Great Train Crimes: Murder and Robbery on the Railways (28 page)

Sherlock Holmes observed in
A Study in Scarlet
that ‘There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.’ Whether it was Thomas Briggs being killed by Francis Muller in 1864 or Patricia Woolard falling victim to Michael Gills just over a century later, the pattern of the railway murder is depressingly the same. In almost all instances, the killer and his victim meet together in a railway compartment. The killer almost always is armed and takes his victim, usually a weaker individual as well, by total surprise. The motive is usually robbery, though not always. The weapon used is often a gun, but can also be a knife or a bludgeon. The victim has little chance. Then the killer either makes his escape or is caught.

Of the twenty-five victims in this book, ten were men, eleven were women and there were four children. Four were shot, nine were stabbed or slashed, two were strangled, four were bludgeoned and six killed by trains. Twenty-one were killed by strangers and four by those known to them. Money was the motivation behind eight murders, sex/love by four and in eight murders the motive is unknown. Two resulted from arguments, one was due to insanity and two were accidental. Of these killers, fifteen were apprehended and ten escaped unscathed. This is a high proportion of unsolved crimes, because in the 1920s/1930s, the clear-up rate of murders in London was over 90 per cent. The reason for this is that most of these murders were crimes committed by strangers and these are the most difficult to solve, because there is no prior connection between killer and victim. Trains can be transitory and anonymous places, where people only spend a fleeting time and then depart. Almost all the killers, without question, were male – murder being predominantly a man’s crime. The exception, perhaps, is the killing of Willie Starchfield in 1914, where a woman might have been responsible.

Compared to those crimes committed in detective novels, railway murders are not carefully thought out ones, requiring a master sleuth to
unravel them. Serious thefts from trains, whether in 1855 or in 1963, did require much planning and nerve on the part of the thieves. Both succeeded in taking the money and escaping unscathed. However, in both cases, the criminals ended up being arrested and gaoled through their own idiocies thereafter.

Is there any consolation for passengers on trains seeking to avoid the fates of Florence Shore, Beatrice Meadmore, Frederick Gold and the others whose deaths have been related here? First, travelling alone can be dangerous. Choosing a compartment to travel in which there are other people, preferably similar to the passenger, is advice given by police. The introduction of greater surveillance techniques, such as CCTV cameras may also assist in detecting crime after it has happened, though railway crimes still occur in the twenty-first century, as we have noted. One only has to think of the woman attacked and nearly killed for remonstrating with youths at a suburban station in London, or a gang of youths who attacked and robbed passengers on the Underground. But, as said, the percentage of crimes committed on board trains is very small, and the main risk to life and limb when railbound, and it is statistically a tiny one, is to be involved in a train crash. Bon voyage!

PRIMARY SOURCES

The National Archives

ADM159/29, 35, ASSI36/139 (Dean), ASSI36/522 (Woolard), CRIM1/1080 (Waters), DPP/2/4222 (Woolard), MEPO3/75-76 (Briggs), MEPO3/169 (Money), MEPO3/1627 (Mays), PCOM8/409 (Mays), RAIL635/196.

The Wellcome Institute Library

PP/SP1/2, 5 (Spilsbury autopsy index cards)

Newspapers

Aldershot News
, 1952, 1965

Annual Register
, 1864, 1884

Brighton and Hove Advertiser
, 1914

Brighton Times
, 1914

Croydon Advertiser
, 1875, 1945

Croydon Chronicle
, 1875

Croydon Times
, 1945

Cumberland Herald
, 1962

Hackney Gazette
, 1927

Hants and Berks Gazette
, 1964

Hastings and St Leonards Observer
, 1920

Illustrated Police News
, 1901, 1910

Middlesex County Times
, 1920

Newcastle Daily Chronicle
, 1910

St Leonard’s Chronicle
, 1920

Sussex Express
, 1920

The Times
, 1855, 1864, 1875, 1881, 1901, 1910, 1915, 1927, 1985

Wembley News
, 1942

Other primary sources

E Nicholls,
Crime within the Square Mile
(1935)

Darling Child: The Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia, 1871–1878
, ed. R Fulford (1976)

The Letters of Charles Dickens
, ed. G Storey, vol. 10 (1998)

SECONDARY SOURCES

R Erickson,
Dictionary of Western Australia (Bond), 1829–1914
, vol. 2 (1979)

S Fielding,
The Hangman’s Record
, vol. 1,
1868–1899
(1994), vol. 2,
1900–1928
(1995)

J Goodman,
The Railway Murders
(1984)

J D Oates,
Unsolved Murders in Victorian and Edwardian London
(2007)

––
Unsolved London Murders: The 1920s and 1930s
(2009)

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Unsolved London Murders: 1940s and 1950s
(2009)