Serial Killer

The dark phantom of Jack The Ripper, whoever he (or she) might have been has haunted the world of crime fiction and True Crime writing for over 130 years. The catchy four-syllable nickname, probably cooked up by newspaper hacks in the first place, is never long absent from newspaper copy when serial killings have to be written about. Peter Sutcliffe, of course, became the Yorkshire cousin of the original killer, but headline writers in 1960s London plumbed new depths of bad taste and lack of originality when they covered a series of murders where the victims were all engaged in what is now primly known as “The Sex Industry”. Their dire effort? Why, Jack The Stripper, of course!

There are certainly similarities between the Hammersmith Murders and the Whitechapel killings. The victims were all women. They had all, at some point, sold their bodies for money. The locations, although not as tight together as those in 1888, were within a recognisable geographical area. There were ‘canonical’ victims; six in fact, as opposed to the generally accepted quintet during the luridly titled Autumn of Terror. There was subsequent talk of a well-known celebrity being involved. The case has inspired both True Crime reconstructions of the events, and novels based on the killings. Finally, of course, the killer was never found, despite subsequent theories claiming to finally identify the perpetrator. The Hammersmith victims were as follows:

Hannah Tailford:Originally from Northumberland, Tailford was found dead on 2 February 1964 near Hammersmith Bridge. She had been strangled and several of her teeth were missing; her underwear had also been forced down her throat. She was age 30

Irene Lockwood: 26 year-old Lockwood was found dead on 8 April 1964 on the foreshore of the Thames, not far from where Tailford had been discovered; their two deaths were linked and police realized that a serial murderer was at large. Kenneth Archibald, a 57-year-old caretaker, confessed to this murder almost three weeks later, but his confession was dismissed due to inconsistencies in his version of events, and because of the discovery of a third victim.

Helen Barthelemy: Barthelemy, originally from Blackpool, was found dead on 24 April 1964 in an alleyway in Brentford. Barthelemy’s death gave investigators their first solid piece of evidence in the case: flecks of paint used in motor-car manufactories. Police felt that the paint had probably come from the killer’s workplace; they therefore focused on tracing it to a business nearby. Barthelemy was 22.

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Mary Flemming: Flemming’s body was found on 14 July 1964 in a dead-end street in Chiswick. Once again, paint spots were found on the body; many neighbours had also heard a car reversing down the street just before the body was discovered. Mary Flemming was 30 years old.

Frances Brown: 21 year-old Brown was last seen alive on 23 October 1964 by her friend, fellow prostitute Kim Taylor, before her body was found in a car park in Kensington a month later on 25 November. Taylor, who had been with Brown when she was picked up by the man believed to be her killer, was able to provide police with an identikit picture and a description of the man’s car, thought to be either a Ford Zephyr or a Ford Zodiac.

Bridget O’Hara: O’Hara, also known as “Bridie”, was found dead on 16 February 1965 near a storage shed behind the Heron Trading Estate. She had been missing since 11 January. Once again, O’Hara’s body turned up flecks of industrial paint which, incredibly, were traced to a covered transformer just yards from where she had been discovered. Her body also showed signs of having been stored in a warm environment. Bridget O’Hara was 28 years old.

BOOKS ON THE CASE

Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (Anthony LeBern, 1966) is very loosely based on the Hammersmith Murders, and was later filmed as Frenzy (with many changes) by Alfred Hitchcock in 1972. The book title comes, of course, from the celebrated song It’s A Long Way To Tipperary.

Jack of Jumps ( David Seabrook, 2006) is a dazzling mixture of fact, fiction, contemporary accounts of the 1960s, real characters, imaginary conversations and a certain amount of psychogeography after the manner of Iain Sinclair. Seabrook also features Freddie Mills, who died in his car, parked in a London alley, apparently from a self inflicted gunshot.

Bad Penny Blues (Cathi Unsworth, 2009) sticks much closer to the original events, and features several thinly disguised real-life celebrities of the time, including the artist Pauline Boty, David ‘Screaming Lord’ Sutch, Joe Meek, crooner Michael Holliday, and ex-boxer and TV personality Freddie Mills (pictured below). The connection to the crimes is provided by a young copper who is drawn into the circle of Notting Hill artists and bohemians while his day job is to try and find the killer.

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Nick Fennimore is a forensic psychologist, and a Professor at the University of Aberdeen. His past gives him a painful and heartfelt stake in the hunt for a serial killer, as his own wife and child were snatched. Both are now lost to him; wife Rachel, because her body was found shortly after the abduction., and daughter Suzie – well, she is just lost. Neither sight nor sound of her has been sensed in the intervening years, but Fennimore clutches at the straw of her still being alive, and he feverishly scans his own personal CCTV footage of the Paris streets and boulevards in the hope of catching a glimpse of her.

Fennimore has an uneasy relationship with DI Kate Simms, a senior police officer now working in Manchester. They too have a past, but Kate is unhappily married to Keiron, an ambitious schoolteacher who seems more concerned with his own professional advancement than keeping their marriage alive. Keiron may have a justifiable grievance, as Kate has only just returned from a high profile secondment to America, while he has been left to keep the home fires burning, and their two children fed and watered.

Julia Myers and her six year-old daughter Lauren have been taken, perhaps by the same killer who inflicted such trauma on Fennimore. Just as in the Fennimore abduction, the mother – Julia – turns up dead, but where is the daughter? We have the occasional chapter narrated in Lauren’s voice, and Garrett captures her intensity, bafflement and frustration perfectly.

Fennimore has been pursued by a persistent Essex reporter, Carl Lazko, who wants to make a headline-grabbing story out of the wreckage of Fennimore’s personal life, in addition to mounting a campaign to prove that a man called Graham Mitchell is innocent of a murder which has no connection with Fennimore but has all the hallmarks of the academic’s family tragedy.

Josh Brown is a research assistant to Fennimore and as part of his campaign to get the academic on-side, Lazko reveals that Josh is on a witness protection programme and is a member of a notorious Essex crime family. Josh has turned Queen’s Evidence, thus indicting several close family members, hence his new life and new identity. When they appear, in the later part of the book, Josh’s family – his brothers, no less – are chillingly depicted as murderous and callous hooligans. As a Briton, I do sometimes ask the question, “What is it about Essex?” That I fully expected the vindictive brothers to be thoroughly odious probably tells its own story. As I write, I can tell you that there is currently a pressure group working hard to force the removal of the term ‘Essex Girl’ from a popular and inclusive dictionary.

A.D. Garrett is the pseudonym for prize-winning novelist Margaret Murphy (above left), working in consultation with policing and forensics expert, Helen Pepper (above right). I found their latest novel well-paced and accurately researched with intense scientific detail, as one would expect from a novel co-authored by a scientist. My only criticism is that the abduction case is eventually solved in a very dramatic fashion, and this was a master-class in how an author should bring a plot to a thrilling – and bloodstained – conclusion. But then, just as we – that’s you and me, the readers – are calming down after a thrilling denouement, the authors decided to wrap up Fennimore’s own personal obsession – the whereabouts of his daughter. This is done at 110 mph, in very few pages, and I felt that it could easily have been left to another day and another novel, to allow its dramatic potential to be fully exploited.

The two previous books in the series are Everyone Lies (2013) and Believe No One (2014). Truth Will Out will be available from 3^rd November in hardback and Kindle, with a paperback version promised for early 2017. The novels are published by Corsair, which is an imprint of the Little Brown Group.