Hue and Cree on Hankley Common CATHI UNSWORTH
A series of wigwams appearing on a surrey heath was a prelude to a savage murder with echoes of the Wild West. CATHI UNSWORTH turns back the clock to 1942 and a strange case that was to prove a landmark in forensic history
H ankley Common, near Godalming in Surrey, is the home of one of Britain’s most popular golf courses, an 18-hole range surrounded by heathland designated a Site of Specific Scientific Interest for its unusual plant life. It’s a tranquil haven of heather and silver birch that belies the sinister events of 75 years ago when, in the middle of World War II, a crime was committed here that seemed like something from the Wild West – the Wigwam Murder.
The Army had commandeered the Common. Bulldozers cleared a site for tanks to practise manoeuvres, pushing up 20fthigh mounds of earth to simulate the terrain of a battlefield. On the morning of Wednesday, 7 October 1942, one of these mock battles was in full flight, and for Marine William Moore the scenario was about to become a bit too realistic. As he crawled past one of these piles of earth, he brushed into the outstretched arm of a dead body. 1
Summoned by Moore’s CO, Lieutenant Norman McLeod, Godalming’s Chief Superintendent Richard Webb arrived on the scene at four pm. Having inspected the site, he cordoned off the area and called in Chief Inspector Edward Greeno from Scotland Yard, Dr Eric Gardner of the Surrey County Coroner’s office and the Metropolitan Police’s Forensic Pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. All duly assembled the next morning at the impromptu burial ground.
Dr Simpson’s assistant, Molly Lefebure, 2 described a desolate, rainswept scene on top of a ridge, where the two pathologists began to dig around the protruding limb and she collected insect and plant samples while mortar shells whistled overhead. Gradually, they exposed the body of a young woman; she had gone to her death in a green and white dress, light underwear, ankle socks and the headscarf now wrapped around her neck. Her shoes were missing and her skull had disintegrated, leaving only a tuft of bleached blonde hair.
The remains were transported to Simpson’s base at Guy’s Hospital in London, to be cleansed in carbolic acid, while Greeno organised a dragnet of 60 police to search the Common. Their reconnaissance yielded bone and teeth fragments, from which the two pathologists reconstructed the woman’s skull.
They deduced she had been stabbed several times on the left side of her head, wounds echoed by those found on her right arm and hand that had been incurred in a futile attempt to ward off her attacker. These had not been made by any blade the men had ever encountered before, but by a knife with a pointed hook resembling a parrot’s beak.
The woman had fallen on her face, knocking out her front teeth, after which she received a single, heavy blow on the back of her head that would have killed her instantly. Injuries on her right leg had occurred post-mortem, when her corpse had been dragged through the heathland to the place of her burial. The growth of heather on top of this spot told the pathologists she had lain there for about a month.
Greeno’s team unearthed more pivotal evidence. A heavy birch bough, sharpened at both ends, with several strands of blonde hair stuck in the bark, left approximately 350 yards from the shallow grave and 16 yards away from a military tripwire. Dr Simpson matched it precisely to the cavity in the murdered woman’s skull. Only 50 yards distant, in a dell above the tripwire, were the missing shoes.
In the immediate vicinity of the crime scene was Jasper Camp, where Canadian soldiers trained for three months before being transferred to other arenas. Now that America had joined the war, there were also transient US troops, as well as the British doing their training. Greeno estimated he had about 100,000 possible suspects, most of whom had likely left for faraway battlefields in the time since the murder. 3
But he got a valuable tip-off from a local PC, Tim Halloran. He remembered a curious couple, a bleached-blonde teenager who wore a crucifix and spoke in a more refined manner than her down-at-heel appearance
Joan had scribbled on the walls pictures of wild roses and Biblical texts
would have suggested; and her boyfriend, who resembled a ‘Red Indian’ and had built them a wigwam home on the Common from birch saplings, heather and bracken. Halloran had arrested them for vagrancy two months previously and their names were still in his book: Joan Pearl Wolfe and Private August Sangret of the Regina Rifles, stationed at Jasper Camp.
Sangret’s CO confirmed that he had once arrested Sangret for building wigwams and that soldier had spoken of marrying a local girl named Joan Pearl Wolfe. His course was due to end in two weeks’ time and he had qualified for a fortnight’s leave. The body on the Common had yet to be formally identified and details of the murder investigation had been suppressed to try and prevent the perpetrator from fleeing. Greeno had one chance to interview Sangret before his pay parade on 12 October. Before he was called in, the Provost Sergeant observed the private ducking into the shower-room.
Sangret was half French Canadian, half Cree Indian, born in Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1913. His childhood was dirt poor and he never went to school, though he spoke English and Cree fluently and had learned the traditional skills of his ancestors as a youth. Greeno was as impressed by Sangret’s physique as he was by the private’s recall of the dates of his arrival in England, transfer to Jasper Camp and first meeting with Joan. The Chief Inspector took him for a walk across the Common, where Sangret showed him the sites of his wigwams and a cricket pavilion where the couple had later set up home. Joan had scribbled on the walls: pictures of wild roses, Biblical texts and the address of her mother in Kent.
Meanwhile, back at Jasper Camp, Sangret’s kit was inspected and one of his blankets found to have traces of blood on it. Greeno took it back to Guy’s, where Dr Simpson matched the formation of the stains to the wounds on the body.
With only 24 hours left to charge their suspect, police recovered from the Common a purse, an elephant charm and an Identity Card so soiled it was sent to Scotland Yard for forensic reconstruction. The crucifix that PC Halloran recalled Joan wearing was found snagged on a branch. While the ID card went through the lab, the CI journeyed to Tunbridge Wells to show the charm to Joan’s mother Edith, who said she had bought the item herself. Joan was the eldest of three children born to Edith and her husband Charles, an apparent eccentric who gassed himself when Joan was only seven. Sent to convent school, Joan began running away at the age of 16, when she was engaged to a local man, a marriage she called off in favour of an itinerant lifestyle and a string of affairs with soldiers. At the time of her murder, she had lived apart from her mother for two years.
She had been engaged to another Canadian soldier, Francis Hearn, who promised to marry her only after he knew he was going to be posted back home. Jilted Joan met Sangret the day after Hearn’s departure, on 17 July 1942, at a pub in Godalming. He built their first wigwam, where she lived on bread, lemonade and pork pies, reading the Bible and awaiting his nightly visits, until Military Police found them on 20 August.
A second Cree love nest was erected and subsequently busted a few days later, when Joan was taken to hospital, from where she wrote her lover letters, telling him she was pregnant and asking him to marry her. After being discharged, she moved into the pavilion and began knitting baby clothes.
Sangret told Greeno he had last seen his lover on Monday 12 September, when he found the pavilion deserted. His statement, at 17,000 words, was the longest the CI had ever taken in a murder case. When it was finished, he showed his suspect the crucifix that had been found on the Common and Joan’s shoes.
“I guess you have found her,” Sangret said. “I guess I will get the blame.”
But by then Greeno had already detained Sangret for longer than he was legally allowed. Without the murder weapon, the CI was powerless to charge his suspect or stop him taking his leave.
It wasn’t until Monday 27 November that the Provost Sergeant from Jasper Camp found, hidden in a waste pipe in the shower room Sangret had visited just prior to his police interview, a jack-knife with a strangely hooked point, filed down to resemble a parrot’s beak. The MP who found Joan and Sangret in their wigwam on August 20 and the Provost Corporal at Jasper Camp both recalled having seen Sangret with it. Dr Simpson confirmed it as the murder weapon.
The investigators could now form a clear picture of Joan’s last night. The couple had quarrelled at the dell, probably over marriage, and he attacked her with his knife. Fleeing in terror, Joan ran down the hillside but fell over the tripwire, smashing her teeth. As she lay dazed, Sangret finished her off with a devastating blow from the birch bough. He rolled her up in his army blanket and dragged her to the top of the ridge to bury her, in what Molly Lefebure speculated was an unconscious echo of the rituals of his ancestors, “who always buried their vanquished enemies upon a height”.
Greeno tracked Sangret to his subsequent posting in Aldershot and charged him on 16 December. The trial was held at Kingston Assizes on 24 February 1943. Dr Simpson presented the reconstructed skull as evidence, the first time such an exhibit had been produced at a trial. The jury found Sangret guilty, with a recommendation for mercy that was turned down on appeal by the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison.
The wild man of Hankley Common was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at 9am on 29 April 1943. Conducting his autopsy, Dr Simpson found Joan Pearl’s name tattooed on her lover’s arm. Whether she had been pregnant with his child at the time he killed her had been impossible to ascertain.