Pierrepoint (26 page)

Less than two months later the Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords. Commenting on the recently reprieved Thomas, Lord Schuster said he did not feel inclined to take part in an experiment ‘which may be at the expense of the lives of every policeman…' In the same week the Bill was thrown out, Albert travelled back to Germany.

On 26 July, Albert flew on another trip to Germany, returning by air on the 29th, after carrying out three executions that morning. Two were war criminals, the other being convicted by Control Commission Court. At 9.00 a.m. he hanged Ruth Clausius, followed by the double execution of Luis Schmidt and Jerzy Trawinski at 9.21 a.m.

Clausius and Schmidt had been convicted of war crimes at the second series of Ravensbrück trials held in April 1947. Ruth Clausius (née Hartmann) was born in July 1920. She was a member of the SS guard at Ravensbrück and had worked there in various capacities from July 1944. Following a spell in the punishment barracks she was promoted to SS Oberaufseherin (senior supervisor), in charge of the youth wing in early 1945, where she worked until the camp was liberated. Clausius was convicted of the torture and murder of men, women and children and of selecting prisoners for the gas chambers.

Sixty-year-old Emma Zimmer had been a guard at the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Dismissed from service near the end of the war, either due to advanced age or chronic alcoholism, she was tried by a British military court and sentenced to death on 21 July 1948.

The first person to go to the gallows in Great Britain following the rejection of the Suspension Bill was Stanley Joseph Clarke, a pig breeder from Great Yarmouth who had stabbed to death a chambermaid at a Yarmouth boarding house. After pleading guilty, his trial at Norfolk Assizes had lasted less than five minutes and he was hanged at Norwich on 18 November.

Leaving Norwich, Albert travelled straight to Liverpool, where he hanged a 22-year-old guardsman Peter Griffiths, who in May had carried out the rape and murder of a young girl at Blackburn's Queen's Park Hospital. Griffith's arrest came after a massive fingerprint hunt, involving over forty-six thousand men – the entire male population of Blackburn. Hanged by Albert and Harry Allen, Griffiths walked bravely to his death and met his end, Albert later recalled, like a soldier.

A week later Albert travelled across to Ireland to hang William Gambon, who had battered a man to death with an iron bar in a Dublin tenement block. It appears there may have been some confusion with the appointment of an assistant executioner for this hanging, as Albert carried out the execution alone, for the only time in Great Britain and Ireland. It's possible that Thomas Johnstone had been the intended assistant, but following his shortcomings on his previous trip to the gaol, perhaps he had a change of heart at the last moment.

Albert travelled back to Germany on 6 December to carry out the executions of one war criminal and three Allied nationals. The men were hanged in two double executions on 9 December, and Albert flew home later that morning.

Although Albert had executed many women during his trips to Germany, he had not yet hanged a woman in a British prison. Engagements to hang Florence Ransom and Elizabeth
Jones during the war had both ended in reprieves, as had the execution of the Bolton mother and daughter he had been engaged to hang at Manchester in 1944. On 12 January 1949, however, Margaret Allen finally ended that trend.

In the early hours of Sunday, 29 August 1948, Mrs Nancy Chadwick was found dead in a road at Rawtenstall, Lancashire. She had been battered to death with a hammer. Allen, a neighbour, was routinely interviewed and after detectives noticed bloodstains on her kitchen walls, she readily confessed to the crime. She was tried at Manchester Assizes in December, where it was alleged she had committed the murder for gain: the victim was reputedly wealthy and Allen, having been forced to give up work, and being short of money, had attacked and robbed her friend. A petition for a reprieve in her home town received a lukewarm response. Denied her last request of being hanged in men's clothing, she went to the gallows in a prison frock, having kicked her last breakfast over saying, ‘I don't want it and no one else is going to enjoy it!'

A week later Albert flew back to Germany, where he executed three men on 20 January, and another man on the following day. On 17 February, between trips to Lincoln and Liverpool, he flew back to Germany to carry out a single execution. The days of multiple hangings in Germany were now over, but as remaining war criminals were slowly being hunted down and convicted, he was still receiving the summons to carry out his duties.

When Albert travelled to Birmingham on 29 March, it was to hang one James Farrell, who had strangled a young girl in November 1948. A couple of hours after the body had been discovered, Farrell had walked into a Birmingham police station claiming he was a deserter from his unit and wanting to give himself up. From witnesses who had seen the girl on
the previous evening, police already suspected the killer might be a soldier and detained him for further questioning. Farrell eventually confessed. He turned 19 in the condemned cell a few days before he was hanged, and was the youngest man to go the gallows for over 25 years.

Albert made two more flights to Germany in the summer, along with two trips to Pentonville and a rare visit to Winchester. On 4 August he made his first trip to Swansea for the double execution of Rex Harvey Jones, a collier from the Rhondda, and Robert Thomas Mackintosh, a steel worker from Port Talbot.

Jones had strangled his girlfriend while drunk; Mackintosh had also strangled a girl, after what the prosecution had alleged ‘the devil of lust' had taken possession of him. Both were convicted on the same day and hanged together for convenience. Albert had travelled to the gaol by car, offering a lift to a new assistant, George Dickinson from Adlington, Lancashire. On the journey home, the execution – Dickinson's first – traumatised him and he was repeatedly ill, to the extent that he tendered his resignation a few days later.

Probably the most notorious murder case of the post-war period was that of John Haigh, dubbed in the press ‘The Vampire Killer' or ‘The Acid Bath Murderer'. In February 1949, wealthy widow Mrs Olive Durand Deacon went missing after arranging a business trip with Haigh, a fellow guest at the Kensington hotel where they both resided. When a friend became concerned about her whereabouts, Haigh offered to accompany her to the police station, where his manner aroused the suspicions of a female officer. A check into his past found he had a long criminal record and when detectives visited a small workshop/storeroom Haigh rented in Crawley, they found evidence to suggest that Mrs Deacon had been murdered. Haigh confessed he had shot her and
dissolved her body in acid. He then admitted to having killed eight other people.

At his trial at Lewes Assizes in July, his defence put forward a plea of insanity. Haigh was made out to be a vampire killer who drank the blood of his victims. The prosecution claimed simply that Haigh had killed his victims for financial reasons and was nothing more than a ruthless killer.

A few days before he was to hang, Haigh had asked the governor if he could have a dummy run, as he was concerned that his slight frame and springy step would give the hangman problems. ‘Mr Pierrepoint knows his duties well enough,' he was told by the governor, who refused to consider his request.

On 31 August 1949, Albert carried out a double execution at Hameln. Roman Klinski, a displaced Pole, and Mieczyslaw Antonowitz, a German, were hanged side by side at 8.00 a.m. Albert's final engagement in Germany was on 6 December, when he executed Jerzy Andziak, a German sentenced to death by a Control Commission Court. Again, a note was forwarded to the Foreign Office to the effect that Mr Pierrepoint had carried out his duties in a satisfactory manner and that his conduct had been discreet.

In total, over five thousand men and women were convicted of war crimes between 1945 and 1949 in the American, British and French zones, tried by Allied war crimes tribunals. They included staff from concentration camps, arrested and tried for murder and acts of brutality against their prisoners. Over five hundred were sentenced to death and the vast majority were condemned to hang, although no standard execution protocol was agreed – as we have seen, executions were also carried out by firing squad, or sometimes the guillotine. Those convicted in the Polish and Russian sectors were often executed in public, while a
number of the high-profile executions carried out by the Americans at Nuremberg, Dachau and Landsberg were televised and shown on news broadcasts.

Albert Pierrepoint hanged two hundred people convicted of war crimes at Zuchthaus Hameln, along with two British soldiers convicted by court martial.

A
s a result of the 1948 amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, on 4 May 1949 the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment sat for the first time, the first of 63 meetings to debate ‘whether liability under the criminal law in Great Britain to suffer capital punishment for murder should be limited or modified’. The wording was carefully chosen so that the outcome of the commission would look not at the abolition of the death penalty but merely at alternative methods or protocols pertaining to the current system. Over the next four years, the commission, led by Sir Ernest Gowers, visited Europe and America, looking at alternatives such as electrocution, the gas chamber and also the guillotine, to decide if hanging was still a proper method of dispensing justice in the 20th century. Albert would not be called upon to give evidence until November 1950.

The year 1949 had ended with an execution at Wandsworth, when, assisted by Harry Allen, Albert hanged Ernest Soper Couzins, a 49-year-old assistant caretaker at Canterbury Technical College, who had shot dead an
insurance agent following a quarrel. When Couzins, a former Regimental Sergeant Major, appeared in the dock, he was sporting a heavy bandage covering a self-inflicted neck wound. The wound, caused by a failed suicide attempt, was so severe it had almost cost him his life and affected his speech to the extent he was barely able to make himself heard as he gave evidence at his trial. He collapsed as sentence of death was passed.

Gauging the prisoner’s condition in the condemned cell, Albert proposed a drop of 7 feet 8 inches, long enough to cause instant death but hopefully not too long as to cause the neck wound to re-open and risk possible decapitation. The calculations still proved too long: the resulting drop tearing open Couzins’ neck wound, spraying blood around the pit; the assistant hangman described the execution as ‘very messy’. It was a rare mishap.

In January 1950, Albert travelled to Pentonville to hang Daniel Raven, a young Jewish advertising agent, who had used a heavy television aerial base to batter to death his wife’s parents. The couple had been visiting Marie Raven in hospital after she had recently given birth to their first grandchild; later that night their bodies were discovered. Summoned to their house, Raven was seen to be wearing a clean shirt and tie and a different suit to the one he had been wearing just an hour beforehand. Detectives went to his house and in the boiler they found a partly burned suit containing bloodstains of the rare ‘AB’ type, the same as that of his father-in-law. Raven maintained his innocence and his counsel suggested that the killer was either a business rival of Goodman’s, or someone taking revenge on his father-in-law, a known police informer.

In early March Albert carried out two executions in two days. On Wednesday, 8 March, he travelled to Norwich to hang James Rivett, who had strangled his girlfriend after her father had tried to split them up. Albert then travelled into London, where he had an engagement to hang a young lorry driver, whose execution was to go a long way towards finally bringing about the abolition of capital punishment in Great Britain.

On the afternoon of 30 November 1949, illiterate, Welsh-born lorry driver Timothy John Evans had walked into Merthyr Vale police station and confessed that he had disposed of his wife in London. He made contradictory statements about what had happened, which nevertheless intimated that he had killed his 20-year-old wife Beryl and their one year-old-baby, Geraldine. Three days later their bodies were discovered in a washhouse at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. Both had been strangled. Evans told detectives that Beryl had fallen pregnant and a tenant at the house, Reg Christie, had offered to perform an abortion. Christie had then told him that Beryl had died during the operation and if he told the police Evans would also be blamed for her death. Evans said that Christie, a former policeman, had also offered to find a home for the baby Geraldine. Tried just for the murder of his daughter, Evans appeared at the Old Bailey in January. He stuck to his story that Christie had killed his wife and child. Christie was the chief witness for the prosecution. Faced with the varied accounts Evans had given, the prosecution exposed him as a braggart and a liar, and on the third day of his trial he was convicted. Christie burst into tears as sentence of death was passed.