Is this the face of killer Jack
Abertillery teenager Harold Jones went to prison for killing two local girls in the 1920s, but what happened to him after his release remains a dark mystery. Nathan Bevan asks if he went on to become the seral killer who haunted London’s underbelly during
ALMOST 80 years after Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Victorian London a new killer held the city’s residents in the grip of fear.
Dubbed Jack the Stripper, he murdered as many as eight prostitutes in the capital during the Swinging Sixties – choking them to death before dumping their naked bodies on waste ground around Hammersmith.
Like the Ripper, he was also never caught, but did that very same person get his first taste for blood with the slaying of two young girls in 1920s Abertillery?
Harold Jones was his name and he was only 15 when he killed eight-yearold Freda Burnell, who’d been sent by her father to buy bird seed from the store where Jones was working.
Her body was eventually found in a nearby lane, but it was the discovery of her handkerchief in the shop’s shed which saw Jones accused and stand trial for her death.
However, a lack of hard evidence would later see him freed.
“He practically got a hero’s welcome upon his return, with bunting and brass bands lining the streets to celebrate his innocence,” says local crime author Neil Milkins, who’s spent more than a decade researching Harold Jones and has written two books about him.
“One of the first men to greet him back into his street was neighbour George Little who told him, ‘Well done lad, we knew you didn’t do it’.”
Fifteen days later, Jones murdered Little’s 11-yearold daughter Florence too, hiding her body in the attic of his parents’ home.
“Jones had cut her throat and bled her dry over the kitchen sink,” adds Milkins, explaining that when the police found her the coroner said there were barely two teaspoons of blood left in her body.
Arrested once again, Jones this time pleaded guilty to the charge of murder at a Monmouth court in November 1921.
Two months too young to face the gallows, he was sent to Usk Prison where he sensationally confessed to the first killing, blaming the voice of a “demon” in his head.
He also bragged about outfoxing Scotland Yard and how, after watching Freda’s funeral, he’d “played billiards and ate and slept as usual”.
What fascinates Milkins, however, was what happened to Jones once he left Wandsworth jail in December 1941, aged 35.
The electoral register having been suspended because of the war means no-one knows where he went, although local legend tells of how he’d return to his parents’ house in Abertillery from time to time.
“The sound of him playing the organ in their front room would haunt the terraced streets, all of which would be empty as mothers kept their children safe indoors until he’d gone away again,” says Milkins.
Jones then resurfaced at end of the 1940s as Harry Stevens at an address in Hestercombe Avenue, Fulham – but he’d vanished without trace again by 1962, just as the battered, strangled bodies of local call girls began appearing across the capital, one of whom was 22-yearold Welsh woman Gwynneth Rees.
And while an intense police investigation resulted in a Scottish security guard named Mungo Ireland being named as chief suspect – he would commit suicide before his arrest – Mr Milkins isn’t convinced.
“When I first came across the details of that case on the internet the hairs on my neck stood up, there were just too many coincidences for Jones not to be connected,” he says.
“Ireland became a suspect after traces of industrial paint was found on several of the bodies, leading police to deduce they’d been stored on the same west London industrial estate where he worked.
“But it turns out Jones was also working as a caretaker at the time and could also have had access to such materials. Plus he was living just two streets from Ireland at the time and a similarly short distance from the first victim.”
That none of the women had been sexually assaulted either also ties in with a report written by a senior prison medical officer during Jones’ time behind bars, suggesting that acts of cruelty and killing gave him the gratification he sought.
Then, in 1965, the Jack the Stripper killings suddenly and inexplicably came to a stop – again mirroring the case of the Ripper.
“The Bridget last dead O’Hara, girl, went missing on January 11, 1965, which is the date of Harold Jones’ birthday,” says Milkins. “He died of bone cancer a few short years after that.
“It still sends a chill up my spine to think that she could have been one of Jones’ final presents to himself.”
To find out more about Neil Milkins’ work, go to www.roseheyworth-press.co.uk