‘ Wanted to clear his conscience’
Ontario man reportedly confesses to 1946 murder of English prostitute
The United Kingdom is trying to extradite a 91- year- old Ontario man who has reportedly confessed to murdering a prostitute 70 years ago in London’s trendy Soho district, then a seedy quarter of brothels and bars.
The unsolved murder of Margaret Cook in November 1946, was one of four killings that sparked rumours of a “Soho Jack,” a central London version of Jack the Ripper, who had stalked prostitutes in the city’s eastern slums 60 years earlier. Police, however, suspected Cook was killed on orders of gangster pimps as a warning to other women to pay their cut.
The truth may be more mundane but no less shocking: That a man shot her in a dispute over payment for sexual services, kept the secret for a lifetime as he raised a family in Canada, then was driven by guilt to walk into an Ontario police station and confess to murdering a woman whose name he could not even remember.
This story, published Thursday in the Sun newspaper in Britain, does not name the man who reportedly confessed, nor any sources, but it describes the extradition efforts in detail. It reports the request was filed last year, with personal approval by Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales.
Canadian authorities would not confirm the request, nor the Sun’s unattributed claim that Canada is reluctant to agree to the extradition “because of his age and the mitigating factor that without his confession, nobody would ever have been any the wiser.”
“Extradition requests are confidential state- to- state communications, so the government of Canada cannot confirm or deny the existence of such a request,” said Ian McLeod, a Department of Justice spokesman.
Margaret Cook, then 26, was born Margaret Willis in the northern textile hub of Bradford, and lived several miles west of Soho, where she worked at the Blue Lagoon club as an exotic dancer. She had served a sentence in a borstal ( a juvenile jail) and the investigation of her murder was complicated by the fact she used several names.
The location of the killing, on Carnaby Street in Soho, would later become famous as a fashion hub in the Sixties. The Beatles and Rolling Stones played shows in the building that once housed the Blue Lagoon, which is now a men’s clothing store, and the district has become an upscale shopping and entertainment area.
In the 1940s and for many years after, however, it was London’s seedy underbelly, and the Blue Lagoon was notorious as a front for prostitution. An Associated Press report at the time described Soho as a “region of street vendors, restaurants and foreigners.”
A press report at the time said the shooting of Cook “took place in a narrow passage between a bricked- up emergency water tank and the door of a club.”
In his book, The Murder Room, about violence in London’s underworld, Donald Thomas wrote that a former policeman noticed a couple arguing, and the woman shouted, “This man has got a gun!”
But the man said, “Get on your way, chum, this has nothing to do with you.”
The ex- cop kept walking, Thomas wrote, then heard a shot and saw the man running away.
Three people chased the shooter but lost him in a crowd. He was described as 25 to 30, about 5- foot- 8 with a dark complexion, wearing a raincoat and a pork- pie hat.
Scotland Yard named a suspect soon after, Robert Currie Wilson, but the Sun reports this is not the man in Canada.
The Sun story, by crime editor Mike Sullivan, reports the confessed shooter, a war veteran, left the U. K. five years after the murder and married and raised a family in Ontario. He became a Canadian citizen and reportedly now lives in a care home.
The confession seems to have been prompted by a skin cancer diagnosis. The Sun quoted an unnamed source: “He is not in good physical health, but is mentally alert. He wanted to clear his conscience before he dies.”
The man told Canadian police he could not remember the victim’s name, but that he shot her outside the Blue Lagoon club, with a Russian- made Second World War pistol, in a dispute over money.
British detectives came to interview him, and apparently believed him after he picked Cook’s picture out of a lineup of photos of similar women of the historical period.
The U. K. has abolished capital punishment, but it would have applied at the time.
There is a police file on the unsolved murder at the U. K. National Archives, due to be released publicly in 2024, unless the British courts get to try the case first.
Extradition requests are confidential ... so the government of Canada cannot confirm or deny the existence of such a request.