transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

Speaker 2:
[00:09] And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

Speaker 2:
[00:21] And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Speaker 1:
[00:26] Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens.

Speaker 2:
[00:34] Some are solved, and some are cold, very cold.

Speaker 1:
[00:38] This is Buried Bones.

Speaker 2:
[01:01] Hey, Kate, how are you?

Speaker 1:
[01:03] I'm well, Paul, how about you? Any help updates? We took that. We both feel old sometimes, so we talk about, we've talked about your hip.

Speaker 2:
[01:11] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[01:11] We've talked about my shoulder and my ankle and all kinds of stuff. What about you? Anything new?

Speaker 2:
[01:16] Yeah, you know, on the medical side, I went in for just the routine mole check, you know, with the dermatologist. And, you know, I was horrible throughout the course of my life. Never wore sunscreen. I life guarded, you know, I'd be out in the yard all day in, you know, Central Valley, California, just being cooked by the sun without sunscreen and just constantly getting burned. And I know something's probably going to pop up at some point. So I did go in and they found a spot on the back of my right hand, you know, and they cut it out. And it turns out it's completely benign. Fortunately, they just, you know, the pathology lab came back and said it's some sort of keratosis, you know, but it's just something that people need to pay attention to, just because watching videos on melanoma and what they can look like and how fast they can metastasize and become very dangerous to health.

Speaker 1:
[02:14] So my mom has had melanoma a couple of times, including one most recently. And then one of my daughters, just like, you know, I'm fair skinned, so is she. And so I'm very vigilant about mold checks. And it's really scary, especially with my mom. I mean, she's just she's had it many times and she's so careful. But she's vigilant about it. And she recognizes it sometimes before a doctor will, which is great for her health.

Speaker 2:
[02:42] No, for sure. You know, and it's it's interesting. Like my family, my mother is 100 percent Irish, very, very fair, blue eyed, fair skin. And my brother took after her. He can't be out in the sun. He burns immediately. Whereas my dad is kind of a mix, a surprising mix. We always knew, you know, German and English. But it turns out we did some, you know, genealogy testing. And he has a fair amount of Italian in his his background. And I've taken after my dad from my skin tone. I can tan. And I think it's the Italian, you know, that that got passed down for my dad. But even with the, you know, the ability to actually tan, it doesn't erase the danger of possibly something bad popping up.

Speaker 1:
[03:29] Yeah. So this is a little bit of a PSA to get moles checked, you know, even if you tan and all of that stuff, because that's always been my fear is thinking about, you know, a skin cancer and because I could be prone to it. So yeah, it's important. I remember Paul swimming. And when I was a kid at my dad's apartment after my folks divorced, and my dad, I think must have forgotten to put sunscreen on my back. And I was so burned, I had blisters all over my back. And I have those. It is. And it's, you know, and my kids are pretty good about sunscreen. But I'm glad you got it checked out. I think that, you know, I have friends who do not like going to the doctor, and they really drag their feet. And I'm proud of you because I know you're not a big fan. You said over and over again, you'd have to be like on the ground dragging yourself before you'll go and get a hip replacement or something like that. So I'm proud of you. That's a good step. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:28] You know, I've had other things pop up on my skin and I dig them out myself.

Speaker 1:
[04:36] Are you serious, Paul?

Speaker 2:
[04:38] Yeah. You know, I was talking to the dermatologist and she said, yeah, that's what we call fingernail surgery.

Speaker 1:
[04:45] Oh, that's a don't do this at home, folks.

Speaker 2:
[04:50] That is true. You know, I used to have, you know, maybe a little TMI, but when I was a teenager, I had a fair number of warts on my hands. And there was one that was right on my thumb. And I'd be sitting in my parents' car. And, you know, in the old days, the cars had the cigarette lighters. And so I'd push that in and I'd get that super hot. And I would just sit there and burn the wart.

Speaker 1:
[05:14] That's awful. I did sort of the same thing, but with pimples. I definitely popped a lot of pimples, which is don't do that either, viewers and listeners.

Speaker 2:
[05:25] They say not to, but it's kind of hard to when you want that thing to clear up, you know.

Speaker 1:
[05:30] Yeah. Well, this is light and airy and a stock of medical stuff, and there's no good way to transition into this story that we're getting ready to tackle, which is a huge story. I have found that when we discuss this kind of story that I'm getting ready to unravel, we have to make it a two-parter because you'll never ever be able to say everything that you want to say if I confine you to about an hour or so. So we're doing a two-parter.

Speaker 2:
[05:58] Okay. Looking forward to it.

Speaker 1:
[06:00] Let's set the scene. Very serious right off the bat. This is a story with several victims and the trigger warning, I would say, is a lot of sadism, a lot of misogyny kind of happening in this story, and sexual assault. So this is just a heads up to people. If you want to skip over some sections of this, I will give a warning when it gets really graphic, as you and I always want to do. So, okay, we are in, I've said this all the time, I'm going to quiz you, when I say one of my most favorite cities or like my, what feels like a second home, what city am I usually talking about, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[06:43] I'm going to say Boston, Massachusetts area, right?

Speaker 1:
[06:48] I would say yes, close third, London. London is my spot.

Speaker 2:
[06:55] I wasn't thinking international, okay.

Speaker 1:
[06:57] I should have opened up the boundaries a little bit more. So we're in London and this is 1942. We are in the middle of the Blitz. This is, I think most people would know, 57 days of pure hell for people in London, a bombing campaign from the Nazis. My first book, which is called Death in the Air, takes place in 1952, so 10 years later, and I kind of open with a little girl who was crawling through all of these air raid shelters, bomb shelters, homes that are destroyed in her neighborhood 10 years later, where they still haven't been able to rebuild, and so this is where we are. We're talking about rubble, people's homes, people's lives have been destroyed, and the city at this point is very dark because they have been doing these blackouts. So what would the blackouts be for? This is a little history quiz here for you.

Speaker 2:
[07:57] Oh, that's interesting. They're doing blackouts. Is this to prevent any type of aerial surveillance by the Nazis?

Speaker 1:
[08:06] You got it.

Speaker 2:
[08:07] Yeah, they're just darkening out. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[08:09] Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people have left at this point. If they can leave, they've left. But we have a lot of people who are, you know, in the service or they're with the police who are staying and they're patrolling. So there are air raid shelters, and I'll show you some photos of those because they become important. These are empty, a lot of them, you know, there are bombed out buildings. And so the city I think is very eerie. So you're thinking cutting electricity off and on to the whole city. You're thinking about, you know, transportation stopped, people gone. To me always when I read these descriptions, it feels like one of those zombie apocalypse movies. And so that's the kind of feeling that we're going into here. And the mandatory blackouts, I think, just add to the fear that the people who stayed in the city, which there were a fair number who stayed, that's what they were feeling, you know?

Speaker 2:
[09:07] You know, I'm getting a sense, like in certain areas, you know, throughout the United States within large cities or various counties, you know, we have areas of what we call blight. And within law enforcement, you know, we have what's called the broken window theory, that when you have, let's say you have a house in a neighborhood and that house has, you know, the broken window, it's never fixed and pretty soon it's not being taken care of. And then eventually what ends up happening, you have people that now are squatters inside the house and then crime starts to occur in that neighborhood. And so this is what I'm envisioning, just on a massive scale in London in 1942, because you have all these broken up buildings, you have all these spaces where people are possibly holding up and committing crimes.

Speaker 1:
[09:59] Yep. Let me start with something I usually don't do. We don't jump into pictures very quickly, but luckily for us, we do have pictures with this story. So bring up your little documents, the PDF that I sent you, and we're going to look at photos one, two, and three.

Speaker 2:
[10:17] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[10:18] Okay. So one is, you want to do a brief description of what we see with one?

Speaker 2:
[10:23] Yeah. One is a photo of what appears to be a relatively narrow street that is bordered on both sides along its length of multi-story stone buildings that are obviously just blown out. You have a lot of the stonework is crumbled down onto the street itself. And then, I mean, I might impress you here. It looks like St. Paul's Cathedral is in the backdrop. And I've actually been on top of that dome.

Speaker 1:
[10:57] Wait, what?

Speaker 2:
[10:58] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[10:59] Side story. What? Tell me what?

Speaker 2:
[11:01] Yeah. When I went on a family vacation and took a tour of St. Paul's Cathedral, you can actually walk up and then there's a very scary, narrow ledge with way too low of a barrier. They allow people, the tourists, to walk around the entire circle of the dome before you go back in. And for somebody who's scared of heights, it's pretty scary.

Speaker 1:
[11:31] Okay. Well, thank you for that little piece of, you know, parts of London. That's good. I would assume this is either a, so we have like porters, you know, who might work for hotels or who, you know, just work in manufacturing around the town. We also have police constables and we also have war reserve police officers. And from my first book, The Killer, the serial killer in that book was a war reserve police officer. And so I don't know who this is. This probably is a constable in the hat, but we have these people patrolling around, you know, these empty buildings, which must have been scary for them at night with no electricity.

Speaker 2:
[12:11] Oh, sure. You know, but at the same time, like my perspective is the bad guys have guns. Over there in Britain, they don't have that, right? Unless it was different in 1942 than what it is today.

Speaker 1:
[12:27] Well, what we were seeing in the 40s is depending on the criminal, you know, you would have access to guns, but also think about the servicemen that are coming in and out and they are armed. They are given service weapons. So, you know, in my book in 1952, when we were talking about an uptick of murders in that time period, some of it was servicemen who came home with PTSD and they had weapons. And so there was an unusual part of it. But, you know, I think that the constables and the war reserve police would have had the bully sticks, you know, they would call them, but I don't think they would be armed at that point even with weapons. But who knows? So look at number two, and this is the inside of an air raid shelter. And this is obviously during the blitz or before the blitz where you have just a lot of people crammed most of the time underground. I have, my parents have a neighbor who I used to play at, and they actually had a, I don't know if it was an air raid shelter, they had like a tornado bomb shelter that was under the ground. That's still there. I don't know if the owners would know what it is, but I always found that really fascinating. But this is what it looks like on the inside. And then I'll show you one on the outside, because the exteriors of some of these can look small, but then they go underground and they're fortified. But this is one in the city that held a lot of people.

Speaker 2:
[13:53] Yeah, nope. And you see these people that are sheltered, the women's coats and purses are hung up on hooks on the wall in the background. It's interesting is that several of the women who are paying attention to them, like one woman's looking directly at the camera and she's just smiling. This has almost become norm for them at this time.

Speaker 1:
[14:14] Yeah, I mean, scary, but right. It is the norm when you hear the sirens and you hear the alerts. Okay, look at the third one. And this doesn't actually come from our story. I wanted to explain something because one of these scenes that I'm going to be taking you to, someone is found in between two air raid shelters. But instead of a wall, these have what they call a gutter in between. It's a trench. So I just wanted to show you that these have to be separated and they would sometimes build a trench in between, obviously for drainage, for rain and to fortify it and everything. But there were all kinds of shelters and families had individual shelters, as you can see here. And someone took a stuffed animal and it looks like it put a gas mask on him. Yes, that elephant.

Speaker 2:
[15:05] They're having a little bit of comic relief during this very serious time.

Speaker 1:
[15:12] So you'll see in the cities, you'll see maybe trenches in between the countryside. You might see trenches, in this case we see a wall. But I just wanted to show you that there is a gap in between. But most of the time, if there's a series of air raid shelters, it's not a big gap. They're kind of next to each other.

Speaker 2:
[15:30] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[15:34] Now we need to get to the part of the story where I introduce a victim. Okay. So on the morning of February 9th, 1942. Okay. So this is not far from Regions Park in central London. There's an electrician and he's walking to work. And it had snowed recently, you know, so there's footsteps around and everything. He notices there is what they call an electric torch, which for us is a flashlight. I'm just sorry, you know, UK folks, I'm just going to call it a flashlight for my ease. So this is a flashlight and it's been tossed in between two air raid shelters. The electrician notices this. And so he goes and looks and there is a woman who is dead. She is lying on her back inside what I told you, the gutter, which is a trench in between these two shelters, which were near the flashlight. There is a scarf that covers her face. Her clothing is torn and disheveled. And this is my first piece of bad news for you specifically, Paul, which is we don't have photos of these scenes. I have photos of evidence, but not of these specific scenes. So that's why I'm really trying to kind of fortify us with photos so that you can picture this. So this is what he sees. And of course he immediately calls the police. Do you want me to talk a little bit more about the scene now, or do you want to talk about injuries? What do you think?

Speaker 2:
[17:05] Well, let's, yeah, let's get to the injuries so I can get a sense of what happened to this woman.

Speaker 1:
[17:10] So this is a public space. She's not in her apartment or anything, right? Anybody like this electrician could walk up on it. The police arrive, we have a detective inspector. We have quite a few detectives floating around. And if I think that they're key to the case, then I'll name them. But we have a detective inspector who is with the Albany Street Police. And what he starts to observe is clues on the victim. So she has a women's wristwatch and it's stopped at 1 a.m. She doesn't have a purse with her. So the detective inspector thinks this is a botched robbery. Somebody took the purse. And he says that there is some loose mortar around the shelter that she's closest to, that's in this, you know, this trench. And he says collect it because it's near her body. He says collect it and collect also stuff, you know, the actual mortar that comes off the front of this shelter. And this comes into play later on. Okay, so within about an hour of finding this woman, there's a police surgeon who comes up, and he is the first one to assess the victim. He does not do the autopsy. You know, I always talk about my London police medical examiner crush is Bernard Spillsbury, so I think he'll probably be really happy to see him because he pops up in so many of our cases. So we have him to rely on, which is good. And what's nice about Spillsbury is you already know his credentials. You already, you know, we already sort of believe that he knows what he's talking about, which is certainly not the case with a lot of the older cases that we talk about.

Speaker 2:
[18:53] True.

Speaker 1:
[18:53] Okay, so we have a police surgeon who's gonna come and he assesses her body. He says that he believes at first blush that she has been manually strangled. He doesn't know if this is the cause of death, the exact cause of death, but these are the observations that he has. Although her head and extremities are cold, the parts of her body that had been covered by clothes are still warm. And he says rigor mortis had not completely set in. And what he says is he estimates that she was killed just a couple of hours ago, based on his knowledge of rigor, which has been established for a very long time. So unless somebody has misunderstood something over the years about rigor, I guess we would believe based on what he's saying. What do you think?

Speaker 2:
[19:47] Yeah. Well, rigor is a common thing that happens after death. And so a pathologist or I'm assuming this police surgeon has experience in assessing the rigor and tends to start in the extremities with the smaller muscles and then spreads throughout the body. And that's what he's noticing is that her entire body hasn't gone through rigor yet. So she's still in the process of developing the rigor in the larger parts of the body. There is some variability in terms of how fast rigor can set, it's temperature dependent. They even say sometimes during extreme exertion, like exercise before dying, that that can speed up the onset of rigor. So there's some variables, but fundamentally with his observations, I think I'm agreeing, she's been dead for a few hours.

Speaker 1:
[20:43] Tell me just a tiny bit more about the exertion during exercising, because I hadn't heard that before, because I know rigor is the stiffening of the muscles and joints, right, after you die.

Speaker 2:
[20:53] Well, it is the muscles, you know, and so it's in some ways, and I can't remember the exact biochemistry behind it, but it is a metabolic process. So after death, the body is no longer going through its normal physiology, and with that, the muscles end up tightening up. And during exertion, you know, people have heart attacks when they're exercising, is that it's been shown that that metabolic process of development of rigor and the muscles has a tendency to speed up a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[21:26] Okay. Okay, good to know. I didn't know that. So we tick through, because we're in London and we're with the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, we tick through a few different experts, which I think is good because we're trying to look for credibility. Fingerprinting was a thing in 1942. And, you know, we'll see, it's the cards, the index card method in this. Fingerprinting collection at a crime scene was important. So we have somebody from Scotland Yard. He is the head of Scotland Yard fingerprint department. And he is a pioneering figure in forensics. So good credentials, I would have to say. He comes, he examines the bruises on this woman's neck, who hasn't been identified yet, and he uses a magnifying glass. On the left side of her neck, there is a deep purple bruise. On the right side, there is a cluster of small lighter bruises. Based on this, he says, this guy is left-handed. Which, I mean, does that make sense to you? So you've got the thumb on one side, or can you not tell that from that information?

Speaker 2:
[22:36] No, I would say that he's reaching. You know, the bruising for manual strangulation can take a variety of appearances, and a lot of it is going to be due to the dynamics of the violence that's occurring. The victim is fighting, you know, maybe the offender isn't straight on using both hands around her neck. Maybe he's having to hold her, putting his forearm into her neck on one side. There's just so many variables. I don't, even though he's making an observation of more bruising on the left side of the neck or her right side of the neck than the left, I don't think you can determine handedness by the person who's strangling her for sure. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[23:19] Well, we'll see moving forward if his techniques change at all. We are now going to try to ID this victim. Police canvassed this particular neighborhood near Regent Park, and they have a picture of her, which must be just terrible for people to look at. There is a boarding house manager who identifies her as a woman named Evelyn Hamilton, she's a 40-year-old pharmacist, and she had gone out for a late night dinner on February 8th, and then she never came back, so she's discovered on the 9th, she went out on the 8th. We'll learn a little bit more about her, but not very much because we'll have more information a little bit later about what may have happened that night. I wanted to show you though, Paul, I thought you might find this interesting, her boarding house. So that's photo number four in your packet. What's interesting about this boarding house is, you know, I'm used to sort of like smaller tenement. That's what I would think. Kind of like a little row house in London. And this is her boarding house when you get a chance to look at it on page four.

Speaker 2:
[24:31] I'm looking at it right now. This is an impressive building. Yeah, which, you know, down, you know, down in that part of London, everything is impressive looking. But yeah, this is it's not small. I mean, this is a multi story, you know, stone building that looks like it was built, you know, centuries ago. But yeah, it's it's an impressive building. It looks like it's right on a very, very busy street. There's lots of vehicles and lots of pedestrians that are on the street in front of this building.

Speaker 1:
[25:05] Yep. And so we have Evelyn, who is a professional, a pharmacist, someone, you know, who is trained. So that's our victim here. Okay. So now they've identified her. They are still looking for this purse, which I think they think will help them determine what the motive is because they have not done an autopsy and they have not undressed her yet. So the police are searching around the area. They do find her purse. And Evelyn, like a lot of people in this time period, did not trust banks. So she kept a lot of money on her. And they found a torn handbag that turns out to be hers on a nearby street. There's no cash inside. But the detective from Scotland Yard thinks that he can pull some fingerprints from it. But the only prints that he ends up being able to pull were Evelyn's. So I don't know how much cash she had, but there's a lot. And so that is surmised as the motive as of right now. I don't know how anybody would know, a stranger would know that she's carrying around a lot of cash. But I think in 1942, it wouldn't matter. The crime was relatively high for the people who were there.

Speaker 2:
[26:21] Yeah. And so earlier you mentioned that her clothing had been torn. So but it is, I mean, she's fully dressed as far as we know, right?

Speaker 1:
[26:30] Yes, correct. Okay. Now my hero comes in, Sir Bernard Spillsbury, just an epically well-known Scotland Yard surgeon. He's the one who does the autopsies. And he has done autopsies on some of the most famous cases that come out of the UK, that you can even think of. He was pretty incredible. And we believe him, I think pretty much every time. I don't know if you've ever disagreed with Bernard Spillsbury on something, but, you know, there's always a chance. It's always the first time. Okay. Spillsbury comes and he performs the autopsy. And here's what he says. He says, there are multiple bruises and abrasions that cover Evelyn's face, her neck and her body. There is no evidence of rape, but we also know the thing about that. That doesn't mean a sexual assault of some kind, or frankly, a rape didn't occur. So that doesn't mean anything. Now, this is what I had a question about. He says the cartilage in her larynx is also fractured on both sides, which filled her airways with blood. So that is the manual strangulation. And is the filling with blood a normal thing when the larynx is fractured?

Speaker 2:
[27:48] You know, I can't say that I've seen that from manual strangulation. Of course, you get hemorrhaging from the pressure that the hands are applying to the structures within the neck. And so you'll often see what are called the strap muscles. You know, that's something that they'll look dark. They literally are bruised. And then, of course, you get the trachea, the larynx, that can be impacted. One of the diagnostics of manual strangulation is the hyoid bone. This is a U-shaped bone that's way up high. And it's with manual strangulation, it can't move out of the way. And so it often ends up being fractured versus if there was a ligature, sometimes a hyoid survives that. So in terms of lungs filling up from the hemorrhaging, I personally don't have a victim that I can recall at autopsy demonstrating that. That's interesting.

Speaker 1:
[28:49] OK, but the larynx being fractured is something that, you know, would not be surprising to a lot of people.

Speaker 2:
[28:55] No.

Speaker 1:
[28:56] OK.

Speaker 2:
[28:56] All of the neck structures have the potential to be damaged as a result of strangulation. OK.

Speaker 1:
[29:02] So we have Spillsbury saying that. And then the case doesn't even have a chance to be investigated or go cold because then something else happens the next day. And so we have to put Evelyn Hamilton aside because there is another victim that Scotland Yard doesn't know is connected, but I will tell you is connected to this case. So we are at a different flat and it's the morning of February 10th, which is 24 hours after Evelyn Hamilton at Regents Park is discovered between the two air raid shelters. OK, so there are two workers from the Central London Electric Company that come to an address 153 Waldor Street, and this is in Soho. And Soho is, I estimated, and I could be wrong, but depending on where you are in that area where Regents Park is and where you are in Soho, probably a 30 minute walk. But, you know, this is this is not very far for someone. And this is what they're doing. They're collecting coins. Tell me if you've heard this before. They're collecting coins from each meters flat. And it is a pay as you go system. And this is not a monthly bill. This is a, if you have a shilling or a bob or, you know, whatever the cost was, you pop it in the meter, your electricity comes on. And if you don't have a shilling in however long that shilling lasts, then your electricity goes off. And so there are these meter guys who go around, they have to go into each flat and they have to go to the meter. And just like a parking meter, just like empty it out. So I thought that was interesting. I had remembered that from my first book, but then I totally forgot because I thought, who are these guys? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[30:53] So these meters are literally in each residence.

Speaker 1:
[30:56] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[30:56] Is that okay? So now you have guys that have access to each residence in order to collect the coins.

Speaker 1:
[31:03] Yeah, yeah. And they had gas meters like that too. And that came into play in my story because the people in my first book had so little money that a lot of times they just had gas lamps or a gas stove and that was it. There was no electricity that they could really even afford. And so there were gas meters too. And so you would have a totally different set of utility workers coming into these flats. But they knock. They knock on this one door on the street that I told you about in SoHo, which is in the West End. And the door is not locked, which would be not preferable in this time period. And the door swings open. And this is the part that is graphic. I would say after Evelyn Hamilton, the previous victim, every time I start to talk about the scene and the autopsy, it's going to be very, very graphic. So they see these two workers see a woman's body and she's lumped diagonally across her sofa. Her throat is slashed and a bloody razor blade rests on a nearby blanket. The bloodied white handle of a flashlight shuts out from her vagina. And somebody threw a can opener nearby. And I will tell you both of these are considered weapons. And the can opener was a little surprising to me, but it's just important to establish that because I want to show you, I don't have a photo of the flashlight, like its diameter, but a normal flashlight would be like a normal flashlight for us. It would be a rather large diameter. But I do have a photo of the can opener. So why don't, before we talk about the can opener injuries, that what Spillsbury thinks are the injuries, why don't you look at the can opener? So that is on page five of your document. It's a scary can opener to me.

Speaker 2:
[32:58] Yeah, no, this is an interesting looking tool. I'm looking at what would be the pronged end of the can opener. It's not showing that the handle, the handle is outside of this photo. There's a longer and a shorter hooked blade that would have been used, obviously, to pierce the metal cans. And then in the middle, it almost appears that it's a metal Y-shaped working surface that must be used to grab onto the can as a lever in order to get one of these hooks to get into the metal of the can itself.

Speaker 1:
[33:42] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:43] And this would leave some pretty distinctive looking injuries.

Speaker 1:
[33:48] Yeah. This makes me appreciate the pop tabs that you get on cans now because this looks sharp and it was probably fairly heavy. So, okay. So this is what I'm warning you about the injuries here. So they identify this woman. So remember we have Evelyn Hamilton, who is in a place in between two air raid shelters where anybody can find her. Now we have a woman named Evelyn Oatley. So we have a second Evelyn. Now, Paul, before you get too excited, 1940s London, a lot of people were named Evelyn. This was which I think is a gorgeous name. This is a popular name in that time period, but it is odd. They find documents in this flat that say her name Evelyn Oatley, and she's 34, and she is an ex-poultry farmer, really, really hard work. She really wanted to be a West End actress, which at that time would have been theater, West End and still is, wonderful theater there. She used to go by Leta Ward. Most people knew her as Evelyn. Now, this is where we get into what I think was the difficult sad part that I discovered in my book that was set in 1952 London, which is a lot of the women who were left behind during World War II, had to resort to part-time or full-time sex work because the husbands either took off or they got killed, or boyfriends got killed, and then it was a really bad economic time anyway. She was one of those women. She had resorted to sex work. What I think is interesting is you have a professional woman who's a pharmacist found out in the open publicly, and then you have this woman who is a sex worker who is found inside of her apartment. So, you know, I will say this is the same person who did this. So what does that tell you about these, you know, these two different locations and all of that, and then I can tell you about the injuries, which are also awful?

Speaker 2:
[35:59] Well, right now with just two cases, it's not very informative, but the misperception that the general layperson has about the serial predator is that they're like cookie cutter. Their cases look the same. Their victims look the same. And that is not the case at all. I've worked so many cases, so many series in which the same offender is responsible, but has this type of variety attacks outdoors, breaks into a house and attacks indoors. Different types of victimology is involved. You know, so from just first blush with just two cases, you know, the lack of injuries to Evelyn Hamilton, the first victim, just straight manual strangulation. Now with Evelyn Oatley and he's inside a residence, you know, he's now taking the time for an object insertion with the flashlight. He's utilizing this scary looking can opener to inflict injuries. And you haven't described the extent of those injuries yet. And he's using a razor blade to cut her throat. You know, this may be where he is feeling more secure in this flat where there aren't witnesses potentially that are going to walk up on him. So he can act out, do more behaviors of violence on the second victim. So you know, the difference between the two victims right now for me is not anything surprising. And it's something that I've seen over and over again.

Speaker 1:
[37:39] So if I'm looking at details from Evelyn Hamilton, the first woman, the injuries were bruises. And that's what they say was the cause of death for her, right? So then we're coming down and there's no insertion that we that we see. It could have happened, but they're also saying no evidence of sexual assault, which to them means no evidence of damage, I assume, to the vagina area. And so this is a little different, right?

Speaker 2:
[38:10] Well, it could be, you know, and this is where, you know, with Evelyn Hamilton whose clothes are torn probably during the struggle and she's manually strangled, the offender takes her handbag, her purse appears that cash has been taken. You know, these offenders commit a variety of different types of crimes. So, you know, he may have seen Evelyn Hamilton and is in need of money. And so this was, it was straight up a robbery homicide, to be frank, versus with Evelyn Oatley. You know, is he posing as a customer? You know, and part of, you know, my question's about the victimology. Was she doing sex work out of her flat or was she, you know, there's a variety of different ways. I don't know how things were working in London for the sex workers. You know, was she working a stroll area? Did she have a, you know, a hotel room or was she going into these air raid shelters that are vacant in order to engage with the sexual encounters and the customers?

Speaker 1:
[39:15] It would be all of the above for most women. It would be, so in the case of my first book, it would be the sex worker going to the client's home and the client saying, my wife is gone, everything's fine, and having money. And in my case, my, my, the serial killer in my case was a war reserve police officer who women had seen. So they were comfortable seeing him around. So, you know.

Speaker 2:
[39:43] Well, and, and, you know, the other, I don't think you can dismiss the possibility that, you know, Evelyn Oatley was coincidentally a sex worker, but that's not the reason this offender killed her. He may have just either followed her back to her flat, or he could have broken into her flat, you know, because he just wanted a victim, and she just coincidentally was also somebody that was engaging in sex work.

Speaker 1:
[40:10] Okay. Let me tell you about the weapons a little bit. And then they find her purse, Evelyn number two, they find her purse in the flat, broken compact mirror on the floor, any money that she did had, and we don't even know if she had money in there. It's gone. The fingerprint expert from Scotland Yard, he starts taking his prints, and he takes prints also from the handle of this can opener because it was a weapon. These items, so the razor and the can opener, are not Evelyn's. I thought it was gonna be, I was for sure, oh, he just grabbed this can opener that was on the counter. That people who knew her really well and knew what was in the flat that's not her can opener. Now, I mean, maybe they, I don't know, who knows, but the police are pretty certain he brought those two items with him.

Speaker 2:
[41:02] Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:04] So the police look askew at these meter readers, as I think anybody would, these two men who are going into a woman's flat, like they've done a million times. They also talk to other residents and they have a police surgeon, a different one who comes. He says, based on the state of rigor, he thinks that Evelyn had been dead for three or four hours. So if we believe these estimates on rigor, you've got Evelyn Hamilton, who was murdered in the couple of two hours or so before she's found outside between these air raid shelters. Then the next day, he kills, I mean, it could have been relatively 24 hours later, this other woman inside her flat. So that's where we are.

Speaker 2:
[41:54] In what time is she found? Obviously, these guys collecting coins out of the meter, aren't doing it in the middle of the night. So I'm assuming she's found in the day?

Speaker 1:
[42:04] No, she's found in the morning. I mean, I don't think that they would show up at 7 a.m. I would guess like at 9 a.m. And Evelyn Hamilton, it's also in the morning, but the day before. So you've got these two victims found in the morning. And the rigor shows that they were killed within a few hours of being discovered. So this is 24 hours apart, it seems like.

Speaker 2:
[42:27] We'll see what the next one is like. What kind of pattern is going to be established during the series?

Speaker 1:
[42:34] Well, let's get back to Spillsbury because he does the autopsy here too. He says that Evelyn was first strangled. And then her actual cause of death was that her throat was cut with a razor. The cut is long and deep, he says, six inches across and deep enough to puncture the back of her throat.

Speaker 2:
[42:54] Yeah, the manual strangulation. She may have gone unconscious. He may have died as a result of the strangulation. You know, but these these predators, they're not experts in identifying death. And so oftentimes what I've seen is initially manual strangulation. And then they put a ligature that is tied around the victim's neck to ensure the victim can't come back to life. And I believe that that's probably what's going on with this victim's throat being cut, is the offender is just making sure she's dead when he leaves the flat.

Speaker 1:
[43:30] Okay. So Spillsbury does a closer examination of the injuries that we talked about with the flashlight and how the can opener was potentially used. He says that there are six ragged cuts above her pubic region that he thinks was caused by the can opener and six ragged cuts around her vaginal opening. And he says he thinks this is the can opener and not the straight edge. He said that the flashlight had been forced four inches into her vagina. And he believes this happened after death. He says there's a small amount of blood, but there's no semen that he finds in her vagina. And he would have, he worked on my case. So he would have known, you know, how to look for semen and all of that. So now what do you think?

Speaker 2:
[44:29] So just to clarify, Spillsbury is saying that the six cuts to the pubic and vaginal area were post-mortem.

Speaker 1:
[44:40] Let's say yes to that. Because it says, it's attached to the flashlight comment, but it could be the whole thing. So just to be safe, let's say it's post-mortem.

Speaker 2:
[44:52] Okay, so from sort of a classification of this type of offender, that is important in terms of, is he doing this act while she's alive? Or is he doing this after she's died? If it's while she's alive, and he's inflicting that kind of pain in these very sensitive areas of her body, that is what would be considered a sexual sadist. However, she's dead, and now he is mutilating the female genitalia as well as doing foreign object insertion. This is where you will see some behavioral analysts saying, this is a form of defeminization. You know, going after the female anatomy after death is showing a level of hostility towards women in general.

Speaker 1:
[45:44] And you and I have talked about a case where it's at the other end of it. Do you remember it was a kidnapping of a couple, and there was a young man who was passed out in the back of a car, and who ended up killing this family? Was it a terrible sheriff or was it this young man? And in the autopsy report, I told you, and I don't want to repeat this word again, it was the doctor, they found Nix on his penis. And so you kind of made the same sort of comment, is that an attack on his masculinity? So it's interesting that you're saying that now too, about this case.

Speaker 2:
[46:20] You know, it's hard to talk about how frequently this type of behavior is done by offenders. All I can say it is something that I have seen, consulted on multiple cases with this type of post-mortem activity. It's not uncommon. I'm not saying that it's happening all the time, but this is something that is part of the behaviors expressed by certain types of predators. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[46:49] We have one detective chief inspector in Scotland Yard, and he is tasked with both of these investigations. They immediately think there could be a link here, but the media has not picked up on this yet. I think they're keeping quite a lot of information, and the media has other things to worry about, which is the raids and what's happening in the city. He's coordinating these investigations, and he is trying to find a link between the two Evelyn's. Did they have a man in common? Did they have a boss in common? What is it? There's no link, they can't find it between these two women. This happens all so fast. Evelyn Oatley, her murder happened on, I think I told you it was the 10th. So now we're skipping two days, and we're going to go to the 12th. So around 9:45 p.m. on February 12th, there's a porter, so just a guy who assists kind of everybody, but most of the time, porters I think were people helping you with luggage in hotels or often on trains. He notices a flashlight flickering down a West End alleyway, and then he hears a struggle. He's walking into the middle of this. He approaches, the guy darts from the alley. He drops a gas mask that is in a shoulder bag on the ground, and then he disappears into the darkness. The porter finds a woman lying on the ground. Her skirt is pulled up, and her dress is torn. She is alive. And he walks her to the nearest police station, and there is a detective sergeant who takes down her report. She is named Mary Greta Haywood. So now we have an Evelyn, an Evelyn, and then a Mary. She is 32 years old. And this is what she says happened, unless you want me to pause and you have a question or a comment or something.

Speaker 2:
[48:57] The only thing that's standing out to me right now is in all three cases, we've got a flashlight. It may just be a practical thing. It's so dark during the blackouts. You need to have a light in order to be able to see. I just think it's interesting that in the first two cases, the flashlights were left behind.

Speaker 1:
[49:17] Yeah. In this case, there's a gas mask, and I don't know the significance of it yet, but I don't know if he was going to put it on or what the point was, but everybody had gas masks. There could be some significance we just don't know yet, but that's their first big clue they have is this gas mask.

Speaker 2:
[49:38] I think just off the top of my head, without having more details is that the gas mask also may just be something to obscure his identity. It's just like when we went through the pandemic and everybody had face masks on, you couldn't really identify who these people were.

Speaker 1:
[49:53] Let me tell you what Mary says happened. That night, she was at a restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. She was waiting to meet a friend for dinner, and there is a young man who approaches her. He solicits her for sex, and he is offering her 30 pounds. But in today's money, that would be $2,000.

Speaker 2:
[50:17] Really?

Speaker 1:
[50:17] She says no, but she likes his confidence. I guess it doesn't bother her necessarily that he clearly approaches sex workers. And so she says, let's go to the Trocadero for a cocktail. They go, this is nine o'clock, 45 minutes before the porter discovers the struggle. They go, they have a drink, and then they go back to the restaurant where he found her. He says, I don't know how he brings this up, I knocked out a girl before, she probably thought he was just being braggy and exaggerating. And then he corners her outside the restaurant or nearby in an alley, he starts kissing her. He asks if there is a surface air raid shelter they could slip into, so not an underground one. She says, hell no, she pushes him away. He starts to strangle her and his grip is so tight that she can't scream. But luckily the porter hears this struggle. So that's the story and he takes off.

Speaker 2:
[51:23] Yeah, so it's an interesting approach, you know, and we don't know with Evelyn Hamilton, she went out for a late night dinner, right? You know, is this part of his MO on how to, you know, approach his victims and then at a certain point he's got to get them isolated. So with Mary, you know, it's interesting that the initial approach is this offer for sex, but that may also come into the details you provided at the beginning of this case, is that a lot of these women were resorting to sex work just to make ends meet because their husbands had been killed during the war.

Speaker 1:
[52:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[52:08] You know, so he may have been quite successful, you know, at finding women that would be willing to engage in sex with him for money. That it may be more than just how he's approaching women. There's also an aspect to when he's rejected, you know, are those are those victims that that he ends up killing, you know? So he sounds, especially with Mary, you know, where he's now kind of he's isolated her outside the restaurant. And now he's he's in essence kind of forcing himself on her that, you know, it wouldn't surprise me that he's been a serial rapist up until the point that he starts killing some of these victims.

Speaker 1:
[52:52] Yep. OK, so we have more victims and we have one big clue, which is that gas mask. And so we have a detective who looks at the gas mask and remember it was in a handbag. There is a very, very big clue on the outside of it, and it tells us who their suspect is. And I will have to tell you about it next week because I know, I know, I know. So think about all that in 1942, London.

Speaker 2:
[53:24] You're leaving me hang again. Just come on.

Speaker 1:
[53:28] Sorry, but come back next week. I'll have more.

Speaker 2:
[53:31] I will be back.

Speaker 1:
[53:32] OK, see you in a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[53:34] Thanks Kate.

Speaker 1:
[53:39] This has been an Exactly Right production.

Speaker 2:
[53:41] For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/buriedbonessources.

Speaker 1:
[53:47] Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi.

Speaker 2:
[53:50] Research by Alison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Speaker 1:
[53:53] Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolade.

Speaker 2:
[53:56] Our theme song is by Tom Breyfogle.

Speaker 1:
[53:58] Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2:
[54:00] Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.

Speaker 1:
[54:05] You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Speaker 2:
[54:10] Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind is available now.

Speaker 1:
[54:17] And Paul's bestselling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now.

Speaker 2:
[54:23] Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.