Murder at the Inn Read online

  Sex and troubled relationships account for a vast number of murders, and again pubs and inns play their part in these tragic episodes, perhaps most famously in the case of Ruth Ellis (see here) but also in the case of another female killer, poisoner Mary Blandy (see here). A man who could not bear to see his relationship fail was behind a less famous murder in Catton near Norwich in 1908. Horace Larter killed his 19-year-old sweetheart Nellie Howard and later that night stumbled into The Maid’s Head in Old Catton, dripping blood and spilling beer. He pleaded guilty to the crime, telling police, ‘In a fit of passion I stabbed her in the neck.’

  Some murders do, of course, seem completely senseless, such as the 1922 murder by 15-year-old Jack Hewitt of Sarah Blake, the landlady at the Crown and Anchor pub, which was located by the aptly named Gallows Tree Common near Pangbourne in Berkshire. Before Hewitt was convicted he put his actions down to watching too many movies, telling police to ‘blame it on the pictures’.

  For some reason, after committing their crimes, murderers often seek refuge in the comforting surroundings of pubs and hotels. When Harry Roberts and two accomplices killed three police officers in 1966 in what would become known as the Massacre of Braybrook Street, the felons went on the run. Roberts checked into London’s grand Russell Hotel. While staying here he bought camping equipment, subsequently managing to avoid capture for three months before being apprehended and locked up for life. Thankfully the long arm of the law usually does catch up with murderers, and they have often been arrested in pubs, such as William Wilton who killed his wife, Sarah, in Brighton in 1887. He was picked up just hours later in the Windmill, now The Dyke Pub & Kitchen, confessing there and then.

  Murder victims have even turned up in pubs many years after the event! In October 2010, workmen were redeveloping a derelict pub in Richmond-upon-Thames called the Hole in the Wall for the naturalist and filmmaker David Attenborough who lived next door. They discovered a skull which had been buried where the pub’s stables had once stood. Scientific tests concluded that it was the missing head of Julia Martha Thomas, a widow who was known to have been murdered by her maid, Kate Webster, on 2 March 1879 in a house nearby. Webster first pushed her victim down the stairs, then boiled her body before disposing of the body parts around south-west London. She even tried to sell the fatty remains of the dead woman as dripping to the landlady at the Hole in the Wall. Webster was hanged in July 1879 at Wandsworth Prison.

  LOCATIONS: The Bull, Hall Street, Long Melford, Sudbury, Suffolk, CO10 9JG, 01787 378494, www.oldenglishinns.co.uk; Maid’s Head Hotel, No. 20 Tombland, Norwich, NR3 1LB, 01603 209955, maidsheadhotel.co.uk; The Grenadier, No. 18 Wilton Row, London, SW1X 7NR, 020 7235 3074, www.taylor-walker.co.uk; The Cat Inn, Queen’s Square, West Hoathly, West Sussex, RH19 4PP, 01342 810369, www.catinn.co.uk; Double Tree, No. 4 Bryanston Street, Marble Arch, London, W1H 7BY, 020 7935 2361, doubletree3.hilton.com; Millennium Hotel, No. 44 Grosvenor Square, London, W1K 2HP, 020 7629 9400, www.millenniumhotels.co.uk; The Golden Bell, Leighton Buzzard, No. 5 Church Square, Leighton Buzzard, Central Bedfordshire, LU7 1AE, 01525 373330, www.thegoldenbell.co.uk; The Stag, No. 1 Heath Road, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, LU7 3AB, 01525 372710; The Beehive, No. 14 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5RY, 0151 525 8967; The Maid’s Head, No. 85 Spixworth Road, Old Catton, Norwich, Norfolk, NR6 7NH; Hotel Russell, Nos 1–8 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5BE, 020 7837 6470; Dyke Pub & Kitchen, No. 218 Dyke Road, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 5AA, 01273 555672, www.connaughtpub.co.uk

  2

  MURDEROUS LANDLORDSCT

  Most pub landlords and landladies are genial folk. They are people with whom you can share a joke and enjoy a chat. Sometimes they even provide a shoulder to cry on. But there are exceptions to this rule, and a few have been truly villainous. Tales of murderous landlords date back centuries and the concept of the psychopathic innkeeper has a rich heritage in literature and film. This tradition first arose because travel, until relatively recent times, was an extremely hazardous business. There was not only the threat of being robbed by bandits or highwaymen on your journey, but it was difficult to know whom you could trust as you bedded down for the night in an unfamiliar place. At even some of the best inns you could awake to find your possessions gone in the morning, only taking comfort from the fact that you hadn’t been murdered in your bed too.

  The Ostrich Inn at Colnbrook, Berkshire, can trace its history to around 1100 when it was a hospice for travellers, though the present building dates to around 1500. It was probably the Crane Inn, mentioned in Thomas Deloney’s 1600 work, The Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading. This tome included the anything but pleasant account of a landlord by the name of Jarman who robbed rich travellers by boiling them. He constructed a special bed in one of the chambers of the inn above the kitchen. When he was sure his unwitting guest was asleep, the poor soul would then be tipped through a trapdoor into a bubbling cauldron beneath. Jarman, aided by his wife, did away with some sixty people before his ruse was finally rumbled when enquiries were made about one of his missing guests, Thomas Cole. His body was found in the local brook, supposedly giving the village its name. Deloney’s work was, in fact, designed as a fictional tale, but the tale about Jarman, which is supposed to have happened in the reign of Henry I, may well have been based on a true story. After all, serial killers are not a new phenomenon and some of Deloney’s details are quite specific.

  The Ostrich Inn, Colnbrook, West Berkshire, was the setting for the story of a killer innkeeper. (© James Moore)

  Just a few years after Deloney’s work was published, there was a true story of a murder by an innkeeper. In 1654 Thomas Kidderminster, a farmer from Ely in Cambridgeshire, was travelling to London and happened to stay at the now lost White Horse in Chelmsford, Essex. Here he was robbed of the £600 he was carrying and killed by a Mr Sewell, who subsequently gave up running the inn. The murder did not come to light until 1663 when some remains were dug up in the inn’s yard by its new owner, a Mr Turner. They appeared to be of a man who had a hole in the side of his skull. Kidderminster’s widow read a report in a newspaper asking if anyone might have information regarding the case and realised that the rough date of the supposed killing matched the time that Thomas had gone missing. She conducted her own enquiries and in the end witnesses who had been working at the inn spilled the beans about the crime. Sewell and his wife, who was also implicated, died before they could be tried, but Moses Drayne, the inn’s ostler (stableman) at the time of the killing, who had helped bury the body, was hanged for his part in the bloody business.

  Other very real tales of killer landlords are not difficult to come by. William Wyatt, landlord of the former Rose and Crown in Fowey, Cornwall, went to the gallows in 1812 after robbing and murdering Isaiah Folk Valentine, drowning his victim near the quay. In January 1878 James Donoghue, the 31-year-old landlord of the Spinner’s Arms in Bradford, was convicted of killing Michael Dunn after an argument. Dunn’s body was discovered at the back of the pub. In December 1899 Samuel Crozier, landlord of the Admiral Rous Inn at Galleywood Common, Essex, was hanged for murdering his wife, Ann, in a room above the bar. The pub is now a private home.

  Perhaps the most infamous publican to have been convicted of murder was George Chapman, a man later linked to the Jack the Ripper murders. His real name was Severin Koslowski and he was thought to have left his native Poland for England in 1888, the year that the Ripper killings began. What is more, he was living in Whitechapel, the area in which the murders took place. By 1890 he was working as a barber underneath the White Hart pub on Whitechapel High Street. He married a Polish woman called Lucy Baderski but another woman from Poland turned up accusing him of already being her husband. Chapman soon left for America. Strangely, around the same time the Ripper murders dried up too.

  By 1895 he was back, without his wife, and hooked up with a woman called Mary Spink. They lived in Hastings, Sussex, where he worked as a hairdresser while she played the piano. Soon they were back in London where Chapman became
landlord of a former pub, The Prince of Wales in Bartholomew Square. Mary soon became ill with vomiting attacks and died in December 1897. Her death was put down to consumption. Chapman employed a new barmaid, Bessie Taylor, who soon became his ‘wife’. The couple moved to the now demolished Grapes in Bishop’s Stortford, Herts, where they lived for eighteen months before moving back to London. In 1900 they took on the Monument Tavern in Union Street, Borough. In February 1901, Bessie died too, with similar symptoms to Mary’s. Again Chapman moved on, this time to The Crown in Borough High Street, taking on another new barmaid, Maud Marsh. The pair were soon living as husband and wife, but within a year she would be dead. Maud’s symptoms were largely the same as the others, but this time the victim’s mother, who nursed her, became suspicious and alerted the authorities. A post-mortem found that Maud had been poisoned with antimony. An investigation followed and the bodies of Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor were exhumed. They, too, were found to have been poisoned, and in March 1903 Chapman was found guilty of murder. He was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 7 April. While Chapman may have been in the right place at the right time and was clearly a man who was habitually cruel towards women, his method of murder, using poison, does not seem to fit with the violent attacks attributed to the Ripper.

  A much more modern serial killer also had a history as a landlord. Steve Wright is currently serving life for the murder of five prostitutes in a horrendous killing spree in Ipswich, Suffolk, in 2006. Discovering that their former publican had been a serial killer sent shivers down the spines of drinkers at The White Horse in Chislehurst, south-east London, a pub which has more recently been called The Lounge. Wright also ran two other pubs, the now defunct Ferry Boat Inn at Norwich and the Rose and Crown in Plumstead, south-east London.

  Of course being a landlord or landlady can be a dangerous business in itself and they have, themselves, often been the victims of murder. For example, on 10 December 1827, James Winter was executed at Chelmsford for the murder of Thomas Patrick, who ran the Yorkshire Grey pub in Colchester. Patrick had called a constable to the pub after a fight had broken out involving Winter, who then struck the unfortunate landlord with a board. In 1832 William Bradbury, the landlord of the Moorcock Inn, also known as Bill O’Jacks, on lonely Saddleworth Moor, was murdered along with his son Thomas. As he lay dying, the 84-year-old William managed to mutter the words ‘pats’ before expiring. It was not enough information to help solve the killings and the case remains unsolved. The pub was demolished in 1937. A policeman, Herbert Burrows, was the culprit in 1925 when he shot Ernest and Doris Laight, the landlord and landlady of the Garibaldi Inn, Worcester, along with their son. The 23-year-old, who lived across from the pub – which has since become a takeaway – had done it for the meagre sum in the till and managed to give himself away when he foolishly asked fellow officers if they had heard anything about the killings. They hadn’t, as the crime had yet to be reported by anyone else. Burrows was hanged at Gloucester in February 1926.

  LOCATIONS: The Ostrich, High Street, Colnbrook, West Berkshire, SL3 0JZ, 01753 682628, www.theostrichcolnbrook.co.uk; White Hart, No. 89 Whitechapel High Street, Aldgate, London, E1 7RA, 020 7247 1546

  3

  HOLD-UPS, HIDEOUTS

  AND HEISTS

  Whilst most alehouses, pubs and hotels have been primarily venues for a bit of honest drinking and relaxation, some have seethed with thieves and rogues. For centuries they have been convenient places in which criminals of all types have congregated to plan crimes, get some Dutch courage before their exploits and even share out their ill-gotten gains. As early as 1370 it was recorded that Juliana Fox of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, was charged not only with running a brothel in her alehouse (once a very common practice) but knowingly using it as a rendezvous for robbers. Alehouses, which were often little more than rooms with a few benches before the eighteenth century, were places where impoverished tipplers could make a bit on the side by hiding goods or fencing them. By the early 1600s alehouses were being denounced as ‘dens of sheep stealers and robbers’. The concerns were not without basis. During the reign of James I, for instance, a villain called Hampshire Will and fellow thieves met up at a hostelry called The Old Chopping Knife at Wokingham to plan their crime sprees. Yet the role of pubs as places where criminals gathered did not diminish – by the early nineteenth century writers were referring to certain pubs as ‘flash houses’ where thieves would congregate. Indeed this function has continued right up to the present day, and in the last 400 years the types of crime linked to pubs have only multiplied, while the concern about the link between drink and illegality remains as strong as ever.

  Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One includes a robbery carried out by Falstaff and his lowlife associates at Gad’s Hill in Kent, near Rochester. Indeed there is now a pub, the Sir John Falstaff, named after the character at the spot. After the hold-up they retreat to the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, London, a watering hole which really existed and burned down in the Great Fire of 1666. At the time the play was written, in the 1590s, Gads Hill was already an infamous haunt of robbers who regularly preyed on travellers, and Shakespeare’s comic device reflected a serious real-life problem. The proliferation of alehouses and inns during Tudor times went hand in hand with the increase in highwaymen. In 1537, for example, an innkeeper at The Bear in Hungerford testified that three highwayman had lodged with him after robbing a clothier between Bagshot and Windsor Park.

  Of course brigands had always held up travellers but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bold new ‘knights of the road’ found rich pickings among the new stagecoaches and mail coaches which criss-crossed the country. The highwaymen used a multitude of drinking venues as their hideouts. They were both places to gather information and divide up the proceeds of their endeavours. One might think that after committing a robbery they would immediately head to the baser alehouses where a friendly tapster would be in on the act. While this was often the case, they also headed to upmarket inns on the basis that they were less likely to be searched. And whilst inns were grander than common alehouses, the reformed seventeenth-century highwayman John Clavell warned that even here the staff could be in league with the criminals. Clavell particularly highlighted the role of the ostler who, he said, was often a little too eager to help with a guest’s bags in order to weigh them up and work out if they would make a good target on the road for the highwayman who would then give him a commission on a good haul. The Bull Inn at Shooter’s Hill towards the south-east of London, which was first built in 1749 and still exists today, was legendary as a place where highwaymen would size up their victims – it would also be a spot where they were gibbeted once caught and executed. The sheer audacity of some highwaymen in the eighteenth century is exhibited at the Black Horse in Cherhill where there hangs a painting of the Cherhill Gang, a group of robbers who terrorised the roads west from London, apparently holding up travellers whilst totally naked.

  The most famous of all highwaymen is Dick Turpin, the son of an innkeeper who was active in the early eighteenth century. During his years as a criminal, Turpin used many pubs and even lodged in them (see here). But there were plenty of other rascals of the road who made inns and alehouses their headquarters. George Lyon was one of the so-called ‘gentlemen highwaymen’, though by all accounts a rather cack-handed one. He was hanged at Lancaster in 1815 for holding up the Liverpool mail coach, his only successful robbery, which was planned at the Legs of Man in Wigan, a pub which closed in the 1970s. Lyon used horses loaned from the innkeeper at the Bull’s Head Inn in Upholland, also now gone, where he returned to share out the loot with his accomplices. The Royal Anchor Hotel in Liphook, Hampshire, which survives as part of the Hungry Horse chain, was used by the highwayman Captain Jacques. He died there when shot whilst trying to make his escape using a secret passageway behind a fireplace. Meanwhile the highwayman Edward Higgins mixed with polite society at the George and Dragon in Knutsford, Cheshire, an inn which became the Royal Geor
ge and is now a restaurant. Few of his fellow carousers realised that he was leading a double life as a criminal until he was arrested and hanged in November 1767.

  However, as both inns and more humble drinking establishments became more refined towards the end of the eighteenth century, they themselves could be the victims of highwaymen and other robbers. By this era there was often plenty of cash and expensive chattels on the premises. In 1772 at The Sun Inn, Hitchin, three robbers held up the customers and landlord at gunpoint. On the way out with their loot they scratched their initials in the brickwork which can still be seen today. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, many innkeepers began to inform on the highwaymen as they had much to lose in terms of licences and reputation. By the 1830s the era of the highwayman had died out thanks to the development of better roads, tolls and more patrols. Thefts from ‘victualing houses’ continued, however, with figures showing that they made up the third largest type of robbery in Preston that same year.

  During the heyday of smuggling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries bootleggers also used networks of pubs as bases for their activities, often with the cooperation of the publicans. Indeed in 1739 a government agent put the success of smugglers down to the fact that innkeepers often harboured them. Of course, the most famous of all smugglers’ pubs is the Jamaica Inn on Cornwall’s lonely Bodmin Moor, where there is even a museum dedicated to its treacherous history. The writer Daphne Du Maurier put Jamaica Inn on the map with her tales of ships being lured onto the rocks and wrecked so that their cargoes could be plundered. The inn, built in 1750, really was used by smugglers who used 100 different routes across the moors when transporting their contraband, and often made for the isolated Jamaica as a place to store the goods. Among the illicit items were tea, tobacco and brandy. In fact there were hundreds of pubs along England’s south and east coasts which provided the cover for smuggling. The Lobster Smack on Canvey Island, which dates back to 1600, is one of the best known, while the history of the inns in the village of Alfriston in Sussex is interwoven with that of smuggling. Both the fourteenth-century Star and The Market Cross Inn were used by smugglers operating in the English Channel. The latter, which has now cashed in by renaming itself Ye Olde Smugglers Inn, was the headquarters of smuggling leader Stanton Collins. Like many such pubs it has a network of secret tunnels used to escape the beady eyes of the excise officers. It was one of these that met an untimely end when Collins’ gang pushed him off a cliff nearby. Collins was finally arrested and transported to Australia for sheep stealing.