Murder on the Home Front (11 page)

The body was clothed in a green-and-white summer dress, light summer underwear, woolen ankle-socks, and a headscarf which lay loosely around the neck. The head had been battered in by some heavy, blunt implement.

It was decided to move the body to Guy’s, and there was some discussion as to whether CKS and I should travel back to London in a van with the body or by police car. Much to my relief the police car was finally chosen.

The body soon arrived at Guy’s, and CKS had it placed in a large carbolic tank so that he might study it at his leisure, or, if you prefer it, in his “spare time.”

“Spare time” mostly came at teatime, so, for the next few weeks, CKS arranged for us to take our tea beside the carbolic tank and its gruesome contents. This, I thought, was a very unattractive idea, for the smell of the body combined with the carbolic was enough to put the most insensitive off anchovy toast and tea cakes. However, it was not my place to complain, so there I sat with my tea tray and memo pad, jotting the notes which CKS dictated to me as he stooped, all concentration, over the body.

Dr. Gardner frequently came up to Guy’s to assist with the examination of the body. The two pathologists discovered that the girl had received stabbing wounds to the left side of the top of the head, accompanied by similar wounds to the right arm and hand; these last resulting from the victim putting up her arm in an attempt to ward off the attack.

The pathologists came to a very interesting conclusion about these stab wounds. Because of certain characteristics it was clear they must have been inflicted with a hook-pointed knife. Neither Dr. Simpson nor Dr. Gardner had ever seen such a knife, but the nature of the wounds convinced them that such a knife must have been used.

Secondly, there were injuries to the mouth in keeping with the girl having fallen heavily onto her face, knocking out her front teeth.

Thirdly, there had been a single very heavy, blunt blow to the back of the head. Dr. Simpson and I spent a whole afternoon wiring together all the fragments of shattered skull; it was like doing an exceptionally thrilling and elaborate jigsaw puzzle. When we had finished we found there was a vast depressed fracture of the skull, five inches in length and one and three-quarters in breadth, across the back of the head, as from a blow with a stake, or bough, or rounded bar. Such a blow would have killed the girl immediately.

A crush fracture of the right cheekbone showed that she had been lying facedown on the ground at the time she received this blow.

Lastly there were dragging wounds to the right leg, which had occurred after death, and which indicated that her body had been dragged over rough, open ground before burial.

So, from these teatime sessions beside the carbolic tank, CKS was able to tell the police that the girl had been stabbed at with a strange hook-pointed knife, had fallen on her face, knocking out three teeth, and while lying thus had been dealt a tremendously heavy murderous blow to the back of her head with a round, blunt instrument such as a bar or stake, and finally, being dead, had been dragged over rough ground to the top of the ridge.

Meantime things had not been standing still in Surrey, either.

The Surrey police had decided to call in Scotland Yard, and Mr. Greeno, now a chief inspector, had gone down to Godalming, on what was to prove one of his most exciting investigations.

It did not take the police long to identify the dead girl, through the clothes she was wearing and a portion of scalp with bleached blonde hair. A blonde girl in her late teens, wearing a green-and-white frock and a head scarf, was already known to the local police; she had for sometime past caused them concern by her mode of life, for she lived rough like a tramp and consorted with soldiers. She was not, the police thought, a really bad girl, but she had run away from her home, and was in need of proper care and protection, or she would, they surmised, rapidly come to grief.

Her name was Joan Pearl Wolfe, she was a Roman Catholic with a strong religious conviction, and, alas, poor girl, she surely came to grief.

She had last been seen alive on September 13, which tallied with Dr. Simpson’s estimate of the time which must have elapsed since death.

Mr. Greeno on his arrival set his men to searching the ground around Hankley Common ridge. Day in, day out, they searched.

Bit by bit they collected clues. First they found the girl’s shoes, lying some distance apart from one another, and some way from the body’s burial place. Then a bag with a rosary in it was found near one of the shoes, close by a small stream where there was a military trip wire. Sixteen yards away was found a heavy birch stake. Clinging to this stake were a number of long blonde hairs.

Later, in a small dell up the hillside above the stream, Joan Pearl Wolfe’s identity card was found, with a religious tract, and a document which was issued by the Canadian Army to men applying for permission to marry. There was also a green purse, an elephant charm, and a letter from Joan to a Canadian private called August Sangret, telling him she was pregnant by him and hoping he would marry her.

Mr. Greeno learned that Joan, since July, had been living in the neighborhood in rough huts, or “wigwams,” which August Sangret had built for her, and where he had spent his leaves with her.

A deserted cricket pavilion which had also been a favorite rendezvous for Joan and Sangret was visited by the detective. Inside, Joan had drawn and scribbled all over the walls. She had drawn a wild rose, writing under it, “Wild Rose of England for ever—September 1942.” And there was another sketch of a cabin, “My little gray home in the West.” And a prayer written in pencil:

“O holy Virgin in the midst of all thy glory we implore thee not to forget the sorrows of this world…”

There was also penciled the address of Private A. Sangret, of Canada, and the address of Joan’s mother in Kent.

The girl, at one stage, it was discovered, had been admitted to a local hospital, where she kept a photograph of Sangret, her “fiancé,” on her bedside locker. From hospital she had written to tell him she was pregnant; pathetic letters explaining that the nuns at the convent where she had been brought up had taught her that an illegitimate baby was a terrible sin, but, she naïvely added, when she and Sangret were married and happy together with the baby everything would be all right.

She bought layette patterns, and people who saw this girl-tramp in the woods in the weeks before she was murdered noticed she was knitting baby clothes…

Chief Inspector Greeno now went to the nearby Canadian Army camp where Sangret was stationed. Sangret was a young man half French Canadian, half Cree Indian. He had recently asked his CO for a marriage application form, but had not returned it filled in. He admitted to Mr. Greeno that he had associated with Joan, but added he had not seen her since September 14, when she had failed to keep a date with him. He had reported her “disappearance” to his provost sergeant, saying, “If she should be found, and anything has happened to her, I don’t want to be mixed up in it.” He had told a friend that he had sent Joan home, as she had no clothes, and he told another friend that she was in hospital. These friends of Sangret admitted to Mr. Greeno that they thought Sangret’s behavior over Joan’s disappearance “very strange.” First he had said one thing, then he said another, and seemed very much on edge over the whole business.

While Sangret was waiting in the guard room for this first interview with Mr. Greeno he excused himself and went to the washhouse. Nobody thought anything of it, at the time…

Mr. Greeno, after this interview, came hurrying up to Guy’s. He arrived in a van, in the back of which he had what appeared to be a section of Hankley Common. There were furze and bracken, hummocks of grass, and a small tree. These were to be examined for bloodstains. There was, in addition, a Canadian Army blanket, and a battle dress, and the birch stake that had been found by the stream.

Dr. Simpson and Mr. Greeno spread the blanket and battle dress out on a table in the lab and examined them. Both belonged to Sangret and both had recently, but not very effectively, been washed. (Sangret apparently could not, or would not, explain why he had washed them.) On the blanket, despite the washing, were faded bloodstains, distributed exactly in keeping with a person bleeding from the head and right hand that had been wrapped in the blanket. Dr. Simpson decided that the body, prior to burial, had been wrapped in this blanket—and probably concealed among bushes. This would explain the very heavy maggot infestation of the body, which had clearly not been buried immediately after death.

The bloodstains on the battle dress no doubt occurred during Sangret’s attack on the girl.

The hairs on the birch stake were examined, compared with the hank of the dead girl’s hair already in our possession, and proved beyond doubt to be hairs from the head of Joan Pearl Wolfe. The birch stake, too, exactly fitted the huge fracture at the back of the reconstructed skull. This was certainly the weapon with which the girl had been murdered.

“Now all we want is to find the knife,” said Mr. Greeno. And returned, accordingly, to searching the ground that had already been searched and searched. For it is infinite patience which so often wins the detective’s day. But the knife was not lying among the grass and bracken of Hankley Common. Very dramatically it turned up in quite a different place…

In mid-November, long after all the leaves had blown down from the trees of Surrey, and Mr. Greeno’s investigations were plugging doggedly, but not very rapidly, along, up at the Canadian Army camp the waste pipe of one of the washhouse basins was cleared of an obstruction which had been blocking it for the past five weeks. This obstruction turned out to be a clasp knife—not a Canadian Army issue, but an unusual-looking knife with a hooked point; a point like a parrot’s beak. And it was immediately recalled that Sangret had excused himself and gone into the washhouse while waiting for that first interview with Mr. Greeno, five weeks previously. Was this Sangret’s knife, and had he dropped it down the pipe in an attempt to hide it from Mr. Greeno, knowing what a vital clue it would be to the detective?

It was Sangret’s knife, all right. One of his fellow soldiers recognized it as such. This soldier had found the knife, he said, during the summer stuck in the trunk of a tree by one of the shacks Sangret had built for Joan. The soldier had pulled it out of the tree and shown it to Sangret, who had immediately claimed it as his own.

The knife was now brought to Guy’s and shown to Dr. Simpson. Its peculiar hook-tipped blade was, of course, precisely the sort of thing the pathologists had described after examining the stabbing wounds.

The last lap of the investigations had now been reached. CKS traveled down to Surrey again and there, with Chief Inspector Greeno, made a final reconstruction of the murder at the actual scene.

It was clear now what had happened on that September afternoon when Sangret and Joan had their last date. They had quarreled in the dell up the hillside; probably over the marriage application form which Joan was so anxious for Sangret to fill in and sign, and which he was so loath to complete. Sangret attacked the girl with his knife. She managed to escape him and, terrified, wounded, and bleeding, ran down the hill away from him, but at the bottom, by the stream, she fell over the military trip wire, landing heavily on her face, smashing her teeth. As she lay there, stunned by the fall, Sangret overtook her and murdered her by a crashing blow on the head with the birch stake, which he afterward flung away. He then wrapped her body in an army blanket and hid it under the bushes for twenty-four hours or so, after which he dragged his victim to the top of the ridge, a distance of some four hundred yards, and buried her.

This reconstruction of the murder must have fitted the actual circumstances very closely, for at the trial Sangret’s counsel never questioned it.

Sangret was charged with the murder on December 16 in the presence of Mr. Greeno. He said, “No, sir, I did not do it. No, sir. Somebody did it and I’ll have to take the rap.” He added, uselessly, “She might have killed herself.”

The trial was held at Kingston Assizes at the end of the following February. Dr. Simpson took the skull along with him to court. We arrived just before the court adjourned for tea. Dr. Grierson, then the chief medical officer at Brixton prison, asked CKS if he would care to take some tea down in the jailer’s room, beneath the dock. CKS accepted the invitation, and I was invited, too. So into the dock we climbed and thence down the short flight of steps leading to the jailer’s cellarlike quarters below.

It was a rather grim apartment, with stone floor and bare walls and several cells opening on to it. In the middle of the room was a big wooden table, laid for tea, and the jailer, one or two policemen, two prison warders, and Sangret were standing talking together. We all sat down around the table, with the exception of Sangret and the warders, who took their tea standing, buffet style; pretty obviously because Sangret didn’t wish to join the tea party. The atmosphere of the gathering was somewhat out of this world. Dr. Simpson, Dr. Grierson and the jailer chatted together on the subject of juries. The policemen were discussing football. I couldn’t overhear the conversation between Sangret and the warders, but it sounded amiable enough. I sat silently, eating bread and butter and drinking good, hot, thick tea from an even thicker teacup. Every now and again I tried to stare at Sangret without staring at him.

Sangret was a strongly built young man of medium height. Straight features, quite impassive, cold, glittering dark eyes, and straight dark hair. With an appetite not at all impaired by the ghastly predicament in which he found himself he enjoyed a large tea, eating and drinking noisily, holding the thick slices of bread and butter in both hands. Not a gracious individual with whom to share a wigwam, I mused. And not likely to make anybody a doting, devoted, baby-dandling husband, either.