Pierrepoint (30 page)

Two weeks later Albert carried out a job at Leeds, normally the territory of his former assistant Steve Wade. Albert received the offer to carry out this rare execution in Yorkshire when Wade was unable to attend due to illness. Flora Gilligan had been found naked outside her home in York one morning in March. At first it seemed she had fallen from the upstairs window, but an autopsy revealed she had been raped, then beaten and strangled before being thrown from the window. A fingerprint was discovered at the scene and investigations at a nearby army camp found a perfect match. Philip Henry, a soldier due to be posted overseas on the following day, denied the murder, but had no alibi for the previous night and splinters of wood found on his clothing matched samples taken from the wooden window frame at the house. Henry’s trial was memorable because the jury, during summing up, asked the judge if they could visit the scene of the crime. After a brief visit to the house, they returned to the court, where they needed just a few minutes to find Henry guilty of murder. It was Albert’s one and only visit to Leeds as either hangman or assistant – all previous offers to assist his uncle before the war had ended in reprieves.

1953 had already seen a number of high-profile cases that had filled the pages of the national press, bringing coachloads of visitors to the Rose and Crown at Much
Hoole. Realising it was good for business, Albert was always willing to sign autographs and sometimes pose for a photograph. He also had a batch of publicity photographs produced, which he was happy to sign and give out to customers. No sooner had the Christie case disappeared from the front pages than it was replaced by a case closer to home, when the trial took place at Manchester of Louisa Merrifield and her third husband, Alfred, accused of the murder of Mrs Sarah Ann Ricketts in Blackpool.

The Merrifields had taken up positions as live-in housekeeper-companions to the 79-year-old, twice-widowed Mrs Ricketts in March. Within a month she had changed her will in favour of the Merrifields and, by early April, Louisa Merrifield was telling friends she had been left a bungalow in an elderly widow’s will. Mrs Ricketts died on 14 April, and when the death was reported in the local newspaper one of the Merrifields’ friends contacted the police; a postmortem discovered that Mrs Ricketts had died of phosphorus poisoning.

Both Mrs Merrifield and her husband were charged with her murder, despite no trace of poison being found at the house, and the existence of conflicting medical evidence that suggested cause of death was actually liver failure. Louisa was sentenced to hang at Manchester Assizes after an 11-day trial. In the case of her husband, the jury failed to reach a verdict and he was released, inheriting a half-share in the dead woman’s bungalow. Mrs Merrifield was taken to Strangeways Gaol to await execution.

On 5 September, the outcome of the Royal Commission Report was published. The commission concluded that the process of execution currently in operation in Great Britain was preferable to that of the other nations visited and that drastic action was not needed. It did, however, make a few
amendments, among them being the suggestion that, ‘Sheriffs should vary their selection of executioners, so as to ensure that there are always at least two experienced executioners on the list of qualified persons.’

The Report also recommended slight improvements to the actual execution process. Henceforth, prisoners were no longer required to hang for one hour following execution, but were now to be removed from the rope once certified dead, a practice Albert had carried out in Germany when the sheer volume of executions on some days had prevented the normal hanging for one hour from being a practical option. The peculiarly gruesome practice of measuring the length of distortion in the body after execution, the length that the neck had stretched, was also brought to an end. The Report also recommended that: ‘Where two persons were to be executed on the same day and in the same prison they should continue to be executed together, but two executioners should be employed, each with an assistant executioner.’

A few minor alterations to the system of employing assistant executioners in Scotland, and the recommendation that notice of execution was no longer placed on the prison gates but rather in a national newspaper, were all that were to show for the four years the committee had sat.

On 18 September, Louisa Merrifield was hanged at Strangeways Gaol. Jock Stewart assisted Albert and noted that she died very bravely. ‘It went very well,’ he said later. ‘She said goodbye in the cell to the death cell officers… much better than I imagined. She was braver than any man. The female officers on watch appeared a trifle upset.’

Albert carried out an execution in October at Bristol, and a month later Joseph Reynolds became the last man hanged at Leicester when he went to the gallows for the murder of a young girl. The year ended with three executions in the week
leading up to Christmas. On 17 December, Albert hanged Stanislaw Juras at Manchester, and five days later he hanged Alfred Whiteway at Wandsworth; Whiteway had raped and killed two young women on the banks of the Thames at Teddington. On the following day, Albert crossed London to Pentonville, where he hanged 21-year-old George Newlands, who had battered to death an old couple he had become friendly with in Essex. At his trial it was alleged that Newlands was influenced by the ‘cosh-boy’ films that were being shown at the cinema at the time, and that he had committed the murder to steal enough money to buy a new suit for an impending date.

When Albert made the short journey to Manchester on 8 January 1954, it was to hang a man who had committed a murder in Yorkshire, but who like Juras, whom Albert had hanged three weeks before, had been taken across the Pennines for execution because there had been an unprecedented number of death sentences passed at the previous sitting of Leeds Assizes.

Czeslaw Kowalski was a Polish refugee, who for two days every week shared a home with Doris Douglas in Leeds. When Douglas wasn’t with Kowalski she lived and worked as a housekeeper to an elderly man in Leeds. Kowalski found out about this arrangement and stabbed her in the head with a scout knife. His failed defence at the trial before Mr Justice Stable was that he was too drunk at the time to have formed any intention to commit murder. Two days before he was to be executed, Kowalski had attempted to cheat the gallows. He had succeeded in scraping the skin off his penis with his fingernails, in an attempt to bleed himself to death; he spent the last hours of his life in great agony.

On 11 February, Tom Pierrepoint passed away at the home of his daughter in Bradford. He was 84 years old and severely disabled by arthritis. Albert had paid a farewell visit to him a few days after returning from Shrewsbury, where he hanged Desmond Hooper for the murder of a young girl whom he had thrown down a ventilation shaft. She had drowned in the shallow pool of stagnant water at the bottom.

In a two-week period in April, Albert carried out four executions in every country in the United Kingdom and Ireland. On 14 April he travelled down to Wandsworth for the execution of James Doohan, who had shot dead his girlfriend’s stepfather. Five days later, he and Jock Stewart flew over to Ireland for the execution of Michael Manning, a carter of Limerick, convicted of the rape and murder of a nursing sister at a Limerick Hospital. Manning had dragged her into a nearby field where he assaulted her. Death was due to suffocation caused by the vicim having grass forced into her mouth to stop her screaming. Manning was the last man hanged in the Irish Republic. With a revolver in his pocket, Albert spent the afternoon following the execution driving around the country with Jock before they made their way to the airport and the evening flight home.

Three days later Albert and Jock travelled up to Scotland, where they carried out an execution at Edinburgh, and five days later, again with Jock Stewart as his assistant, Albert travelled down to Swansea, where he hanged 24-year-old Ronald Thomas Harries for the murder of his aunt and uncle. Farmer John Harries and his wife Phoebe had last been seen alive following a visit to a church service near their home on a Carmarthenshire farm on 16 October 1953. Nephew Ronnie explained away their disappearance by saying they had gone to London for a secret holiday. Detectives immediately suspected foul play and Scotland Yard were
called in. A forged cheque was found made out to Ronnie Harries and officers soon deduced that he had killed his aunt and uncle after they had refused to loan him money. It was suspected that Harries had buried the bodies in fields close to his own farm and a trap was set. Cotton thread was tied over entrances leading into the fields and noises were made to make Harries think police had searched the fields. On the following day, Harries entered the fields and the trail of broken thread led police to a spot in the fields where they found the bodies battered to death in a shallow grave. Harries lost his composure completely in the death cell and had to be assisted on the short walk to the gallows. As Harries stood on the drop, Albert just had time to place the noose over his neck before he collapsed in a faint. Officers supported him until the trapdoors opened, but Harries was already unconscious before he dropped to his death.

Although the Royal Commission report had made a recommendation that two executioners be employed at a double execution, their request seemed to fall on deaf ears. When Albert was engaged at Pentonville in June, he had three assistants: two, Royston Rickard and John Broadbent, had joined the list in the previous year; the third was Harry Smith, the most experienced of the trio but with less than four years’ service himself. None had sufficient experience to carry out the duties as a second executioner. Albert would therefore carry out the double execution as he had done in the past, as the only principle hangman.

George Smart worked as a porter at a Kensington Hotel. On 9 March he was found bound and gagged in the basement at the hotel; he had been battered about the head but death had been due to suffocation caused by the gag. A small amount of cash and a large quantity of cigarettes had been stolen from the hotel stores. On the following day, 24-year-old
Ian Grant told a friend that he and another friend, Ken Gilbert, aged 21, had killed the porter and stashed some stolen cigarettes in a left-luggage locker at Victoria station. The friend contacted the police and both men were soon taken into custody. Their Old Bailey trial heard how Gilbert, a former employee at the hotel, had led them into the building via the coal cellar, but that they were disturbed by Smart. Both admitted striking the victim before he was tied up. There was no incident on the morning of the execution. Albert allowed Harry Smith to lead one of the men onto the drop but he placed both caps and nooses onto the men and pulled the lever. It was the last double execution carried out in Great Britain.

Albert made another trip to Edinburgh later that summer, travelling direct from Liverpool, where he had carried out an execution on the previous day. When he was next called into action in August, it was again to carry out two executions in two days.

On 11 August, he hanged 62-year-old William Sanchez de Pina Hepper at Wandsworth. Hepper had persuaded his daughter’s friend’s parents to let their young daughter visit him at his Brighton apartment, where he said he would paint her portrait while she recovered from a broken arm. She was later found raped and strangled. Hepper fled to his native Spain, and tried to fight extradition on the grounds of nationality. When it came to light that he had fought on the opposing side during the civil war, his deportation back to England was sealed. Following the execution at Wandsworth, Albert caught a train to Lincoln, where he hanged Harold Fowler for the murder of his wife’s new lover.

The year drew to a close with Albert making his first visit to Holloway Gaol. The north-London all-female gaol hadn’t witnessed an execution since his father had officiated there
half a century before, when he hanged Sach and Walters, the two baby farmers.

Fifty-three-year-old grandmother Mrs Stylou Christofi had left her native Cyprus to live with her son, daughter-in-law, and three children at Hampstead in the summer of 1953. From the outset the two women did not get along and German-born Hella told her husband that his mother must leave the house. At the end of July, shortly after Mrs Christofi had been told she must leave, a neighbour saw her lighting a fire in the back yard. In the early hours of the following morning, the body of Hella was found in the yard. She had been strangled and battered about the head with a heavy, iron ash plate before paraffin was poured onto her body.

Sentenced to death by Mr Justice Devlin at the Old Bailey, Mrs Christofi claimed the death had been an accident, but her account of the incident, related through a translator, failed to convince the jury. Following the passing of the death sentence it was revealed in court that Mrs Christofi had stood trial once before, for the murder of her mother-in-law in her native Cyprus. She had been accused of murdering the woman by ramming a burning wooden torch down her throat, although on that occasion she was found not guilty. She stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed a slight 117 pounds; Albert worked out a drop of 8 feet 4 inches. Unable to speak any English, she was in tears as she was led onto the drop, where a large crucifix had been placed on the wall at her request.

Albert’s final year as a hangman got off to a slow start. There was one execution at Liverpool in March 1955, but that went to Steve Wade, and it was not until mid-April that Albert and Jock travelled down to London together for an appointment at Wandsworth to hang Sidney Clarke, who had killed a
prostitute on a London bombsite. In May, Albert carried out an execution at Lincoln and in June he hanged Richard Gowler, a dockworker, who committed the murder of his girlfriend’s mother at Wallasey, Liverpool. Albert and Jock Stewart hanged Gowler on 21 June.

A few hours after the hangmen left Liverpool’s Walton Gaol, 200 miles away at the Old Bailey a tiny piece of black cloth was draped on the wig of Mr Justice Havers as he pronounced sentence of death on a 28-year-old former model and club hostess from South Kensington. Ruth Ellis was sentenced to death for the murder of David Blakely, her former lover, whom she shot dead outside a Hampstead public house. The mother of two young children, Ellis was alleged to have been given the gun by one of her lovers. At her trial she was asked what her intentions were when she pulled the trigger. She had replied that when she shot Blakely, a Buckinghamshire racing driver, after he had tried to end their relationship, she had intended to kill him. With that statement her fate was sealed.