Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations (2 page)

Monty failed to reach his fiftieth birthday, succumbing to a cerebral haemorrhage while imbibing at a Marseilles café in 1929. The unfortunate Mrs Taylor died in hospital only a few days after accompanying him to France, having been taken ill with pneumonia during a railway journey on the Calais-Paris-Nice train which featured in the novel
The Mystery of the Blue Train
(1928). Agatha considered it her worst book, for she had written it in the depths of depression immediately following the collapse of her marriage.

When celebrating her eightieth birthday with the publication of her eightieth book in 1970, Agatha Christie revealed how her characters were often derived from real people and real places, while her rich imagination was stimulated from studying newspaper reports of true life crimes. Almost daily, distressing incidents of killing, vandalism, robbery and assault provided inspiration for plots. ‘Could this be England?’ she asked, ‘And yet one knows how much goodness there is in this world of ours?’

Confronted with the ABC murders, Poirot and his colleagues find it natural on several occasions to compare them with the Ripper’s exploits.

(The Agatha Christie Collection No. 5,
The ABC Murders
)

In
The ABC Murders
(1936), Agatha Christie concocted a perplexing and apparently motiveless series of murders carried out in various parts of the country by an alphabetically-obsessed killer travelling by train and taunting Hercule Poirot with letters informing him where is he going to strike next – Andover, Bexhillon-Sea and the railway station at Churston in Torbay. Alongside each corpse is placed a copy of the ABC Railway Guide opened at the page of the town or village where the killing has taken place. A strange, dishevelled character whose name is suspiciously formed from the first three letters of the alphabet, Alexander Bonaparte Cust, staggers into a police station believing he is guilty of the murders, but Poirot is not convinced. Before solving the mystery, the Belgian detective draws a parallel with the world’s most infamous serial murderer in a conversation with his old friend and trusted aide Captain Arthur Hastings: ‘Remember the long continued successes of Jack the Ripper’.

For
The ABC Murders
, Agatha Christie certainly drew inspiration from the celebrated true-life ‘Whitechapel Murders’. They took place in the heart of London’s East End, where homicide was commonplace, yet the sheer ferocity and savagery inflicted on the victims immediately attracted lurid headlines in the press as five prostitutes were killed and mutilated over a three-month period in the autumn of 1888. The first of these so-called ‘canonical’ victims was struck down on 31 August, when the body of Mary ‘Polly’ Nichols was found. Unable to afford a bed in a lodging house, she had been wandering the streets trying to raise money by prostitution when her throat was viciously cut right through to the spinal column, before her skirts were raised and her abdomen ripped open, exposing her intestines. A week later, Annie Chapman met a similar fate when her intestines were removed and laid neatly on the ground, while her womb was removed and taken away by her killer. On the last day of September, an infamous ‘double event’ occurred when two women were slain in a single night. Elizabeth Stride was last seen talking to a man ‘respectable’ in appearance less than thirty minutes before her body was discovered. This time there was no mutilation and blood was still seeping from the dead woman’s throat, indicating that the Ripper had narrowly escaped detection. Forty minutes later, the psychopath struck again and killed Katherine Eddowes. With maniacal zeal, her throat, face and abdomen were slashed and a kidney and womb removed. The worst atrocity was saved for the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, who was attacked in her lodging house on 9 November 1888. When a rent collector called on the streetwalker, he peeped through the window and spotted her naked, bloodied corpse lying on the bed. Her face had been brutalised almost beyond recognition, flesh removed from her abdomen and thighs was found on a bedside table, while the breasts had been sliced off and her heart extracted and removed from the scene of the crime. The shocked gentleman who made the terrible discovery remarked, ‘It looked more like the work of a devil than a man’.

Letters sent to a news agency were signed by the self-proclaimed ‘Jack the Ripper’, and a prominent London citizen received a piece of kidney which the writer claimed he had taken from one of the dead women, while in correspondence purportedly received ‘From Hell’, he boasted ‘tother piece I fried and ate’. Such psychopaths are usually compelled to continue their killing spree until they are apprehended, but following the death of the fifth victim, the murderer’s reign of terror mysteriously ceased and the villain was never brought to justice. Since the time of the atrocities numerous suspects, accomplices and conspirators have continually been named in connection with the crime. These include: members of the royal family, Queen Victoria, Edward Prince of Wales, and Prince Albert Victor; prominent politicians Lord Salisbury, William Gladstone and Randolph Churchill; eminent artists and writers Frank Miles, Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll; and physicians Sir William Gull, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr Neill Cream. The latter was a Glasgow-born physician mentioned by Agatha Christie in
Cat Among the Pigeons
(1959), a tale of international intrigue involving an exclusive school for girls, where a character opines that the villain may be a serial killer like Jack the Ripper or Dr Neill Cream who ‘went about killing an unfortunate type of woman’.

After graduating from Canada’s McGill University, the notorious Dr Cream embarked upon a life of crime involving arson, blackmail, abortion and murder. While practicing as a physician in Chicago he was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking the life of the husband of his current mistress. Released on parole after ten years, he moved to London where he poisoned six prostitutes with strychnine-laced medication ostensibly administered to treat various ailments. Another would-be victim became suspicious and only pretended to swallow some poisoned pills given to her by Cream. She survived to tell the tale and gave vital evidence for the prosecution in the subsequent trial held in 1892.

Like the killer in
The ABC Murders
and the Whitechapel Murders, Cream was an indulgent self-publicist who enjoyed drawing attention to his crimes. In fact, he was the architect of his own downfall in Chicago where his victim was buried, arousing no suspicion that he had died from poisoning until Cream wrote to the district attorney suggesting that the body should be exhumed. Likewise, in London, Cream made an offer to name the ‘Lambeth Murderer’ if Scotland Yard paid him a substantial reward. Sentenced to death, without admitting his guilt, he seemingly confessed to a string of earlier crimes on the scaffold. As the hangman drew the bolt, the condemned man declared with his last breath, ‘I am Jack the …’

It was not often that Agatha Christie modelled a character on a recognisable person in real-life. However, you are tempted to identify Lady Westholme, the overbearing Member of Parliament in
Appointment with Death
who is ‘much respected and almost universally disliked’ with Lady Astor.

Christie biographer Charles Osborne

In the mystery novel
Appointment With Death
(1938), American Lady Mary Westholme is a domineering Member of Parliament married to a country squire. Although Agatha Christie claimed to have based the character on two women she had met in the Far East, readers could barely fail to notice the striking similarity with an American-born lady representing a Devon constituency, Lady Nancy Astor (1879-1964).

The beautiful, vivacious southern belle was twenty-seven years old with one disastrous marriage behind her when she met wealthy socialite Waldorf Astor onboard a liner travelling to England. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple were wed in 1906. Her friend, American cowboy comic Will Rogers, later quipped: ‘Nancy, you sure out-married yourself’. She had a firm belief in the superiority of the female species and countered: ‘I married beneath me – all women do’.

Waldorf had been born in New York on the same day as Nancy. His father, Viscount William Astor, had not endeared himself to his fellow countrymen when he moved his family to England in 1899, publicly stating: ‘America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live’. Becoming a British subject ten years later, he took a shortcut to a peerage by becoming a newspaper tycoon.

In 1908, Waldorf entered politics. Refusing the offer of a safe seat, he became the Tory candidate for Plymouth Sutton, attracted by its historical association with the Pilgrim Fathers and America. Two years later, at the second attempt, he won the seat from the Liberals. During the First World War he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George before his career in the Commons came to end upon the death of his father in 1919. Waldorf inherited the peerage and was obliged to move to the House of Lords.

The part played by women in British society while men were at war had finally won them the vote and the right to stand for Parliament. Lady Astor became the first woman to take her seat when she fought a by-election in the constituency vacated by her husband, which she was to hold for twenty-five years. In her maiden speech she requested: ‘I do not want you to look on your lady member as a fanatic or lunatic. I am simply trying to speak for the hundreds of women and children throughout the country who cannot speak for themselves’.

Her plea fell on deaf ears; the ‘woman in the house’ was mocked relentlessly, her presence bitterly resented in a hitherto exclusive gentleman’s club with no facilities for women. Winston Churchill could not bring himself to speak to her in the Commons for years. When Nancy confronted him about his attitude, he replied, ‘Well, when you entered the House of Commons I felt as though some woman had entered my bathroom and I had nothing to protect myself with except a sponge’. In
Appointment with Death
, Dr Gerard remarks, ‘that woman should be poisoned… It is incredible to me that she has had a husband for many years and that he has not already done so’, drawing on the famous exchange between Astor and Churchill: ‘Winston, if you were my husband I should flavour your coffee with poison’, to which he replied, ‘Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it’.

Nancy gradually overcame male bias. As a spirited opponent of socialism, a champion of women’s rights and children’s welfare, she won popularity as one of the most flamboyant personalities in British public life. When Nancy retired from politics at the end of the Second World War, the Astors had served the people of Plymouth for thirty-five years. Waldorf died in 1952, having supervised the reconstruction plans for the war-ravaged city. On her eightieth birthday in 1959, Nancy became the only woman to be honoured with the Freedom of Plymouth. She died on 2 May 1964 after a stroke. During Nancy’s lifetime, the Astor family had been closely involved in two of the most sensational events of the twentieth century – the
Titanic
tragedy and the Profumo Affair. Coincidentally, both stories also had criminal links to Agatha Christie’s hometown of Torquay.

In 1912 an inquiry into the maritime disaster which claimed the lives of 1,500 people was convened at a New York hotel owned by Waldorf, whose cousin John Jacob Astor was the ‘unsinkable’ luxury liner’s wealthiest victim. The multi-millionaire’s body was found floating in the water with $2,500 on his person. Giving crucial evidence to the inquiry was the helmsman at the moment of impact with the iceberg, Robert Hichens. Some twenty years later, he was the debt-ridden owner of a Torquay pleasure boat that was repossessed. After drinking heavily and brooding about his problems, he bought a revolver and shot the man who had sold him the vessel. Luckily, the bullet only grazed the skull of the blameless victim and Hichens was sentenced to five years imprisonment for attempted murder in November 1933.

Dr Stephen Ward, a central figure in the explosive 1963 political scandal, opened his first osteopathic practice in Torquay, where his father was the vicar of St Matthias Church from 1922-1940. After wartime service, Ward resided in London and treated the rich and famous, including Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. He moved in high circles and, as a talented artist, was invited to sketch members of the royal family at Buckingham Palace. In 1956 he leased a cottage from Waldorf and Nancy’s son, Lord William Astor, on the family estate at Cliveden. It was there at a party that Ward introduced married government minister John Profumo to showgirl Christine Keeler. She was also sleeping with a known Soviet spy, causing the society doctor to observe there was the potential to start ‘World War Three’. Profumo was forced to resign after lying about his fling with Keeler. Stephen Ward was then made the scapegoat for the sordid affair that had deeply embarrassed the government. Having supplied members of the social elite with a string of girls for sexual purposes, he was charged with living off immoral earnings. As the jury delivered a guilty verdict, the prisoner lay in a coma from which he never recovered, having taken a lethal dose of sleeping pills.

The most memorable moment of Stephen Ward’s trial at the Old Bailey came when his former mistress, Mandy Rice-Davis, gave evidence. When told that Lord Astor had denied paying her for sex, she replied disarmingly, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child.

Quote from
King Lear
used in
Ordeal by Innocence

In Agatha Christie’s novel
Ordeal by Innocence
(1958), there are two references to ‘the Borden case’. For, like the crime in Christie’s book, the real-life murders of Andrew and Abbey Borden appeared to have been committed by someone in the household. In August 1892, thirty-two-year-old Lizzie Borden raised the alarm after discovering the bodies of her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The victims had been savagely attacked and killed with several blows from a freshly-cleaned axe that was found lying nearby. Police discovered that the day before the murders, two drugstores had refused to sell prussic acid to Lizzie, who claimed she required the preparation to mothball a fur cape. It also emerged that she had a clear motive for the crime, as she made no secret of the fact that she hated her stepmother whom she feared would inherit her father’s considerable wealth. The only other person in the house at the time of the crime was a sleeping maidservant; therefore, Lizzie was the obvious suspect and was charged with murder after she was seen burning a dress, which she claimed, was ‘stained’. A tidal wave of public opinion mounted against her, but by the time her trial was heard, sympathy had swung in her favour and there were joyous scenes in court when the jury announced ‘not guilty’. The
Illustrated Police News
reported that ‘the liberated prisoner fell into her seat as if shot when the verdict was announced’.