How many wom sadistic Blackou En did the dashing, ut Ripper slaughter?
GORDON CUMMINS remained utterly impassive when he was told in the dock that he would be sentenced to death by hanging. The jury had taken only 35 minutes to convict him of killing that was described by Mr Justice Asquith as being “a sadistic sexual murder...of a ghoulish and horrible type”.
Asked if he had any cause as to why the court should not impose the penalty of death, Cummins replied: “I am completely innocent, sir.”
His attitude of composed calm continued all the way to the day of his execution where, during a wartime air raid, he was said to have drunk a glass of brandy before being led to the gallows.
The 28-year-old RAF serviceman, who affected an aristocratic accent and was known as “the Duke” by his military comrades for his pretensions and desire for high, fast and easy living in thewest End of London, was hanged for the grisly murder of Evelyn Oatley, a sex worker who was strangled and mutilated in her Soho flat.
But it was already incontrovertible by the time of his death that Cummins had
‘There’s no doubt he was a psychopath’
also murdered three other women in a killing spree that would see him dubbed The Blackout Ripper.
“There’s only been three criminals in English history who have got the ‘ripper’ nickname,” says Stephen Wynn, a retired constable with Essex Police and now a fulltime author.
“Jack, of course, Peter Sutcliffe and Gordon Cummins. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was a psychopath. But the mystery is what prompted him to be a calm, RAF pilot one day and a killer the same night before going back to his day job as if nothing had happened.”
As Wynn describes in his new book, over two nights in February 1942 the supposedly charming and debonair Cummins stalked the West End during wartime blackouts and strangled Oatley and three other women in sexually motivated attacks that remain some of the most brutal murders ever seen in the capital.
Using the women’s own underwear to choke them, Cummins would then use anything from torches to tin openers to savagely wound their bodies. He would then “pose” their corpses in positions designed so that whoever found the bodies would have no choice other than to see their exposed genitals.
Cummins methods were not only savage but also, thankfully, woefully and seemingly almost deliberately designed to make his imminent arrest inevitable.
“The police found his gas mask which he’d left behind in a panic after he w turbed during one attack,” Wynn rev
“It had his RAF number on it so i things much easier for the police. A left fingerprints and even stole thing the women’s handbags which wer found in his billet.
“I think he just seemed to have an lutely extraordinary arrogance he never get convicted for anything he
“He genuinely thought that h smarter the police or the legal system
What is beyond doubt due to the of evidence discovered by the poli pathologists at the time was that Cu was guilty of the murders of
Williams, Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe and Doris Jouannet over the nights of February 8 and 9.
BUT during this murderous frenzy he also attacked two other women who survived; Margaret Heywood was saved after Cummins was disturbed in a passageway near Piccadilly Circus by a delivery boy during his attack, while Catherine Mulcahy bravely fought off Cummins after he attempted to kill her in her own flat.
Most of the women he attacked (with the exception of Evelyn Williams) were sex workers, lured in by Cummins charm and his wallet which often had as much as £300 in cash inside it – equivalent to over £20,000 today.
But what intrigues Wynn is the evidence that this wasn’t Cummins first and only killing spree.
The murders of two women in London the previous November have striking similarities to the methods of murder Cummins used in early 1942 with news reports stating that the police considered Cummins to be a “viable suspect” in both the murders of Edith Church and Mabel Humphries.
Mabel was taken into a derelict house on the Hampstead Road and when contractors hired to demolish the buildings arrived the next morning, they found her body placed on boards of the ground floor. Her jaw was swollen from a punch that had knocked her unconscious.
The killer had then ripped off her clothes, pinned her to the floor and strangled her.
Four days later, Edith, a wealthy woman who lived alone in Gloucester Place, was found by a neighbour, sprawled across her bed with her face beaten so badly her jaw was broken. She had been strangled, her throat slit and stabbed in the head.
The blade split her skull and penetrated her brain. Incredibly, still alive, she was taken to hospital but died during surgery without being able to ever give any details of her attacker.
WHAT makes Cummins a suspect in these crimes isn’t just the manner in which Mabel and Edith died but the fact that Cummins’ wife Marjorie was living in London at the time. At the time of their deaths in 1941, Cummins was based at an RAF base in Wiltshire but wasn’t billeted so could have easily travelled the 80 miles or so to London to visit Marjorie and perhaps embark on his first killing spree.
But did the police ever make the connection? Wynn believes so but, as a retired officer himself, even he has been unable to untangle the web of snares that still exist and prevent anyone from taking a closer look at the vital police files from the time.
“I tried for months and months to get the police files on Edith and Mabel opened and got refused every time,” admits Cummins. “They tried to claim that suspects might still be alive. That’s absurd as they’d have to be at least 100 years old!
“The files will be opened on them both, but not for over 20 years from now in
‘Something police don’t want us to see’
Edith’s case. It’s quite clear to me there is something in the files on these women that the police still don’t want us to see.”
The speed of Cummins trial, his total lack of remorse or confession and the many gaping holes in his history and movements make getting conclusive proof difficult. It’s even possible that before the murders of Mabel and Edith he killed more women but in the peak of wartime London their deaths simply weren’t reported at a time when thousands of people went missing each year.
Are there even more Blackout Ripper murders that we don’t know about? Wynn believes the casebook on Gordon Cummins could yet reveal more deeply unpleasant surprises.
“It’s not impossible that Cummins might have killed more. But the real sadness is that we never got an insight into why he did what he did,” concludes Wynn.
“These days, the run up to the trial and a long imprisonment would mean psychologists would have time to work with him. But he was killed so quickly.
“His relatives and his descendants will never know what motivated him to commit these horrific crimes.”
The Blackout Ripper by Stephenwynn is published by Pen and Sword books (£16:99)