Murder Houses of Greater London
Matador Books 2015
Pb, 400pp, illus, £12.99, ISBN 9781784623333
FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £11.69
Before Bondeson there was Roger Wilkes’s ‘An Infamous Address’ but what is it about murder houses that is so appealing to some?
The first thing you do when you pick up one of these books (as a London-dweller) is to look up your own house. Where you live now. Then you look for the houses of your friends. Then you move on to look at places where you used to live. I found four murder sites within yards of my old flat and discovered that the so-called ‘Soho Strangler’ had struck at 66 Old Compton St a few doors down. Late one night in the spring of 1936 working girl ‘Dutch’ Leah Hinds was seen by a hotel porter picking up a punter. She brought him back to her second floor flat, where she was found next day, after the door was broken down, garrotted with a thin wire, her cooling body poignantly attended by her puppy dog. The redtops declared her to be the fourth victim of a serial killer called The Soho Strangler, who was never found or even identified. Some suggested he was the same man who also became known as ‘The Blackout Ripper’ during WWII, though his ‘MO’ and physical description is not a match, Bondeson assures us. Another possible serial killing of Soho prostitutes is later posited as taking place in 1947–1948 and was dubbed ‘Soho Jack’. This again remains unsolved, the police file closed in 1975, the neatly dressed man in a blue suit never found.
Another nearby murder site is now a Thai restaurant. This property is the site of the gangland murder of ‘Big Tony Mella’ in January 1963 when it was called The Bus Stop Club. Directly opposite the flat, I discover from Bondeson’s books, there was an amusement arcade murder in 1974 at 36 Old Compton St where ‘Italian Tony’ Alfredo Zomparelli was shot dead – Barbara Windsor’s husband Ronnie Knight stood trial for it. It’s now a café called Muriel’s Kitchen, which sadly has no link to that other Soho denizen Muriel Belcher. At a former club at 24 Frith St, now the convenience store Dodo I once used occasionally, dodgy French bruiser Charles Baladda was murdered in 1926, as the result of a money-lending arrangement gone wrong.
Most of the best known murders are modern ones and are covered in these books – Lord Lucan, Dr Crippen and Dennis Nilsen for example (the latter elicits a particular waft of disgust from Bondeson). But a good deal of these murders seem to have been furnished by that model of curtain-twitching surveillance, so familiar to readers of Fortean Times, The Illustrated Police News.
The cosmopolitan nature of London means that the objects and subjects of murder can have an international flavour, involve actors and aristocrats, even the King of Greece in one instance. But after the organised crime nexus of Soho, things ripple outwards.
Outside Zone 1, we’re more likely to find the deaths are often sadder and more personal. There are still some sensational cases: a ‘Kensal Rise Bluebeard’, a ‘Demon Barber of Earlsmead Road’, ‘a Hampstead murder triangle’, a ‘Tooting Horror’ (which claimed eight lives) , an ‘Acton Atrocity’, an ‘Ealing Weirdo’ and a ‘Brixton Matricide’.
A surprising number of murder houses still stand, but London’s sole ‘triple murder pub’ The Charlie Brown in Limehouse was pulled down to make way for the Dockland Light Railway. The authorities were so appalled by the behaviour of ghoulish souvenir hunters they went to considerable efforts to disguise locations (most usually by changing street names) after what happened with the Red Barn murder in 1828 where William Corder murdered Maria Marten: sightseers to the Suffolk barn stripped it for souvenirs and planks from it were removed and sold as memorial toothpicks. Her gravestone too was reduced to a stump by people chipping away small bits of it.
These days such ghoulish pleasure is largely catered for by the benign ambulation of walking tours.
Though most of London’s murder victims appear to be women killed by men, women who killed were hypocritically held up as especially evil. Was the skull found during renovations of Sir David Attenborough’s house in Richmond really the head of murder victim Julia Thomas, a former schoolmistress whose body was otherwise boiled in a copper and the bones dumped in the Thames by her foul-mouthed servant Kate Webster? The consensus seems to be yes.
The truth is that in central London you’ve never far from the site of historic crime.
Last night I went to a
“Outside Zone 1, we’re more likely to find the deaths are sadder and more personal”