital punishment was outlawed in Britain in 1969, with the last person hanged in 1964.) After his trial, another confession was read out. This had been written before the trial. It said:
“I, Harold Jones, willfully and deliberately murdered Freda Burnell in Mortimer’s shed on 5th February 1921. The reason for this act was a desire to kill.”
According to the Sunday Chronicle, after Harold’s conviction, his father Phillip said, “My boy is a champion and I am, and before my boy is twenty-one, he will be back with me. Just change his name and find a fresh place to live in and there you are—everything alright.” Changing names and addresses does not change a person’s character. Phillip Jones either believed his son was innocent or he didn’t care that he was guilty.
During the time of the murders, Harold was having sex with the Mortimers’ thirteen-year-old daughter, Lena. It’s not clear if the Mortimers knew this, but surely if they had, they wouldn’t have given Harold an alibi for Freda’s murder. In prison, he admitted that he didn’t need to have sexual relations or to commit sexual assault to gain sexual gratification. Acts of cruelty and causing death were enough.
The people of Abertillery were wrong. The killer was one of them.
Harold Jones was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released after twenty years against the advice of a psychiatrist, who still considered him dangerous. On December 6, 1941, at age thirty-five, he was released on parole from Wandsworth Prison in London. He joined the merchant navy and, after the war ended, moved to Newport, an industrial town in South Wales, eighteen miles from Abertillery. He would apparently visit his parents, staying in their house for a few days, playing the piano. Some websites claim he visited his victims’ graves, but it cannot be verified. Locals kept their children indoors until he left. In 1948, he changed his name to Harry Stevens and moved to the Fulham area of London. He married, fathered a daughter, and lived a seemingly normal life as a sheet-metal worker with no one, not even his wife, knowing that he’d murdered two young girls when he himself was a boy.
Harold Jones died of bone cancer at age sixty-five on January 2, 1971. He was working as a night watchman under the name of Harry Jones, but, before he died, he told his wife that the name Harold Jones should be put on his death certificate. Was this to cement his infamy? He was buried in Hammersmith Cemetery in London.
Shortly after Florence Little’s murder, Herbert Mortimer sold his shop and moved away with his family. Despite being fully supportive of Harold, the locals ostracized Mortimer for giving him a false alibi, and he struggled with guilt for having done so because it enabled the boy to kill again.
Both girls were buried in Brynithel Cemetery, though their graves fell into disrepair. The girls’ mothers were distressed at the state of the graves. In 2018, local author Neil Milkins raised four thousand pounds for their restoration.
In 2018, in a BBC television documentary, Dark Son: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, Professor David Wilson, a former prison governor and one of Britain’s top experts on serial killers, put forward the case that Harold Jones could also be responsible for the “Hammersmith Nude Murders” in the 1960s. There is some discrepancy as to how many were killed. Most people agree that there were definitely six women murdered between 1964 and 1965, but others claim that two murders which took place in 1959 and 1963 were also the work of the same killer. The 1963 murder certainly shares some similarities to the later murders. The women’s bodies were found strangled and undressed by the River Thames, which led to the press dubbing the murderer “Jack the Stripper.” He is the most prolific serial killer very few people have heard of.
Harold was living in the area at that time and on the same street as one of the men suspected of the crime. The women, who worked as prostitutes, were all choked to death and had their teeth removed; their naked bodies were dumped either on wastelands or in the Thames. Along with former Home Office Pathologist Sir Bernard Knight, retired Detective Chief Inspector Jackie Malton, and volunteers, Professor Wilson set up an investigation into the Jack the Stripper killings. They made their HQ in a chapel in Abertillery. The locals befriended them and told them their memories of Harold Jones and the murders.
Professor Wilson believed that, once released from prison, Harold would continue to kill. The murders were similar to the ones he confessed to. Certainly, circumstantial evidence does lend credence to Harold Jones being the killer: he lived a few streets away from three of the victims and he was a sheet-metal worker, so he would have used the type of industrial paint that was found on the last four of the victims. Professor Wilson and his team tracked down Harold’s daughter. She had no idea who her father really was and described him as “an unassuming family man.” Being quiet and unassuming was exactly what had enabled him to kill two girls and convince a town that he was innocent.
In the Fred Dineage Murder Casebook series, journalist and broadcaster Dineage, who ghostwrote My Story as well as Our Story for the Kray twins (Ronnie and Reggie Kray were London’s most notorious gangsters in the 1950s and 1960s), did an episode as part of his Murders That Shocked a Nation, entitled “Harold Jones: The Welsh Child Killer.” In it, he also suggested that Harold was responsible for the London killings, as did Neil Milkins in his 2011 book, Who Was Jack the Stripper?: The Hammersmith Nudes’ Murders. While Milkins was researching the Wales murders for his book, Every Mother’s Nightmare: Abertillery in Mourning, he discovered that Harold Jones had moved to Hestercombe Avenue in Fulham in the late 1940s, staying there until 1962, when he disappeared again. The prostitutes were murdered in the three-year period when his whereabouts were unknown.
Despite the police interviewing more than seven thousand suspects, they never interviewed Harold Jones. Did they know a convicted murderer was living nearby? The Identikit picture released by the police bears a striking resemblance to Harold. Like the two young girls in Abertillery, the prostitutes weren’t raped, but they did suffer extreme violence. Harold was fifty-eight at the time of the last murder, so was he too old? Child killers don’t usually switch to killing adults, but maybe he killed the two girls in Abertillery because he’d been too young to overpower a grown woman. Did he already have cancer at the time of the London murders? If so, was the cancer diagnosis the trigger? Did he feel he had nothing to lose? If he did have cancer, he would again escape the noose, but this time through death. All of the murdered prostitutes were short in stature and probably easier to overpower. However, Freda Burnell and Florence Little both suffered head wounds, and Florence’s throat was slit.
Unfortunately, despite one of the biggest manhunts in Scotland Yard’s history, the case remains unsolved, and much of the evidence has been destroyed or lost.
The name Harold Jones will always bring back terrible memories for the people of Abertillery. Two girls were cruelly murdered for his own sick pleasure, and his trustworthy, personable facade fooled the town into believing in his innocence. They had no idea that a monster walked among them, until it was too late.
Twenty Cents’ Worth of Arsenic
Tyrell Tilford