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:
[01:02] Hi, Kate.
Speaker 1:
[01:02] Hey, Paul. How's it going?
Speaker 2:
[01:04] It is going good. I've been thinking about this London case.
Speaker 1:
[01:08] Oh, my goodness. Okay. So I'm going to now tell you this case because probably some folks have recognized it. So this is called the Blackout Ripper case because we've talked about the blackouts.
Speaker 2:
[01:21] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[01:21] And I don't know if these actually happened during a blackout. Some must have, but that's what this case is called. So I can do a real quick summary for us. So we're in 1942 in the middle of the Blitz in London. Most of the city is gone. There are still people there. And we have so far two murder victims. One is a woman named Evelyn. She's 50. She's a pharmacist. And she is found strangled with no evidence of sexual assault, but we know what that means. In between two air raid shelters outside in the public. And then we have a second victim who is probably about a 30 minute walk away from the first victim. She is a known sex worker. She's found inside her flat and she has been mutilated, sexually mutilated as well as her throat cut. So we've got some clues. And then we've got this assault that happened. Say goodness, there's a porter who intercepts. And we have outside of a man in an alleyway, a woman who had gone on kind of a mini date, had a drink with a man, he starts to attack her. She fights him off and he starts to strangle her. The porter interrupts this and the man takes off and he leaves behind a key clue, which is a gas mask, which everybody had during the Blitz in London, but it was inside a handbag essentially, or a shoulder bag that a man might carry. And so now we have Scotland Yard saying, maybe this is our first clue. Now, based on your memory, did I do a pretty good wrap up there?
Speaker 2:
[03:02] No, absolutely. And I think you ended by saying that the guy's name is on the gas mask or on the bag that the gas mask was inside of? Is that right?
Speaker 1:
[03:15] Well, so there's something as important, which is the detective examines this gas mask that's left behind in Mary Greta Hayward's case, the one who gets away. And it's in a bag, it's called a haversack, but it's a shoulder bag, essentially. And it has a label on it that this bag belongs to the Royal Air Force, the RAF, a regimental number 52597. And it's printed on this bag. And inside where this gas mask was also, there was a watch that has a worn out strap. You know, this is an identifier for them. It's a piece of military equipment. Mary had said she thought the man was an airman, but she wasn't sure, she wasn't able to really identify this part. So, you know, their next thing is they're going to go to the Royal Air Force and trace this number to figure out who owns this bag, and who owns the gas mask. And I know kind of one of the things you're going to say is it doesn't mean that this is the guy, but it is a clue, right?
Speaker 2:
[04:23] Oh, it's a major clue. That's the logical next step that you have to take. The military, they keep meticulous records. So, I'm confident the investigators are going to be able to get to at least who was assigned to that particular gas mask, and they'll contact that person. That person may say, yeah, that went missing three days ago or something. But you are a huge step closer to identifying who dropped that gas mask during the assault on Mary.
Speaker 1:
[05:00] Thirty minutes before the detective makes the call to the Royal Air Force about the gas mask in the previous assault, there is a call about another assault and another survivor. So, this woman is 22 years old. Her name is Catherine Mulcahy, and she says she was approached by an airman in Piccadilly, okay? He offers her two pounds for sex work. She agrees to five pounds, which is about $400 today. I mean, that to me just seems incredible in 1942, but that was the deal. So this is, you know, Catherine is a sex worker, and they get into a taxi and they go to her flat. So now we're talking about two women who operate out of their personal flats. And her flat's in Paddington. They get there at 11 o'clock that night of the 12th. So at 9:45 p.m., the guy is scared away from potentially killing Mary Greta Haywood, who escapes, and now by 11 o'clock, he is in a taxi and getting out at Catherine's flat in not such a far away, far flung place. But doesn't this seem a little frenetic to you to barely get away from assaulting one woman and then immediately approach the same situation?
Speaker 2:
[06:28] Well, it shows a level of compulsion that he's under at this moment in his life. You know, he's carrying out these homicides and quite frankly, attempt homicide on Mary. I mean, he was strangling her when he got run off. So it's the pace that he is operating at is somewhat unusual for sure. However, it just speaks to the compulsion. You know, I'm wondering what's going on in his life, his personal life, his work life with, you know, it sounds like he's, you know, Air Force, you know, is, are there some stressors that are potentially contributing to this level of compulsion and the prolific nature of his attacks? So it's not, I think what's surprising is, is, you know, being run off and possibly being seen by this porter in Mary's case, and he turns right back around and is now out trolling for victims and approaching Katherine, you know, for sex, you know, with an offer for sex. So there's a brazenness. That is, I think, what strikes me about this scenario, because you think he would be nervous. Oh, I almost got caught, you know, and he would lay low, and he's not. He's just going right back to work.
Speaker 1:
[07:57] Well, let me tell you what happens with Katherine. They get to her flat. They get into bed. They start to have sex. He slams both of his knees into her stomach, and he starts to strangle her. She is fighting for her life. She's kicking at him, and she finally gets him off of her, and she runs into the dark hall of her apartment building, and she's screaming, screaming. Luckily, there's a neighbor that hears her and opens the door, and this guy, the airman, follows her quietly, and he says, I'm sorry, I drank too much. He picks up his clothing from inside the flat. Then he throws her a five-pound bill that is worth $400 today, and he walks out the door.
Speaker 2:
[08:43] Yeah. Again, this is where he's not necessarily either comprehending the risk to himself as a result of this victim being able to escape, or he thinks, hey, we had an agreement. I maybe got a little carried away, and by paying her, she's not going to get the police involved in this attack. But one of the things that I had mentioned previously was, was he only going after women who turned him down? Well, obviously with Katherine, she is cooperating. It's for money. Some of these offenders, they have a, we call them missionary offenders. They have a mission. And so, guys that are going after sex workers, in their mind, they're justifying their attack on these women is because these women are doing something evil. So is that something that's going on inside this particular offender? We'll see how this plays out.
Speaker 1:
[09:49] The serial killer John Reginald Christie from my first book, he did the same thing. He would bring home part-time sex workers, and he would have them inhale like a gas, basically to help their throats because they all had bronchitis, and the gas was attached to the back of the tap of his stove. So it knocked them out, and then he was a physically weak guy. He had to use pantyhose to strangle them most of the time, and then he would sexually assault them during strangulation, and then he would bury them in the garden. And there was just no kind of like explanation. He had murdered a coworker in this exact time period, but after that it was pretty much all, you know, part-time sex workers at his own flat. And so, you know, it's so risky, but you know, whatever, common sense eludes a lot of serial killers, I think.
Speaker 2:
[10:47] Well, they're the ones that get caught too, right?
Speaker 1:
[10:50] Yeah, yep, yep. Look at your last photo that I have in this packet. This is the gas mask. And we're about to find out who the owner of this gas mask is. But we don't know yet if this is the guy or if he just had this stolen from him.
Speaker 2:
[11:09] Yeah. This photo is almost, it's hard to really see the totality of the gas mask. But in essence, this looks like a gas mask where, in essence, it's a black rubber mask that has the circular types of lenses to allow the wearer to look out. And then it appears that it probably has that long tube that the canister attaches to, that is the filter for the toxic gases. But most certainly, if somebody has this style mask on, they could not be identified, their face can't be seen at all.
Speaker 1:
[11:50] No, absolutely. And if you go to Portobello Road in London, which is one of my favorite places to visit, this is where I get the men from, in the back, my Vanity Fair men that I've told you so much about, Portobello Road, they sell those masks.
Speaker 2:
[12:04] Oh, they do?
Speaker 1:
[12:05] You know, that you can just, yeah, from the 1940s. And a lot of World War II stuff, but the masks are there, and I remember being freaked out when I saw them at first. But, you know, so yeah, you're right, it would have completely not only scared the crap out of most people, but it would could have completely obscured their identity, but they were also so used to it because everybody had those, and it was prudent to wear them in certain times during the woods.
Speaker 2:
[12:31] And maybe he's just keeping the gas mask with them because of the uncertainty of when an attack is going to come. He's obviously approaching these women in restaurants, you know, some of these women in restaurants, and they see him, they see his face, they hear his voice, they're interacting with him. So he's not trying to hide who he is initially. But maybe the gas mask is something that, let's say during the escape, as he's leaving the crime scene, he's throwing the gas mask on or has it available in order to try to prevent witnesses from seeing who he is as he's trying to get back home.
Speaker 1:
[13:08] Okay, so they are dealing with Katherine's case, which sounds like it's connected. They are figuring out who owns that gas mask. And the Royal Air Force says that the owner of that bag is a 27-year-old airman. His name is Gordon Frederick Cummins. And they see him, they get him in the interview room, they search him, they find a couple of things, a cigarette case with a yellow band, a comb with some missing teeth that don't have significance yet. So this is what he says. He says, I don't remember a thing. I was totally drunk with a bunch of other servicemen. We wandered over to this restaurant where he solicited for $2,000. You know, Mary, he had a lot to drink there. He left with some woman. I don't even remember who it was, Mary. And after that, he doesn't know what happened. He said about 2.30 in the morning, he regains his senses and he said, Oh no, I violated the curfew. And they're supposed to be in, the airmen are supposed to be in by midnight. And then he goes back to where he lives, which is a bunk house around Regents Park area, which is where the very first attack on Evelyn took place, the pharmacist. So he's there around 4 a.m. And there is, you know, obviously some inconsistency and he does not at first talk about the second incident with Catherine, which happened the same night at 11 p.m. So they're kind of just like letting him sort of spill out what he wants to spill out. And what they're trying to do right now is just nail him down for Mary. Because that's the gas mask where the gas mask appeared was in Mary's case. He says, write down your recollections. And Gordon does. And they're looking at him and his left hand, remember the theory. His left hand has scabs all over it. And he says, Oh yeah, I injured it on a plane engine, which is very possible. But they still charge him with assault. And now that Katherine, the second victim that night, has told her story, the detective is connecting these two. And you know, this all sort of like starts to swirl around this sex worker community. And there is another sex worker who comes forward. She said she took a client who matches Gordon's description exactly. She took him back to her apartment later in the day when they discovered our first victim, Evelyn, February 9th. So if this is our guy, right, he kills Evelyn in the early morning, the pharmacist in the early morning hours, the police discover her later that day. He solicits. She says yes. This woman goes back, takes him back to her flat. They have sex. Nothing bad happens. At first I thought, what? But it's because he noticed that she had a bodyguard. There was a guy, her bodyguard, that was hiding behind a blanket, who was watching all of it to make sure she was okay.
Speaker 2:
[16:32] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[16:33] So that's why we presume nothing happened to this woman.
Speaker 2:
[16:36] The very first victim, Evelyn Hamilton, is there any indication that she was doing any sex work at all? She's just the professional pharmacist, right?
Speaker 1:
[16:51] You got it. Now, her friend said that she was supposed to have dinner with somebody the night before. We don't have details on who that person was. I don't know if it was Gordon or whoever this killer is, but no, no evidence of sex work.
Speaker 2:
[17:03] Okay. Yeah, because now after that case, it appears that all these other women, he's at least approaching, soliciting for sex. Does he do that in that very first case? And she turns him down and now he's following her back home and just does a blitz attack out there in an area where he can't really spend much time with her without risk of actually being seen. And so that first experience, assuming that's his first case, that may have been a learning opportunity, if you will. And he alters his approach with these women, though it's such an odd thing to just start hitting women up, soliciting them for sex at restaurants. You're going to get caught eventually. And you said he was 22?
Speaker 1:
[17:59] 27. He's 27.
Speaker 2:
[18:01] 27. Okay, 27.
Speaker 1:
[18:03] And he's married. We're going to find out more in a second. So what's interesting about what I had learned about sex work during this time period in London was there was not an easy way to distinguish who was in the sex industry and who wasn't. It's not like what you would think about Times Square with the tiny skirts, you know, in the 80s, like the Times Square serial killer that we talked about. There are a lot of part-time sex work women who are trying to get jobs in munitions factories. They're trying to do other things. They don't want to be in sex work and necessarily. So my thought was that he approached Evelyn Hamilton for like what I think what you had said for thinking that she was a sex worker, although she's in her 50s, she was 50. And not that that would have been unusual, but you know, that is a little riskier if that's what even happened or he asked her on a date and that's who she was supposed to have dinner with that night. We don't know.
Speaker 2:
[18:59] Or he could have blitzed her while she was walking home and decided that wasn't going to be the way that he wanted to do it moving forward because it didn't work out for him.
Speaker 1:
[19:09] Right. Yep. You're right. Okay. So we now are on February 13th. February 13th is when they track down Gordon Cummins and they interview him about the assault on Mary. And Catherine's assault had also just happened too the night before. So on the 13th, he's in custody. And the police later that afternoon get a call to Gosfield Street in Fitzrovia, another part of London. A neighbor was concerned about one of the tenants, a woman. And they said that there was a package that had been sitting out for several days. And this was unusual. It would have been a good idea. It would have gotten stolen. But an officer kicks in the door and finds a woman's body on the bed. This is very, very graphic. I'm just warning people. Under the blood-soaked bedsheets, there's a woman who is naked, legs apart, knees bent. She has a silk stocking knotted so tightly around her neck that it has left bruises. And the other stocking was laying on the floor next to the bed. And she is severely needled. There is a five-inch wound across her abdomen that exposes her intestines and cuts through her uterus. There is a deep gaping wound about ten inches long that tears the right side of her inner thigh. Above her vagina, there is a ragged cut. There are five other cuts that stretch from the pubic area to just beyond her vagina. And pushed six inches into her vagina is a wax candle. There is a used condom tossed in the blood that is pooled between her legs. There are actually multiple weapons. There's a blue-handled bread knife. There's a black-handled table knife, a yellow-handled table knife, another one, and a small but sharp white-handled vegetable knife that lies next to her groin. And they are all covered in blood. And there is a metal poker with a broken handle in between her legs. This is so freaking brutal, man. I mean, that's brutal.
Speaker 2:
[21:40] And does Spillsbury do the autopsy in this case?
Speaker 1:
[21:44] He does. He does. And I have information on that. We have the prerequisite detective from Scotland Yard who comes and does the fingerprinting and all of that stuff. And there's a bottle of stout that's there. He takes the fingerprints off that. There's a drinking glass on the mantel. And we have an identification. She's 43. Her name is Margaret, but everybody calls her Peggy Lowe. And she has been a sex worker for 15 years so that she could put her child through schooling, good schooling.
Speaker 2:
[22:18] What happened to Peggy was what was going to happen to Catherine. And by Catherine.
Speaker 1:
[22:23] And Mary.
Speaker 2:
[22:23] And Mary. Now, Mary is a little bit different because she resists while outside, you know? So you see the pattern when he gets these women indoors, like with the second case, Evelyn Oatley, where he does the post-mortem mutilation, the defeminization. And that's what it sounds like he's doing with Peggy. And that's where I'm kind of curious to see, does Spillsbury, you know, determine that these wounds were post-mortem? And so he's being consistent in terms of that part of his behavior.
Speaker 1:
[23:04] So this is what the autopsy says. Spillsbury says that unlike the previous three victims, he believed that Peggy had been beaten before she was strangled and mutilated. And there are large bruises on the back of her head, on her lower left jaw, on her left shoulder and on her left knee. And her right temple has a faint bruise, and her shin is lightly bruised in two places.
Speaker 2:
[23:28] I would say that that's possibly, you know, the injuries he's inflicting as he's trying to overpower her and she's fighting back. You know, so now he's having to step up the level of violence in order to get her under control. You know, that is more, you know, sort of the unpredictable dynamics that, you know, these offenders are confronted with and aren't necessarily being expressed as something that they need to do to satisfy their inner compulsions. The cutting on Peggy's body, you know, that's where I'm curious, are those cuts determined to be postmortem, which would be consistent with the Evelyn Oatley postmortem injuries?
Speaker 1:
[24:17] Here it is. The mutilations inflicted on Lowe, on our last victim, surpassed the savagery, is what Spillsbury is saying. Then those are the murderer that he had inflicted on Evelyn Oatley. Some of the mutilations on this victim happened while she was alive.
Speaker 2:
[24:37] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[24:38] Although very close to death. Now, I don't know if Spillsbury is able to determine that or not, he says she was at the end of her life when he was doing this stuff, but that she felt it.
Speaker 2:
[24:50] Yeah, you know, that may be, he may be able to, Spillsbury may be able to come to that conclusion by correlating the wounds with the types of blood patterns on her body or at the crime scene, showing that per his experience, he would expect to see so much bleeding to have occurred, and he doesn't see it. You know, we have, everybody's heard post-mortem, after death, and then there's anti-mortem before death, but then there's this in-between time, perimortem, in which the pathologist can say she could have been alive, she could have been dead, she was in the process of dying when these injuries were inflicted, and that's what it sounds like to me. He can't definitively say anti-mortem or post-mortem. And she was strangled, you said, as well?
Speaker 1:
[25:42] Strangled, yes. Silk stocking knotted so tightly around her neck that it left bruises.
Speaker 2:
[25:47] And for the serial predator that does ligature strangulation, the most common form of ligature is something like the silk stocking or pantyhose. This is the imagery that they would see in their, you know, the true detective magazines back in the day. It is part of their fantasy is to utilize that type of women's garment in order to do the strangulation. Right now, I would say with the information that this sounds very consistent with the second case, Evelyn Oatley, he may have applied that stocking and then is now starting to cut through her body. And he's experimenting. Why is he using four different knives, you know? So that's just part of him getting up and seeing what he can do with each type of blade. So he's in the process of, I think, really escalating. You know, this is what he wants to do. And he just needs to be able to get these women isolated inside, where now he can spend time to do this type of crime, this type of mutilation on the women's bodies.
Speaker 1:
[27:07] I want to take a quick note and give a lot of props to one of our main sources here. There's an author named Simon Reid, and he wrote a great book called In the Dark, The True Story of the Blackout Ripper. And, you know, it was a really good source. I always like to really pick out the important ones here. This is the same freaking night that we're talking about now. February 13th, 730 in Sussex Gardens. There's a constable who gets a call from a man named Henry Zuani. He is very upset because he went to his wife's flat and he was alarmed. Now, before you ask, they were, it sounds like separated and she had her own flat. One of the reasons why they were separated is because she started doing sex work.
Speaker 2:
[27:58] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[27:58] He said, no. He goes to go see her and there's still a morning milk delivery on the front porch. He goes in the flat because he had a key. There were unwashed dishes in the sink and the bedroom door is locked. That's why he calls the constable. The constable breaks through the exterior bedroom window, climbs in, and this is a really bad scene. This is as bad as the others. Okay. This is a woman named Doris. She's 32 and she is lying diagonally across two blood-soaked twin beds. There is one silk stocking ligature that's tied around her neck, and there's another one that's draped over her right leg. The left side of her face and her right cheek are scratched. Her left breast is mutilated by a four-inch long slice. A half-inch cut partially separates her left nipple from the underlying breast tissue. Okay. There is a deep five and a half-inch gash that travels from her navel to her vagina. Her left groin is wounded by another six-inch cut, and there is a three-inch slash that cuts the left side of her vagina. There are two used condoms on the floor. One is empty, one has semen. There's a bloody razor on a table in the corner. There's a cigarette butt in an ashtray, and the bedroom clock is frozen at eight. I don't know if that's significant or not. There is two spots that are missing on this dusty table, two objects that apparently somebody took, and someone, if Doris had money, it's gone because the purse is essentially empty. That is that scene.
Speaker 2:
[29:51] Any information if these incisions to Doris' body post-mortem?
Speaker 1:
[29:56] So Spillsbury, so you want to get right to Spillsbury. Fingerprints, we've got the fingerprint guy trailing behind all of these cases. So we have Spillsbury, and the autopsy happens on the 14th on Valentine's Day, the next day, 2.30. He says that the four inch slice under Doris' left breast is actually the result of two deep knife cuts. The wounds on her left thigh and her breast were inflicted as she lay dying of strangulation. The other wounds were likely made after death, and he finds no semen on or inside of her body, but there's semen in the condom.
Speaker 2:
[30:36] Sure. Yeah, so it's identical to the previous victims. You know, he's in essence, in his mind, he has killed Doris. He's put the silk stocking around her neck, tied it tightly. You know, she is literally unconscious. And even though her heart, there may still be some blood pressure as she's, you know, laying there. Now he's cutting into her body and look where he's focusing. He's cutting into her breasts, the genital area. And remember, we did the episode on Black Dahlia. And again, with Black Dahlia, you have a true sexual status because he's doing much of that mutilation while she's alive. In this case, this guy is doing it perimortem. In his mind, he may be thinking she's dead. You know, so he's not getting that, he doesn't have that need to hear them scream as he's cutting to them, you know, and fight and, you know, and inflicting that type of torture. So, but he is doing that defeminization. And, you know, this is, if these cases were all happening today, these types of behaviors is in part how you can link cases together. You have an offender that is doing sort of, you know, his signature, you know, in essence, post mortem mutilation of the female anatomy is so that's where London probably, even though it's a big city, probably has not experienced this type of series in quite some time, you know. So this is where now the investigators are going to go, well, we all of a sudden have a bunch of women being mutilated, likely going to be the same guy.
Speaker 1:
[32:19] Yep. And you stepped right into my next point was, now the media catches onto this because there's four murders and the police are starting to release the details and how gruesome they are. This, of course, reminds everybody of Jack the Ripper, which was, if you do the math, 12, I mean, just 50-something years ago, there are people still alive who remember Jack the Ripper when this is happening, and that's how we get that moniker, The Blackout Ripper. So we are going to the morning of February 14th. Gordon Cummins is arrested and he is transported to the West End Central Police Station within a few hours. That's when the autopsy of Doris will happen. So this is all happening so quickly. I mean, we started the 9th, and now we're ending on the 14th, and four murders, two assaults, and then probably a third almost with the sex worker who had the guard standing by. Okay, the detectives look at his quarters in Regents Park. So there are essentially trinkets everywhere. He's got something that says DJ, which is from Doris, his last victim. It's a fountain pen. He has a crumpled shirt and a belt with some red stains on them, which they would assume is blood. There's a list, I'll tell you about a little bit of more things. Just know that he collected trinkets from, it seems like every victim.
Speaker 2:
[33:53] We call those souvenirs.
Speaker 1:
[33:56] You know, you correct me every time and I always think, I've got to make a note about that. I know, trinkets. Okay, you're right, souvenirs. So I will make sure I remember the next time. They talked to his wife, Marjorie, who says, this is BS. None of this is happening. There's no way. His fellow cadets say this guy is great. He's kind of cocky, he's a little brash, but he's not dangerous. And he's risky, is what they say. But as in like he'll go out drinking and break her few when he's not supposed to. And the family, his family says he's never had any kind of violent behavior whatsoever. We know the answer to this. Every time I read a story where the family goes, he would have never, she would have never done this over this, over this amount of money. And it's like what is in their head is not what you will think is reasonable. And I would believe anybody could do anything. So everybody is in disbelief. He doesn't show this kind of character, right?
Speaker 2:
[34:54] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[34:55] Okay. Alibis. This is a lot about log books where the airmen are supposed to mark down when they exit, when they leave. You can guess how this goes. You know, they cover for each other. Sometimes they forget. It's done in pencil. And you can erase pencil. I mean, none of this works. So his alibis for any of this are not reliable. So on the 16th, they search garbage cans outside of his barracks and there's rubber boot soles. The theory was that he discarded them because it was snowing on the first night with Evelyn Hamilton and there were prints. In his kitchen, there is a white metal cigarette case in the cupboard with the initials LW. That is with one of the monikers for one of the women there. So there's just a lot of stuff that when we talk about the victim's families, they say, Oh yeah, Evelyn Oatley sometimes went by Lid Award and there are this just a list of stuff that he's picking up. And I know none of that is gonna be surprising to you at all. So will you do me a favor and go through what we have on Gordon at this point, and whether this would be enough to take the trial today?
Speaker 2:
[36:14] Well, I think first and foremost, you have the gas mask, and the gas mask, I think you said, did come back to be logging to Gordon Cummings.
Speaker 1:
[36:25] It did.
Speaker 2:
[36:26] And that was dropped at an attack location. You have a living witness who probably gave a description of the man that attacked her, and I'm assuming that description fits Gordon Cummings. You have another living victim, Catherine, who is also going to be able to give a description, and I'm sure that description fits Gordon Cummings. Now, when you get into his residence and are doing a search, you are finding belongings from homicide victims inside his residence. This is all adding up as now it's like, oh, okay, this guy is not only responsible for these attacks on these surviving victims, but he is also mutilating these other women that are found in their flats. So, you know, the case is starting to build up. You have a, you described as a very competent, latent examiner that is going to these crime scenes and processing the crime scenes. So, probably is developing fingerprints, and they would possibly have matched some of those fingerprints back to Gordon. You know, and of course, today, there'd be DNA all over the place, you know, in these, in these cases, but they don't have that back in 1942. You know, Gordon makes admissions about the attack on Mary. So, he's, in his own words, telling law enforcement, yeah, I was with a woman, but I was drunk. I don't remember anything, but that is an admission. So, you know, so the case, this is an easy, easy case. Yes, there is sufficient probable cause in order to be able to charge Gordon with, I think all the cases, except maybe Evelyn Hamilton, unless they find fingerprints on that flashlight that was, you know, in the trench or by the, you know, air raid shelters. But this is a, you know, right now, this is a good case. And I think they're going to have more than what you've told me.
Speaker 1:
[38:37] Well, let me tell you first what his explanations are. So, you know, they have the souvenirs and all of that. But when the detective interviews come in, he does not ask for an attorney, which would have been an option. And he says, so he's going to tick through all of his alibis here. He says he spent the whole day on February 8th, which is the night that Evelyn Hamilton, the first victim, was supposed to go to dinner with somebody. And he said he spent that whole day with his wife and his sister-in-law, and he went back to his barracks just before 10 p.m. I mean, so that's not an alibi. He's saying these things straight out and just saying, here's my explanation, take it or leave it. Because he's not staying with his wife, he has to stay at the barracks. So, you know, maybe he's relying on the sign in, sign out sheet, but on the night of Evelyn Oatley's murder, he and another cadet solicit sex in Piccadilly, but he was too drunk to act on anything, is what he says. And I will tell you that Air Cadet Sampson says that was BS. I was not involved in anything like that. I was not with him, you know, all of that.
Speaker 2:
[39:52] Gordon's digging himself into his own grave. You know, this is what you want during an interview, is you want him to make, you know, definitive statements like this. I was with so-and-so. Okay, what are the investigators going to do? They're going to go talk to so-and-so. And quite frankly, you know, it may sound cruel, but you're going to put jeopardy on this other person, going, you know, this is a homicide investigation. Do you want us to look more closely at you thinking you had involvement? And that guy is going to go, oh no, it was all Gordon, right? You know, so when he's making that type of definitive statement, that's awesome because now law enforcement, the investigators, they go and they try to corroborate or they try to refute that statement. And now the prosecutors love to put that in front of a jury.
Speaker 1:
[40:44] Yep. And he just keeps kind of going with it. I mean, he's admitting to be at the restaurant where Mary was. But, but, you know, he said, I'm sorry, you know, I don't remember what happened after that. Same thing with Catherine. I don't remember. I mean, he literally apologized to her. He says, I was soliciting sex. Oftentimes what it seems like he's saying is, I was soliciting sex and I don't remember who that was. Or, you know, I was too drunk to do anything. He's not flat out, it doesn't seem like he's denying a lot of this stuff. He says that on February 12th, which was when Margaret Lowe and Doris were murdered. He was at a military marching parade he was in, so lots of witnesses. But he said he and a friend ate dinner and drank at this restaurant. And that's where he met Mary, like I was saying, he had a few more brandies and some whiskey. And then he says they went back to her flat and had sex. Mary's story was that did not happen. We went and had a drink and then went back to the restaurant. That's when he attacked me. He says, I never went to Peggy Lowe's flat. I was never in Sussex where Doris was murdered. And he said he might have gone to a flat on Waldorf Street where Evelyn Oatley lived on February 9th. So he is, I mean, I don't know if he's trying to be clever or if he's given up or what's happening, but he has roundabouts admitting that he's at least in these areas soliciting sex workers during some of this time period.
Speaker 2:
[42:20] That's a common ploy that suspects use is that they know, they've been out in public. So they have to account for witnesses saying, yeah, you know, Gordon, I saw Gordon over here. You know, so they're having to feed that. And in essence, they are placing themselves, Gordon is placing themselves in locations where he's crossing paths with the victims. Now, he's trying to say, I was only there doing innocent activities, you know, I'm not the killer. But it's still golden in terms of building a case that eventually is going to be thrown, you know, that information is going to be out there in front of the jury. I mean, imagine Mary, you know, being a witness getting on the stand and the prosecutor saying, can you point out the man who was strangling you that night? And she points at Gordon Cummings.
Speaker 1:
[43:15] Yep. And I would say this with more evidence, their fingerprint guy, thank goodness he was there, they match Gordon's fingerprints to fingerprints from Peggy's apartment, the can opener that was the weapon, in Evelyn's apartment. There were no usable prints from Doris' place when the milk was left out and not from Evelyn Hamilton's. And so they aren't able to get fingerprints in those cases. He's charged with the murders of Evelyn Oatley, the second victim, Peggy, and Doris. There's not enough evidence to charge him in Evelyn Hamilton's case. They had already arrested him for the attack on Mary because that was the connection to the gas mask. So here's the thing that is interesting that happens when you are kind of going through this criminal justice system in the UK, at least in this time period, is you only go on trial for one at a time, if that. So he's only going to go on trial for one of these murders and then it will be a capital case because the UK didn't abolish the death penalty until my case came along where they know that the serial killer in my case had sort of framed an innocent man. And so the death penalty is still very much around, it's hanging. And you've got this evidence and you've got now the cadet, Air Cadet Sampson saying, we did not look at sex workers, we didn't do any of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:
[44:49] Well, I think that that's an interesting legal process. Only one case being tried at a time. You know, over here in the United States, there sometimes is a strategy that is similar to that. Instead of charging, you know, the defendant with everything that they've done, you hold a couple of cases back. In case, let's say he gets acquitted on the cases put that you've charged and prosecuted him for, you still have other cases as backups to go after him on. You know, so I don't know if, you know, the English process, the British process is, you know, if there's such a thing as double jeopardy. That's what we have here in the United States.
Speaker 1:
[45:39] Yeah, I had learned about this with the first book in the 1952 book, because the supposed wrongful conviction, which I think now people aren't quite sure this was a wrongful conviction. It was a man named Timothy Evans who was first confessed and then arrested and put on trial for the murder of his wife and his baby, and they had both been strangled. He happened to live in a building with a serial killer that nobody knew about, who was John Reginald Christie. So what they decided to do with Timothy Evans is they could only put him on trial for one. They went with the little girl's case, Geraldine, because he and his wife had fought so viciously, both of them, that they were afraid that if they charged him and put him on trial for her case, there would be some sort of justifiable self-defense homicide, and so they felt like they could tie the case better to the little girl. So they had to make those kinds of decisions. What's the best strategy and all of that, and really risking, and he was convicted and he was executed, and then later on, when they start digging up bodies in Rillington Place, that's the discovery is, oh no, how could a wife murderer live in the same building as a serial killer? That's impossible. No, it's not. In 1952, there were serial abusers everywhere in that area of London, and so, I don't know. In my book, I make a pretty good case for why I think Timothy Evans actually did murder his own wife and child and her brother. Her brother wrote a book and said he did it. It was not a serial killer. He did it. So anyway, and actually that brings up another point. In that book, the wife and the child were strangled. In the case of John Reginald Christie and the sex workers I told you about, and his wife, they were all strangled too. So that was the, oh, it's a big connection, but we both know that strangulation, I mean, it's the cheapest weapon out there, strangulation, you know, manual strangulation. And so that, it just didn't, that didn't surprise me either. I don't think that makes it a strong connection. You know, I don't, I don't know. It was a complicated case. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[47:51] Well, strangulation is, is frequently used by, by predators because they like to, to feel, you know, and be up and close with their victims. You know, every now and then you run into somebody that prefers to shoot their victims, but that's, that's relatively rare. It's, it's typically going to be strangulation or the use of a knife. They want to feel that, you know. So in fact, Samuel Little, you know, he talks about how when he would strangle his victims, he liked to, you know, feel them swallow. That would make them do that swallowing action. Because so he could feel their neck and the way that, you know, the muscles and everything was moving during that process. These guys are weird. And there's a lot of bad guys out there that do this type of thing.
Speaker 1:
[48:38] Yep. Well, this might not be done here because Scotland Yard is remembering a couple of other cases from the previous year that they think were probably connected. So this is four months earlier, and I'll just go through these quickly. This is a victim October 13th, six months earlier. Her name was Maple Church, and she was found strangled to death in her own lingerie in a bombed out house in Hempstead. And she worked as a clerk by day, and then she worked at a West End canteen at night. She's not a sex worker, but she's in that world at night. She had been strangled by a man who had more power in his left arm than in his right. And I'm assuming it's from bruising, you know, and I don't know if Spillsbury did the autopsy on this. She was partially undressed and slashed in several different places and robbed.
Speaker 2:
[49:31] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[49:32] So there's that one and then there's a woman named Edith Humphreys, which happened a few days after that. She was 48. She was a fire station cook. She was strangled and beaten in her Regents Park home, which is where he lived also. Her skull was fractured, her jaw was broken. There was a stab wound that penetrated her brain after manual straggulation and failed to kill her. Her throat was slit. And they say left-handed killer also. So they're just saying, you know, that this is two other cases that could belong to him. He doesn't go on trial for these though.
Speaker 2:
[50:08] And I mean, entirely possible that Cummings is responsible. I just, having my own experiences trying to, you know, apply a known serial killer to other unsolved cases, only to discover, no, there's other serial killers working in the same area at the same time, doing the same thing. You know, that's, so that's where I'd give a little bit of pause, you know, to those earlier cases, just saying there's a possibility it could be somebody else. I'm not liking the whole, no, it's somebody who's left-handed, you know, and I, if they're seeing some sort of, something consistent in terms of the bruising on the neck, that may have more to do with how the offender is actually doing the strangulation than what his handedness is.
Speaker 1:
[50:59] So to wrap this up, he goes on trial for Evelyn Oatley, the second victim, the end of April. So this is quick. This is two months after all of this starts. There's a little bit of a delay. The jury saw an incorrect display, so they had to disassemble this jury and get another one. So the basic case for the prosecutor, you can imagine, we found all of these souvenirs. We have witnesses. He doesn't have a good alibi anywhere. There's a litany of things. The defense attorney attacked the fingerprints and said, so this is bad fingerprint evidence. This is pattern matching, which we've talked about before. It's subjective. It's not sticking into a computer like we might today. It's subjective. This guy is wrong. He takes the stand. I have no idea why. But when he's cross-examined, he says that he lied about his alibi the night of Evelyn Oatley's murder. Because the log books were found to be wrong, he says that he was intimidated by the police to confess. The jury doesn't believe it, and he is found guilty after 35 minutes of Evelyn Oatley's murder, and he is given the death penalty, and by June, he is dead, hanged.
Speaker 2:
[52:20] That's swift justice there.
Speaker 1:
[52:22] It is. Nobody wants to mess around. So, I mean, what a story. And this is a, this is a, there are documentaries that have been made about this story. It is a lot about like the vulnerability of these women taking this strange man back to their flat and just being so vulnerable. And then of course, you know, if you're looking at Gordon Cummings and what he did to these women, we don't know much about him. And that's okay with me.
Speaker 2:
[52:47] You know, I think what, what strikes me about Gordon Cummings and, and these cases is the, the frequency. You know, that, that really stands out. Now, the, you know, the mutilation of the victims, you know, of course, it's a, it's a horrific crime. But this is not unique to Cummings, you know, and this is having worked to these types of cases now for over 30 years, you know, this is where I, I have taught at classes where there are women that are looking for, you know, tips on how to keep themselves safe. And I tell them, you have to understand that there are men out there who are hunting you. You are prey and you need to protect yourselves as much as you possibly can. And what you read about in the media, about what happens to victims of predators, it is so sanitized. You do not want to be a victim of these types of predators. Because it is, it can be horrific. It absolutely can be. So Cummings, this whole Blackout Ripper, it's Jack the Ripper, there's a certain, almost a salacious aspect to that type of moniker. But because of what he was doing to the victims, it is very, very much in line with the Jack the Ripper and what he was doing to the sex workers. I can't remember exactly everything Jack the Ripper did, but he is mutilating these women's probably after death. And that's where it's very different than a sexual sadist who is torturing women before he kills them.
Speaker 1:
[54:33] Yeah, I mean, this definitely reminded me in a very bad way of Black Dahlia, because that was such a hard case for you and I to talk about. So yeah, I mean, interesting case. I always am excited to talk about cases about really vulnerable groups, of which we know sex workers are part of that group. And also to talk about the circumstances that these women were in this particular time period. A lot of them would not have been this vulnerable had they not lost husbands. And a lot of people really just didn't feel like they had another option. And that's what I learned. So next week, no serial killers, I hope. Well, maybe we'll have a serial. Who knows? We don't know. I don't even know.
Speaker 2:
[55:17] You always keep me on my toes. So I'll just sit back and wait to hear what the details on the next case are.
Speaker 1:
[55:24] Wait to hear what I hit you with. Okay, Paul. Well, I will see you next week.
Speaker 2:
[55:27] Awesome. Thanks, Kate.
Speaker 1:
[55:33] This has been an Exactly Right production.
Speaker 2:
[55:36] For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/buriedbonessources.
Speaker 1:
[55:41] Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi.
Speaker 2:
[55:44] Research by Alison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1:
[55:47] Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolade.
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[55:50] Our theme song is by Tom Breyfogle.
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[55:52] Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
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[55:55] Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1:
[55:59] You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.
Speaker 2:
[56:04] 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:
[56:11] And Paul's bestselling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now.
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[56:17] Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.