Pierrepoint (15 page)

One afternoon in late August, Tom was having tea at home with his nephew Albert when he read in the paper that John Ellis, some six months retired, had tried to commit suicide, having first tried to kill his wife and family. ‘He should have done it bloody years ago,’ Tom said crudely. ‘It was impossible to work with him!’

One of the most notorious murder cases in the between-the-war years concerned the murder of Emily Kaye by Patrick Mahon at Eastbourne. Mahon’s wife had triggered off the murder investigation after she was rummaging through his pockets and found a ticket for a left-luggage locker at Waterloo Station. Suspecting he may be having an affair, she
asked a neighbour, a former policeman, to check what was being stored at the left-luggage office. He presented the ticket and found it related to a Gladstone bag, which contained bloodstained clothing, a kitchen knife and a tennis-racquet case marked with the initials E.B.K. The neighbour informed Scotland Yard, who posted a man to question Mahon when he came to collect it, and on 2 May, as Mahon handed over the ticket, he was approached by detectives and asked to account for the contents of the bag.

After sitting silently in Kennington police station under the watchful gaze of Chief Inspector Savage, Mahon finally revealed that the bloodstained clothing belonged to 38-year-old Emily Beilby Kaye, a woman with whom he had been having an adulterous relationship. He claimed that while they were staying at a cottage at Eastbourne, on 11 April, she had fallen and struck her head on the hearth, receiving fatal injuries. Fearing the repercussions on his home life if he reported the accident, he had decided to dismember the body and dispose of the dissected body parts. Police hurried to the house, situated on the Crumbles, a stone’s throw from where the body of Irene Munro had been discovered a few years earlier, and discovered the dismembered corpse in a trunk, with saucepans on the stove filled with boiled body parts.

A postmortem found that Kaye had been pregnant when she died, suggesting a motive for murder. Mahon denied committing murder and his trial in July lasted five days. As he was giving evidence on the final day, describing how he had dissected the body, a terrific thunderstorm broke outside the courtroom, and a lightning flash lit up the sombre courtroom. The accused turned a ghastly shade of white.

Tom arrived at Wandsworth Gaol on the afternoon of Tuesday, 2 September, and was given the details of the condemned man. Mahon weighed 141 pounds, stood just
short of six feet tall and was to be allotted a drop of 7 feet 8 inches. Observing him in the condemned cell, Tom saw that he seemed quite composed – in contrast to the first time he had been brought into the cell, when he had had to be carried along the corridor before collapsing on his bunk crying and moaning. During his stay in the shadow of the gallows he lost 9 pounds, as he was unable to eat most of his meals. Mahon appeared to have some knowledge of the execution procedure, for as he was placed on the drop and the noose positioned, he sensed the hangman was reaching for the lever and jumped with bound feet as the floor beneath him collapsed. It was alleged he jerked backwards and struck his back on the edge of the scaffold. Although Tom later told his nephew of this incident, there is no record of it in assistant William Willis’s account of the execution. Coroner Sir Bernard Spilsbury also made no record of any other bruises on the body when he performed the autopsy later that morning, although it was noted that the neck had been broken in two places, which was unusual in a standard execution.

The year 1925 was relatively busy, with 18 executions carried out in Great Britain and Ireland, including three double executions. Tom was responsible for 11 of them; the rest were split between Willis and Baxter. At a double execution at Durham on 15 April, one of the condemned men sang loudly as he walked to the drop. The governor of Durham Gaol, fearful that there may be trouble, had requested that the four executioners be employed, a practice that soon became standard procedure.

On 5 August, Tom was in Ireland to carry out two executions at Dublin on the same morning. At 8 a.m., 24-year-old Michael Talbot walked to the gallows in the men’s
prison at Mountjoy, for the murder of Edward Walsh, the husband of Annie Walsh, his aunt, and with whom he had been having an affair. Walsh was murdered in his bed, allegedly for the insurance money. Mrs Walsh blamed her nephew for the killing; he later confessed to the crime, but said that he had committed it in league with her. Both were convicted and 90 minutes after her lover walked to the gallows, Annie Walsh was hanged in the women’s prison, spending her last hour crying and praying.

Tom was accompanied by a friend from Bradford, whom he had trained up in the same stable his brother had trained him in 20 years before. Such was the rivalry between the executioners that Tom, who was at liberty to appoint his own assistant, didn’t want to bring anyone off the official list whose names would then be recorded in official circles and who could potentially take job offers that would otherwise have gone to him. The unnamed assistant went under the name of Robinson, and on subsequent trips to Ireland, over the next six or seven years, the persons who accompanied Tom changed from time to time but always signed in as Robinson.

There were twenty executions in 1926, eleven of which were carried out by Tom. His work involved three trips to Ireland, and was to mark the first time he hanged a woman in an English prison.

Louie Calvert was a 33-year-old part-time prostitute and petty thief. In the spring of 1925, she moved in with Arthur Calvert, who was unaware of her past. After telling him she had fallen pregnant, Calvert persuaded him to marry her. As autumn approached she left her home in Leeds and travelled to Dewsbury; she had told her husband that she would stay under the care of her sister until the child was born. No
sooner had she arrived in Dewsbury than she went back to earning money as a prostitute, finding lodgings with Lily Waterhouse, an old lady she had known previously. She then placed an advertisement offering to take in a child for adoption, which she hoped to then return back to Leeds with and show off as her newborn baby. She was soon contacted and took into her care a baby girl.

The plan may have worked had she not fallen back into her old thieving ways. Her landlady noticed items of her own property missing and reported it to the police, who advised her to take out a summons. When Calvert failed to turn up in court, officers went to her house and found the landlady battered and strangled in a bedroom. A letter in the house was addressed to Louie Calvert in Leeds and, aware that she was the subject of the summons, the police travelled to her home, where they discovered items belonging to the murdered woman. Mrs Calvert, when she opened the door to the police, was wearing her landlady’s clothes and boots.

Asked at her trial if she had anything to say before sentence of death was passed, Calvert replied: ‘Yes sir, I am pregnant!’ Medical examinations later established that this wasn’t the case and Calvert’s execution went ahead as scheduled. Although the sentence was to be carried out at Manchester’s Strangeways Prison, whose regular hangman was William Willis, the job went to Tom, with Willis being nominated as assistant – presumably because she was convicted at Leeds and it was the under-sheriff of Yorkshire who appointed the hangman. The national strike was in full flow at the time, causing a lack of newspapers, and so, in contrast to the case of almost every other woman executed in the twentieth century, Louie Calvert went to the gallows with barely a murmur from the general public.

Whether Willis raised any objection to what could be
construed as a demotion for the execution is unclear, but in any case his behaviour was beginning to cause concern among prison officials. Three days following Mrs Calvert’s execution, he was again only employed as an assistant, this time to Robert Baxter, a man whom he claimed almost ten years’ seniority on. His conduct was recorded as aggressive, irritable and full of self-importance. When he failed to secure the leg strap on the condemned man satisfactorily tightly, he was dismissed.

The nine executions carried out in 1927 were split fairly between Tom and Baxter, with four each in Great Britain. Tom gained an extra 10 guineas fee when he carried out the last execution of the year at Dublin, hanging 19-year-old William O’Neill, who had carried out a brutal murder in County Wicklow.

1928 got off to a record start and brought in a healthy sum to the pockets of both Tom and Baxter. They each carried out five executions in the first month. Tom carried out four in five days, travelling to Manchester, Lincoln and then, after a day at home, up to Durham. By now the government was becoming increasingly reticent about releasing information relating to executions, and when the inquest jury asked after the execution how long had elapsed from the hangman entering the cell to the execution being carried out, they were informed by the prison governor that he was not permitted to disclose that information. Both the Manchester and Durham engagements had originally been to carry out double executions. Leaving Durham, Tom travelled down to Leeds, where he hanged a Sheffield miner who had strangled the
woman he was having an affair with.

On 31 January, Tom carried out the execution of James Power, a former policeman who had impersonated a detective before raping and murdering a young woman by throwing her into a canal, where she drowned. Power was hanged at Birmingham’s Winson Green Gaol, which overlooked the canal bank where he committed his crime.

Probably the most famous name to enter Tom’s diary of engagements this year was that of Patrick Kennedy, who – along with his accomplice, Frederick Browne – had been convicted of the murder of PC George Gutteridge, shot dead on a quiet country lane in Essex. Kennedy, allegedly a former member of the IRA, was a petty thief who regularly teamed up with Browne, the owner of a garage that specialised in dealing with stolen cars. They had been stopped as they drove a stolen car down the Ongar to Romford road and, fearful that the policeman’s eyes might hold their reflection after they had shot him dead, they blasted him in both eyes.

Tom hanged Kennedy at Wandsworth at the same moment Baxter hanged Browne at Pentonville. Although both Tom and Baxter were receiving a fair share of executions, they were both warned that ‘touting for business’ – offering to carry out an execution rather than wait to be asked – was contrary to their terms of engagement and could lead to dismissal. It had become a clear divide of work: Tom received engagements predominantly in the north; Baxter, a resident of Hertfordshire, carried out most of the work in London and the south. In January, Tom had had to reject the offer to hang a man at Glasgow, as it clashed with the Lincoln engagement, and as his diary was full on dates either side, he reluctantly had to turn it down. In shades of what happened in 1923, when he lost out on the Bywaters execution, Tom again found himself sitting at home while the Glasgow job was passed to
Baxter. Perhaps even more galling was the fact that two other men were later condemned in Scotland that year and Baxter, well-respected and capable as he was, received the call to carry out those jobs too.

Tom made the by-now familiar round of northern gaols in 1929, with executions at Durham, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, plus the seemingly perennial trip across to Ireland. The year was also to see the start of a debate that raged in Parliament for the next 18 months, and which threatened to hinder seriously the hangman’s earning potential.

W
ith the dawn of the new decade came the first major referendum on capital punishment in modern times. The debate, which had started at the end of the previous decade, filled the papers for weeks and was split between those wanting to keep it as a deterrent while not simply keeping it for retribution, and those advocating total abolition. Recent cases were reviewed to support both sides of the debate, and for a while Labour Home Secretary J. R. Clynes sanctioned a large number of reprieves. Clynes was the first home secretary in modern times to be an abolitionist. At the end of the report the committee recommended that the death penalty should be suspended for a trial period of five years. The Conservative members of the committee refused to sign the report, however, and the government’s failure to bring in any amended legislation effectively defeated it.

In February 1930, Tom gave an interview to the
Yorkshire Observer
and the reporter was able to glean a couple of quotes from the normally reticent and secretive executioner.
Describing Tom as 60 years of age, but looking younger and in excellent health, the reporter caught up with him at Haley’s Foundry, where he had recently started work.

‘Why should a murderer be nursed for the rest of his life?’ Tom said, demonstrating his advocacy of the retention of capital punishment. ‘I think it would be encouraging people to murder if the death penalty were abolished, but it would make no difference to me either way.’

In fact, the last sentence was clearly contrary to his way of thinking, and to his financial demands. He was known to be quite vocal in his annoyance when a date in his diary was crossed out. ‘There’ll come a day when they’ll all get a bloody reprieve,’ he had mumbled angrily to his nephew in the previous year. Money was clearly an overriding factor to Tom, as he made clear in the final quote in the article: ‘I am quite prepared to give evidence before the Select Committee if they should ask me,’ he told the reporter, adding as an afterthought, ‘providing, of course, if they made it worth my while.’

For Tom’s first execution of the new decade he travelled across to Belfast to execute Samuel William Cushnan, a 26-year-old farm labourer. Cushnan had been sentenced to death on 9 March, at Antrim Assizes, for the murder of a postman who had been found shot dead in May 1929, with his post-bag, containing over £60, plundered. Convicted largely on circumstantial evidence, Cushnan had betrayed himself while on remand, describing in a letter how a fellow prisoner was going to help him dispose of the stolen money. The jury failed to reach a verdict at his first trial, while at the second trial he was sentenced to death twice over! When the initial death sentence was passed, it was announced that Cushnan was to be ‘hanged on April 8th 1929’. The prisoner was taken down from the dock before a court official noticed the mistake with the fateful date. He was then brought back into court and resentenced.
An appeal for a reprieve on the grounds of mental anguish was quickly dismissed and he was hanged at Crumlin Road, Belfast.