The Supernatural Murders Read online

  There was no apparent motive for the crime, and at the coroner’s inquest the expected verdict was returned: Murder by Some Person, or Persons, Unknown. Walton was known not to have carried much money around with him; his old tin watch was missing, though its chain was attached to one of the pockets of his waistcoat. No one other than Potter claimed to have seen him out of doors on the day of the murder. What at first must have seemed to be a fairly simple case began to be complicated – chiefly because the locals, shocked or frightened, were chary of giving help to the police.

  There was a suggestion that one of the thousand polyglot inmates of a prisoners-of-war camp near Long Compton was responsible, and Fabian investigated that possibility. An Italian prisoner had been seen trying to dab blood from his clothing while crouched in a ditch near the scene of the murder. With the missing watch in mind, Fabian sent a detachment of Royal Engineers trained in the use of metal-detectors to the ditch. The detectors click-click-clicked the presence of metal in the ground. Tensely, the police waited. A tin watch … ? No – rabbit snares. The mystery was soon solved: the blood on the Italian’s clothes was that of a rabbit – he was guilty only of the relatively minor misdeed of unlawfully leaving the camp to indulge in a spot of poaching. (But that solution raises another mystery: considering how difficult the Germans and Italians made it for their POWs to escape, how was it that the British allowed theirs to wander out of bounds, apparently much as they pleased?)

  Most of the few opinions voiced in the village were conflicting. One farmer insisted that the killer must be a local man who knew just where Walton would be that afternoon – but another was just as sure that, in such a small community, someone must know something if the culprit lived in their midst, and so it stood to reason that he must have come from outside. An informant from Birmingham declared that survivors of an ancient ‘black cult’ lived in and around Lower Quinton – but muddied the declaration by adding that the murderer was from elsewhere … and was actually a woman. In view of the violence of the crime, the idea that it was committed by a murderess may seem improbable – but feminine strength, when stimulated and inflamed by frenzied fantasies or fanaticism, can undoubtedly be awesome.

  While hints of local witchery were still floating around, the police conducted inquiries regarding infrequent, even ‘one-off’, visitors to the district, taking no fewer than four thousand statements from tinkers, gypsies, tramps, travelling salesmen, and even boot-repairers in Salisbury, in an effort to find the owner of some unusually-studded boots, the prints of which were found in the vicinity of Meon Hill. All was without result.

  Of growing importance during this mundane activity was The Legend of the Big Black Dog. In a countryside so rife with esoteric mysteries and hints of the supernatural, tales of ghosts, warning visions, and sinister appearances formed, as it were, a layer of melodrama beneath the surface of prosaic reality. Shortly after the murder, the body of a black dog was found hanging from the branch of a tree not far from the murder site. Superintendent Alec Spooner of the Warwickshire CID told Fabian of a local legend.

  In 1885, a ploughboy reported that on nine successive evenings when returning from work, he had come upon a black dog – which, on the last occasion, turned into a headless woman. The next day, his sister, hale and hearty till then, dropped dead. The boy’s name was Charles Walton. In 1885, the murdered man was a boy – a ploughboy – aged fourteen….

  Once when Fabian was on Meon Hill, a large black dog bounded past him and vanished from sight. Almost immediately, a farm-boy appeared. As he wrote later, Fabian asked him: ‘Looking for that dog, son?’

  The boy went pale. ‘Dog, mister?’

  ‘A black dog …’

  But before Fabian could say more, the boy ‘stumbled off in his heavy earth-clogged boots’.

  Soon afterwards, a police-car ran over a dog; and about the same time, a dead heifer was found in a ditch. Later, when Fabian was in one of the village pubs (named – improbable though it may seem – the Gay Dog), he mentioned his encounters on Meon Hill, and was told of ‘a ghostly large dog with mad eyes’ which was supposed to haunt the district: to see it meant death to the beholder. There is no evidence as to whether or not Fabian felt any discomfort at the thought of his possibly imminent decease, but from then on he – and his colleagues – received even less encouragement from the villagers. ‘Cottage doors were shut in our faces,’ he wrote, ‘and even the most innocent witnesses seemed unable to meet our eyes. Some became ill after we spoke to them … and one night, when we had waited all day to question one man who might have aided us, I said: “I’m inquiring about the late Charles Walton …” He interrupted me gruffly: “He’s been dead and buried a month now – what are you worrying about?” Then he shut his door. So we had to leave it.’

  Shortly before his death in 1978, however, Fabian told crime historian Richard Whittington-Egan that he had long been convinced that he knew the murderer, but had been unable to voice his conviction in his memoirs1 because the man was still alive and protected by the laws of libel.

  According to Fabian, Albert Potter, who had died in 1964, was the only person who could have committed the crime.

  Potter was the last man known to have seen Walton alive (and in the small, compact community, it seemed doubtful that any stranger could have approached the farm on Meon Hill without being noticed). In darkness alleviated only by the light of a torch, Potter was able to walk straight across the fields to the murder-site. His fingerprints were found on the handle of the hay-fork. His evidence at the inquest was both uncertain and unreliable. Firstly, there was the matter of the shirt-sleeves, which he claimed to have spotted (from a distance of more than a quarter of a mile) and by which he said he had recognised Walton, even though there were no shirt-sleeves to spot – or, at any rate, only short ones. Then he had contradicted himself when giving the order of his activities during the day – such as feeding his cattle and collecting a dead heifer (not the one I mentioned earlier) from a ditch. (The dying of two heifers in different ditches within a short while struck Fabian as being an odd coincidence – a fabricated hint of witchery?) Clearly, the coroner was not altogether happy with the answers of the chief witness. ‘You cannot help us any further, can you?’ he asked after a most frustrating interview. ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Potter, adding, with all the signs of earnest regret: ‘I wish I could.’

  1. Fabian of the Yard, (Jarrold, Norwich) 1955.

  Questioned as to whether he got on well with Walton, he said: ‘I never had a row with any man in this country. I just let him get on with his job, and he told me what I owed him. I always trusted him’ – which sounds like any politician’s non-answer to a direct question.

  Potter seems to have been a contradictory sort of person: sullen and unforthcoming, but a church sidesman (not an extraordinarily rare combination, perhaps); an active member of the British Legion, who could be abusive and violent when drunk, as he frequently was; an unsociable and shifty man, yet of seeming rectitude; a lover of cricket (which, in many opinions, would excuse almost anything) and horse-racing (which may partly explain the fact that he was often short of money).

  Apropos of that last point, Potter was in financial straits at the time of the murder. According to Walton’s niece Edith, he had borrowed ‘considerable’ sums of money from her uncle. It may be that Walton was pressing for repayments which Potter was unwilling, or unable, to make.

  Considering all of the above, both Edith and Fabian were convinced of Potter’s guilt. They believed that, when confronted with Walton’s demands for repayment of the debts, he had killed him on the spur of the moment, and then embellished the crime with counterfeit presentments of witchery: cross-shaped wound in chest and neck, pinning to the ground with a hay-fork, dead heifers in ditches, a dead dog hanging from a tree….1

  But the collection of pointers to Potter’s guilt was not enough – not nearly enough – to justify his arrest. ‘And so,’ Fabian wrote in 1955, ten years after the murder, ‘w
e had to leave it’ – with the black clouds of fear and suspicion still hovering over the village of Lower Quinton. Fabian’s last written words on the matter were these:

  ‘In the offices of Warwick Constabulary, the case is not yet closed.’

  In 1960, interest in the case was rekindled by the discovery of an old watch in what had been Charles Walton’s garden. It was impossible to prove that the watch had belonged to him; any fingerprints would have been erased after so long a time in the soil. Even if it was indeed his watch, that could only mean that he had not had it with him on the day he died. What earthly – or, for that matter, unearthly – reason could the murderer have had for planting the thing in his victim’s garden?

  1. With regard to the unnatural deaths of two far more illustrious persons, there are somewhat dubious theories that actual witchcraft underlay them but was concealed. Both Thomas à Becket and William Rufus (King William II) – so the theorists say – were leaders of covens; they were killed because of that, and the reason for their deaths falsified to conceal the unpleasant truth.

  An earlier case of murder, which also gave rise to talk of witchcraft, was discovered in 1943, when some boys searching for birds’ nests found a human skull and other bones, together with rotted clothing, in the hollow trunk of a decayed wych-elm in Hagley Wood, not far from Stourbridge in Worcestershire (and about thirty miles north-west of Lower Quinton). Other bones from the skeleton, and more bits of clothing, were found near the tree. As the result of exceptionally skilful work by forensic scientists and policemen, the skeleton was proved to be that of a woman about five feet tall and of slight build, who had probably been killed some time in 1941. The fact that a piece of the clothing was stuffed in the mouth of the skull suggested death by suffocation. The woman’s identity was never established; a series of apparently-pointless messages chalked on walls in various West Midlands towns led to her being nicknamed ‘Bella’;1 among any number of theories, the most daring was that she was a Dutch-born spy. The place of ‘burial’, in an old tree, raised the spectre of Druidism, with perhaps more justification than in the Lower Quinton case. But it is surely more probable that she was a stranger to the district (an itinerant prostitute?) who was taken to the lonely spot at the foot of the Clent Hills and killed after being robbed and/or raped – and that the criminal, acting practically rather than ritually, used the hollowed wych-elm as a kind of upright coffin, a convenient hiding-place for the signs of his sins.

  1. EDITOR’S NOTE. In the spring of 1991, I gave a talk on ‘the literature of crime’ at the King Edward VI College, Stourbridge, and afterwards, during the discussion period, mentioned the ‘wych-elm murder’ in Hagley Wood, just down the road. Several members of the audience remembered seeing case-associated graffiti in the neighbourhood: most often, ‘WHO PUT BELLA DOWN THE WYCH ELM? or variations on that question. Subsequently, Anne Shiner, a sixth-former at the college, sent me cuttings about the case from local papers; also notes she had made, one saying that she had spoken to a relative who recalled seeing a chalked Bella-message on a wall in Stourbridge within the past five years. And Dr Alan Keightley, the master at the college who had arranged for me to give the talk there, sent me, among other things, a copy of a paperback, Black Country Ghosts & Mysteries, by – I swear – Aristotle Tump (Bugle Publications, Stourbridge, 1987). Unfortunately, though Mr Tump devotes practically half of the book to the Hagley Wood case, practically all of those pages are squandered on accounts of his searches for persons who, he hoped, could throw light on the case – but who, speaking of those he did trace, turned out to be unilluminating.

  The Widow of Hardscrabble

  ALBERT BOROWITZ

  IN MARCH 1925, the supernatural was greatly in vogue among the citizens of Cleveland, Ohio. Harry Houdini had come to town to fight still another battle in his relentless campaign against fraudulent spiritualists. At noon on Friday the 13th, he staged an imitation of a seance at the Palace Theatre in Playhouse Square for a spellbound audience of 1500, including ministers of many of the city’s churches. In the course of his impersonation of a fake medium, Houdini exposed a number of that shameless profession’s most dazzling effects, including floating trumpets, strange voices, and baby hands that touched clergymen who volunteered to be tricked. Departing from the usual reticence of the prestidigitator, Houdini explained how he achieved an apparently magical phenomenon of spirit-writing by the simple device of having an accomplice substitute a slate with a chalked message.

  To the right of its double-column-on-front-page account of the theatrical triumph of the ‘world’s greatest mystifier’, the Cleveland Press published its first report of the hunt for a ‘super-killer’ in neighbouring Medina County. As news developments in the case broke at a dizzying pace in the succeeding weeks, the facts of the bizarre crime were to become shrouded in claims of diabolic influence that were ultimately tested, not by a Houdini, but by the common sense of an Ohio jury.

  The first sign of trouble was a series of unexplained barn-burnings. The little rural Medina County community of Hardscrabble, located near Valley City in Liverpool Township, about thirty miles southwest of Cleveland, was beset by trivial mysteries as well: disappearing jewellry and thefts of wheat and farm implements. It was the fires, though, that most severely disrupted the efforts of the predominantly German Lutheran farmers to wrest a living from the soil of their fields. The first blaze consumed the barn of Mother Gayer, and similar calamities befell Howard Grabbenstetter and Edward Bauer. Villagers whispered about the possibility of an arsonist in their midst; but when two years passed without any more emergencies for the local fire brigade, it seemed that peace had been restored to Hardscrabble.

  In 1924 Medina County seemed to be caught up in the unremarkable rhythm of birth, marriage and death celebrated in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. On 16 December, in its regular column headed ‘The Way of Life’, the Medina County Gazette reported the passing of a woman who had attained the biblical age of three score and ten:

  HASEL. At Liverpool, on December 13, Mrs Sophie Hasel, aged 72 years, 13 months and 16 days. Funeral at Zion Lutheran Church, Dec 14, at 10 am. Burial at Hardscrabble Cemetery.

  If Sophie Hasel’s death appeared commonplace, her funeral proved to be unpleasantly out of the ordinary. After a reception at the Hasel home, five relatives took ill: Sophie’s son Fred, his wife and their fourteen-year-old son Edwin, as well as Fred’s brothers, Henry and Paul.

  On New Year’s Day, 1925, it was the turn of Sophie Hasel’s brother, fifty-nine-year-old Fred Gienke, Sr, and his family to be stricken by a sudden malady. After eating a dinner of warmed-over pork, Fred, his fifty-two-year-old wife Lillie, and four of their six children, Marie (twenty-five), Fred, Jr (twenty-four), Rudolph (seventeen) and Walter (nine), became seriously ill. Lillie Gienke died on the morning of Sunday, 24 January; the hospital doctors speculated about the possibility of a botulism, but the Medina County Gazette death-notice settled generically on ‘ptomaine’. Lillie’s body was laid to rest in Hardscrabble Cemetery, a few steps away from Sophie Hasel’s fresh grave.

  The strange illness attacked the entire surviving Gienke household again on 16 January. This time the two other children, Herman, who was twenty-one, and Richard, a year younger, were also afflicted, as well as Mrs Rose Adams, Lillie Gienke’s sister, who was paying a condolence visit. The family physician, A.G. Appleby, of Valley City, two miles to the south, summoned the Medina County Health Commissioner, H.H. Biggs, who took blood specimens from each member of the family. Dr Biggs also dispatched to the Ohio state health department in Columbus samples of the well-water that the Gienkes used for drinking and cooking, and of the lard which had been used in the two meals that had sickened them. Provisionally, Dr Biggs ruled out the recurrence of a botulism, on the ground that the second illness of the Gienkes had come on too quickly after eating; an alternative theory of typhoid was excluded by the results of the blood-tests.

  By 3 February Biggs was ready to calm the fears of the residents of M
edina County that a dangerous epidemic was at work. He told the Medina County Gazette that another report from the state health authorities, focusing on the Gienkes’ food, showed no evidence of toxic poisoning; the analysis of the household water was still awaited. Unfortunately, the comfort offered by Biggs was premature. On 6 February, a powerful third wave of illness swept the Gienke home: Fred Gienke, Sr, and his children Rudolph and Marie were taken to the hospital; a Cleveland nurse, Mrs Rose Kohli, who had been attending the Gienke family, was also stricken. Two days later, Fred Gienke died in the Elyria hospital, and a few days afterwards was buried beside his wife in the little cemetery on Myrtle Hill in Hardscrabble. According to the Gazette death-notice, the post-mortem examination of Mr Gienke’s body had revealed ‘nothing extraordinary’.

  It was only on 13 March that Gazette readers learned that the facts of the investigation had been largely withheld from them. Under a screaming headline, GIENKE FAMILY WERE POISONED, the paper revealed that arsenic had been established as the cause of the deaths of Lillie and Fred Gienke and of the serious conditions of Rudolph, Marie and young Fred. Final confirmation of arsenical poisoning had been provided by analysis of blood and feces obtained from Marie and Rudolph; the Medina authorities now admitted that a post-mortem examination of the contents of Fred Gienke’s inflamed stomach, previously reported to have been ‘uneventful’, had not yet been undertaken. According to county prosecuting attorney Joseph A. Seymour, the authorities had known for some time that the Gienkes had succumbed to arsenic but had kept that fact from the public ‘in the hope that some clue could be discovered that would lead to information as to how the poison was administered’. Insisting that he had not yet targeted a suspect, Seymour would not even say whether the arsenic had been intentionally added to the Gienkes’ food or drink. However, he ventured the opinion that the poison had been ingested in coffee, and revealed that he was holding part of the contents of a package of unbrewed coffee for analysis. While Seymour performed his demure fan-dance with the truth, the Cleveland Press was more outspoken, declaring that the medical findings had stimulated a ‘hunt for a super-murderer who kills for the mere joy of killing’.