BLACKOUT THE RIPPER
Under cover of the Blitz, a smooth-talking sexual sadist pulled on his RAF uniform and – almost exactly 75 years ago – began a killing spree so horrific and prolific he became known as...
ON A cold Sunday night, Evelyn Hamilton, a 40-year-old chemist, arrived in London with her suitcase, planning to stay the night before travelling to Grimsby to start a new job in a pharmacy.
Charming and intelligent, if a bit lonely perhaps – like many women between the wars, she had not managed to find a husband – Evelyn had lost her job due to wartime cutbacks and hoped this new role would bring her security.
Leaving her suitcase at her boarding house in Marylebone, she popped out for supper at a Lyons Corner house. But she would never return to the property.
The following morning – Monday, February 9, 1942 – an electrician on his way to work spotted a torch lying on the ground near an air raid shelter. He and his companion peered inside and saw something that would haunt them for ever: the body of a woman, lying on her back in the gutter. A policeman heard their shouts and within minutes senior officers were on the scene. They saw that the woman had been strangled. Her skirt was rucked up revealing her stockings and underwear, and her vest had been torn, exposing one breast. It suggested the killer had a sexual motive.
The next day, two meter readers found an even more horrifying scene when a neighbour let them into a flat in Soho, Central London. Their torchlight picked out the body of a woman, her head hanging over the edge of the bed, and blood streaming across the floor.
She was Evelyn Oatley, 35, the flat’s occupant. She had been strangled and her throat had been cut. She had also been sexually mutilated with sickening brutality, using a torch, a razor blade, a tin opener and hair tongs. Were the murders, carried out within 48 hours of each other, the work of the same sexual sadist? Chief Inspector Edward Greeno, of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, thought it likely. Fingerprints revealed the killer in both cases was left-handed. But his prints did not match any held on file. So who was he and could he be caught before he struck again? FEBRUARY sees the 75th anniversary of a momentous month in the Second World War, during which Singapore fell to the Japanese, with other British strongholds soon following. But closer to home, Londoners, still reeling from the Luftwaffe blitz that had shattered the city and claimed so many lives, were haunted by a different kind of killer, one who struck in the dark, slaughtering by night so prolifically and with such sadistic savagery in a grotesque six-day killing spree that he was dubbed the Blackout Ripper.
‘Not since the panic-ridden days in 1888, when Jack the Ripper was abroad in the East End, had London known such a reign of terror,’ said Chief Superintendent Fred Cherrill, one of Scotland Yard’s most famous detectives and the pioneering head of its Fingerprint Department.
The killings and the hunt for the murderer are described in a book, In The Dark, in which author Simon Read draws on Scotland Yard’s case files to narrate the story of the murderer.
Enquiries about the woman in the Soho flat soon established her identity. Evelyn Oatley, a shapely blonde, was an actress, who had married a Lancashire poultry farmer but abandoned him to pursue her West End career. Work had dried up so she bedded strangers partly for the money and because she did not like to be alone in the darkness as the air raid sirens wailed. Evelyn preferred older men – they were less demanding, less prone to violence. But on the night of February 9 she caught the eye of a good-looking young man and decided to relax her rule.
They walked through the dark streets scarred by bombs, gaping holes where houses had once stood, back to her one-room flat, where his charm gave way to horrific violence. Evelyn’s neighbour heard nothing above the sound from the wireless. And even as her body lay in the mortuary, the killer was already hunting for his next victim. AT THE Air Crew Receiving Centre in Regent’s Park, trainees were put through rigorous tests and medicals before they could go on to training wings around the country.
One, Leading Aircraftsman Gordon Frederick Cummins, 28, impressed
He unleashed his sadistic urges during a grotesque six-day spree
his superiors with his efficiency and zeal to transform himself from lowly ground crew into dashing airman.
He was popular with his messmates, though some thought him pretentious: he claimed to be the Honourable Gordon Cummins, illegitimate offspring of an aristocrat and affected an upper-class drawl. He also bragged of his sexual conquests: certainly his easy charm and good looks seemed to melt women’s morals. Despite having an adoring young wife, Marjorie, he bedded innumerable women.
And now that he was posted in London, there was no shortage of them. Cummins was not the only married air cadet to sample the wares of the Piccadilly Commandos, as the sex workers were known. But he had not shown any propensity to violence.
On the night of February 9 he was accompanied into Soho by Air Cadet Felix Sampson. While Sampson went off with a buxom girl named Molly, Cummins selected a blonde named Laura Denmark but, though he paid her, he failed to complete the act, perhaps as a result of all he had drunk.
After this failure he headed back to Piccadilly and spotted another blonde, Evelyn Oatley, and it was on her that he unleashed the sadistic urges that had, perhaps, been bubbling beneath his charming exterior for years. CHIEF Inspector Greeno was sure that a man with such sickening appetites would strike again if police did not find him fast. Within 24 hours, Cummins proved him right. His aristocratic pretensions had led his messmates to nickname him ‘The Duke’. Now, with dreadful irony, he homed in on a woman whose fellow working girls had dubbed ‘The Lady’ due to her fur coat and refined air.
Margaret Lowe was a widow and had a 15-year-old daughter, Barbara. It was in part to pay Barbara’s weekly boarding school fees that she had taken to the streets.
At about 1am on February 11, Margaret was approached by a wellspoken young man. She took him back to her flat and, once again, the nextdoor neighbour heard nothing as Cummins set about his sickening work. Then, he quietly let himself out and returned to his billet where his roommates were snoring obliviously. Meanwhile, in a flat the other side of Regent’s Park, Margaret Lowe’s mutilated body was growing cold.
By now, although the newspapers had devoted little space to the murders of Evelyn Hamilton and Evelyn Oatley, whispers had reached the working girls. Despite police
resources being under huge strain due to black-market racketeering, muggings and burglaries unleashed by the war, Chief Inspector Greeno sent officers out to try to pick up intelligence, hoping the increased presence might deter the killer.
On the night of February 12, Cummins bought drinks for a pretty woman, Mary (also known as Greta) Heywood, 32. He had spotted her in a Piccadilly restaurant where she was waiting for her boyfriend. He propositioned her, thrusting £30 – worth £1,000 today – on to the table, but she told him she was not that kind of girl. She did, however, accompany him into the street. He pulled her into a doorway, kissed her and tried to put his hands inside her skirt. When she told him to stop, he put his hands around her neck and began to squeeze.
As he tightened his grip she fought desperately, struggling to breathe. Just as she fell unconscious to the ground, a torchlight shone into the doorway: a passing night porter had noticed the commotion. Cummins ran off but in his hurry he dropped his respirator, with his RAF number 525987 printed on it.
Still desperate to sate his perverted desires, Cummins continued cruising the streets that night and found prostitute Catherine Mulcahy. He attempted to strangle her but she had kept her boots on in bed and with a kick to his stomach she managed to get him off her, alerting neighbours with screams of ‘Murder!’ Cummins fled, throwing money at Mulcahy as he left.
Furious at being thwarted, he roamed on. In Paddington he encountered Doris Jouannet, a bored housewife who picked up men as much for diversion as for cash.
On her, he at last satisfied his repulsive cravings, strangling her with her silk stocking then ripping her body open with a razor blade.
On February 13, Doris’s elderly husband returned home in the evening from his job as a hotel manager and found the bedroom door locked. When police broke it down they discovered Doris’s horrifically butchered body. A few streets away, Margaret Lowe’s daughter had arrived at her mother’s flat for the weekend, but her knocking went unanswered. Neighbours called the police who kicked the door down and found her remains. Like Doris, she had been strangled and then mutilated with the hallmark sexual sadism of the Blackout Ripper.
But his bloody orgy had already come to an end. Both Heywood and Mulcahy had told police about the airman who had tried to strangle them. The number on his respirator led them to Cummins and when they questioned him on February 13 they found him evasive and arrogant.
A search of his accommodation and possessions uncovered items belonging to his victims: a pen engraved with Doris Jouannet’s initials, a cigarette case Barbara Lowe identified as her mother’s, and another belonging to Evelyn Oatley. One of his shirts was bloodstained and the money he had thrown at Catherine Mulcahy was traced to his payday records.
Fingerprints tied him to the tin opener used to mutilate Evelyn Oatley and to a glass found in Margaret Lowe’s flat, while mortar dust in his gas mask was similar to that found in the shelter where Evelyn Hamilton had been murdered. His trial was brief. He was tried only for Evelyn Oatley’s murder and within 35 minutes, convinced by the fingerprint testimony given by Chief Superintendent Cherrill, the jury found him guilty. On April 28 he was sentenced to death by hanging.
Cummins continued to claim his innocence and his family even attempted to appeal, in vain. He was executed on June 25, 1942, at Wandsworth Prison during an air raid.
His death had brought the killings to an end but left unanswered the question: why? What had turned Cummins from a cheery, easy-going young man with a promising career into such a brutal killer who murdered and mutilated four women in six days, and attacked two others?
As Cummins refused to admit his guilt, the question remained unan-
swered. Police suspected that Evelyn Hamilton was not his first victim: he was also linked with two unsolved murders.
Cummins remains a grotesque enigma. His violence rivalled that of the other Ripper, his killing even more frenzied and almost as prolific: while Jack the Ripper is known to have slaughtered five women over three months, Cummins murdered four in five nights, and would have killed and eviscerated two others had he not been disturbed.
Yet, because of the war, and the fact that he was caught quickly, neither his crimes nor his victims received the level of attention as those of his Victorian predecessor.
Seventy-five years on, it is time to remember them, victims of their time and of a killer of such remorseless brutality that his i nfamy deserves to be far greater.