The Black Museum’s historical collection of articles and exhibits was and is unique. It covers more than murder. Other sections deal with Forgeries, Espionage, Drugs, Offensive Weapons, Abortions, Gaming, Housebreaking, Bombs and Sieges, and Crime pre-1900. The museum also houses displays concentrating on particular crimes, such as the Great Train Robbery and the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne, and possesses such peculiar exhibits as Mata Hari’s visiting card, a fake Cullinan diamond, a loving-cup skull with silver handles, two death masks of Heinrich Himmler, and thirty-two plaster casts of the heads of hanged criminals, men and women, executed in the first half of the nineteenth century at Newgate in London, at Derby and York. The heads, still bearing the mark of the rope, are said to have been made to record the features of those who were executed. Many criminals then used aliases, and the only way of identifying them after death (before the use of photographs and fingerprints) was to keep these plaster likenesses. In addition, some if not all of the heads were probably made for doctors or phrenologists bent on proving theories about the physiognomy of criminal types by examining the bumps and shape of a criminal’s head after its owner was dead and gone.
Visitors’ books, also maintained in the museum, contain records of a different sort: the signatures of such notable persons as King George V, Edward, Prince of Wales, Stanley Baldwin, Sir Arthur Sullivan, WS Gilbert, Captain Shaw of the London Fire Brigade, and William Marwood, executioner.
There is an undisplayed mass of other material (newspapers, cuttings, photographs, documents, letters and miscellaneous objects) relating to the exhibits on show and to other crimes. This material is kept under lock and key, generally in cabinets or cupboards below the showcases and mainly because space is restricted, but also because some of the items – for instance, the police photographs of Gordon Cummins’s victims – are too obscene to be shown. The museum was rearranged and refurbished early in 2008.
I first visited the Black Museum in 1979. It was a most interesting and very disturbing experience. There was a certain grim fascination in seeing the actual instruments and implements used by criminals, infamous or otherwise, and in seeing other more innocuous items given a sinister cast in the context of their use. But the effect of the exhibits on display was cumulatively shocking. They presented a dreadful picture of ruthlessness, greed, cruelty, lust, envy and hate, of man’s inhumanity to man – and especially to women. There was nothing of kindness or consideration. There was no nobility, save that of the policemen murdered on duty. There was very little mercy. But the museum made me realise what a policeman must endure in the course of his duty: what sights he sees, what dangers he faces, what depraved and evil people he has to deal with so that others may live secure. The museum also made me curious to know more about the people whose stories were shadowed by the exhibits on display.
This book deals with a very few of the murders investigated by the officers of the Metropolitan Police between 1875 and 1975. This hundred-year period embraces many of the major murder cases in the history of Scotland Yard as well as the major advances in crime detection. The museum has some exhibits relating to murders before 1875 (notably a letter written by the poisoner William Palmer) and several associated with murders after 1975 (notably the murder of Lesley Whittle by Donald Neilson in 1975 and the murders of Dennis Nilsen a few years later). But, writing in 1982, I felt that the grief suffered by families whose relatives had been murdered after 1975 was too recent to be revived by a detailed account. The murder that ends this book, that of Mrs Muriel McKay, seemed a fitting conclusion to the whole sequence, having been more publicised than most and being in many ways extraordinary.
The accounts of these particular murders of the Black Museum have been dealt with as case histories, with an emphasis on factual, social and historical detail, and on the characters and backgrounds of both the victim and the killer. Principal sources are listed at the back of the book, but in the main, statements and court proceedings have formed the basis for each story. No dialogue has been invented; it has been reproduced from statements and evidence given by the murderer as well as by witnesses and the police. What was said or alleged at the time by those most closely involved in a murder case may not always be true, but it is, I feel, of paramount importance in understanding the events that lead up to an act of murder and the complex motives and personalities of those most closely concerned. Like the superintendent or inspector in charge of a case I have tried to find out exactly what happened and why. It is my impression that the police officers investigating a murder ultimately have a clearer understanding of character, method and motive than some of the lawyers who take part in the ensuing trial. A court of law is seldom a place where the whole truth is told or revealed. It is in some respects a theatre of deception, with witnesses, defendants and barristers seeking to deceive the jury and each other. Even the judge, the arbitrator of truth, can mislead and be misled through ignorance or bias. But in a police station, although a suspect may lie as much as he likes, a truer picture of events and character is more likely to be attained in the end. Police reports concerning a murder and sent to a chief constable or commissioner are most sensible, lucid presentations of comment and fact. It is a pity they are not also available to the members of a jury in a court of law.
In researching and writing this book in the early 1980s, since revised for this edition, I was afforded the constant and generous cooperation of New Scotland Yard. I would particularly like to thank the following for their individual assistance at the time: Peter Neivens; Patricia Plank and the staff of the Commissioner’s Reference Library; the Museums’ Coordinator, Paul Williams; and the then Curator of the Black Museum, Bill Waddell. More recently, various Home Office and Ministry of Justice departments have also been helpful in updating information about the subsequent lives and deaths of those in this book who were given a prison sentence or detained in Broadmoor, and in this instance I would like to thank Les Blacklaw, Miss L Douglas, Kathryn Coleman, Emma Reed, David Keysell and Dave Norris, as well as Syd Norris and Sandy Macfarlane. The two Curators of the Museum who succeeded Bill Waddell have also been unfailingly helpful. My special thanks to John Ross, and to Alan McCormick, the present Curator of the Crime Museum.
Murder is a very rare event in Britain. Its exceptional nature is, in fact, part of its fascination. More than ten times as many people are killed on the roads each year as are victims of a murderer.
In 1980, 564 cases of murder, manslaughter and infanticide, all now classed as homicide, were currently recorded in England and Wales. On the roads of Britain in 1979-80, 6,352 people were killed and 81,000 injured. It must be said, however, that these figures for death on the roads were the lowest for thirty years and that the homicide figure was unnaturally high. Indeed, the car-death figure, when compared with that of other decades and with the number of cars on the roads, shows an astonishing decrease in fatalities. In 1931, for instance, when 1,104,000 cars and vans were on the roads, 6,691 people were killed and over 200,000 injured. Yet in 1979-80, with over 15 million cars on the road, the death toll was much lower, as was the number of those injured. The worst year for road fatalities was, significantly, 1941, the second full year of the Second World War, when the blackout was in full force: 9,169 people were killed that year. It is worth noting that deaths caused by reckless driving are not classified as homicide by the police, who recorded 235 such deaths on the roads in Britain in 1980.
The year 1980 was unusual in terms of homicide in that, of 564 homicides, seventy occurred in fires – thirty-seven in a Soho club and ten in a hostel in Kilburn. In addition, twenty-three deaths that had occurred in fires in the Hull area between 1973 and 1978, when they were regarded as accidental, were recorded as homicides in 1980. This meant that the homicide figure for 1980, without the unusually high figure of deaths in fires, would have been under 500 – a great reduction on the 551 homicides recorded in 1979. Instead, with the figure of seventy deaths in fires included, the overall number of recorded homicides in 1980