The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (46 page)

The three left for Bude in William Thomas’s car at three p.m. One of the lesser resorts on the north Cornish coast, it was a drive of twenty miles (thirty kilometres). They went to Littlejohn’s Cafe (no longer in existence), where they ordered tea. When they were seated, Annie produced a packet of sandwiches, carefully prepared by herself with tinned salmon and her own salad cream, as her contribution to the treat. By today’s standards this seems an odd thing to do, but not then. “Remember,” says a relative of Jack Littlejohn today, “you’re in Cornwall now. That’s the way they did things here, saving the pennies.”

They ate most of the salmon sandwiches and afterwards the two women went for a stroll while William Thomas took a walk on his own. He stopped at the nearest inn, The Grove Hotel, for a couple of whiskies, with the excuse that he was feeling queasy. When he rejoined the ladies, his wife complained of “a sticky taste” in her mouth and asked if they could buy some fruit; her husband bought her some bananas.

They started the drive back to Trenhorne Farm at six forty-five p.m. but were forced to make a number of stops on the way because Mrs Thomas was suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea. On their return to the farm, they sent for Dr Graham Saunders, who arrived at nine thirty p.m. He found Mrs Thomas’s symptoms consistent with food poisoning, but did not think she was seriously ill and recommended a diet of whitebait and water.

Now it was Annie’s turn to play the good neighbour and she rallied nobly, staying at the farm to nurse Alice Thomas who improved steadily. Oddly, it was eleven days before Alice’s mother, Mrs Parsons, heard of her daughter’s illness, although she lived only five miles (eight kilometres) away—apparently Alice did not want her mother to be alarmed. Once she knew, she came over to nurse her daughter herself; Annie continued to run the house and do the household cooking. The doctor was sufficiently reassured to stop calling every day, and the following Sunday Alice Thomas was able to come down for lunch—a traditional meal of roast mutton, sprouts and potatoes, prepared by Annie. Alice ate hers in the dining room while the others stayed in the kitchen. At nine p.m. Thomas carried his wife upstairs, giving her an aspirin from a bottle that Annie had supplied.

During the night, Alice became ill again. In the morning Thomas sent for the doctor, who was so shocked by the change that had taken place in his patient that he called in a consultant. Alice was now delirious, partly paralysed and unable to use her legs—and the consultant agreed with Dr Saunders’ suspicion that she had arsenical poisoning. They transferred the patient immediately to Plymouth City Hospital where she was admitted just before midnight on Monday 3 November. By nine thirty-five the next morning, she was dead.

Because of the doctor’s report about possible poisoning, a post mortem was held. The organs sent to the Exeter city analyst were found to contain 0.85 grains (56 mg) of arsenic. This finding should have remained confidential, but William Thomas somehow got to hear of it. He warned Annie that there might be inquiries by the police and possibly an inquest. The rumours spread, and festered in the retelling, so that the funeral of Alice Thomas on Saturday 8 November took place in an atmosphere of high tension. Subjected to stares, whispers and innuendos, Annie Hearn braved it out until the accusations against her were finally voiced the following day in the Thomases’ dining room at Trenhorne Farm. Percy Parsons, the dead woman’s brother, said to Annie Hearn: “We haven’t met, but I’ve heard about you and them tinned sandwiches you was responsible for. What d’you put in them? That’s what I’d like to know. Something wrong from all accounts. This needs clearing up, ’tis not the end of it, no way.”

Understandably distressed, Annie confided to her neighbour Mrs Spears, who lived in the other wing of Trenhorne House, “They seem to think I have poisoned Mrs Thomas with the sandwiches. They think down there all tinned food is poisoned!”

Meanwhile, the behaviour of William Thomas struck some people as peculiar, too. Far from accusing Annie, he asked her to stay on at the farm, but demanded some form of receipt for the thirty-eight pounds she had borrowed two years before. Distraught, she refused to sit down and eat with him, and burst out, “I’ll never forget that horrid man Parsons and the things he said. I’ve lost my appetite . . . life isn’t worth living.” She ran off up the lane and, when she failed to return, Thomas called at her house. There was no answer.

On 11 November Thomas received a poignant letter from Annie, posted the previous afternoon from nearby Congdon’s Corner, in which she insisted on her innocence but clearly threatened suicide. Or was the letter a bluff? The “awful man” was Percy Parsons, the dead woman’s brother.

Thomas immediately fetched a police officer and together they broke into Trenhorne House to find it empty. Annie Hearn had disappeared.

Was the letter an implicit admission of guilt despite her claim to innocence? Or was it the final testament of a woman weighed down by local gossip, attempting to do the honourable thing by saving the reputation of her friend William Thomas by destroying her own? Or could it have been a charade—a calculated deception by one guilty of murder? If that was the case, then Annie Hearn was a monster.

To start with, her movements were easy to trace. She had hired Hector Ollett, an ex-army man who ran the shop at Congdon’s Corner where she had posted the letter, to drive her down to Looe about twenty miles (thirty kilometres) away on the south coast. She paid him eighteen shillings, and he dropped her off at the bridge. After that the scent went cold, until the police found her check coat several days later, near the edge of the cliff. The conclusion was obvious: Annie Hearn had killed herself by jumping from the clifftop.

On 24 November, little more than a month since that outing to Bude, the inquest into the death of Alice Thomas began in Plymouth. The coroner asked William Thomas these vital questions:

“Had you any rat poison?”—Thomas replied that he had, “locked in my desk”.

“Did your wife ever object to Mrs Hearn coming to the house?”—“Never.”

“You and Mrs Thomas were friendly with Mrs Hearn’s sister?”—“Yes.”

“Did you ever give your wife any cause to be jealous of Mrs Hearn?”—“Never.”

A chemist from Launceston confirmed that he had supplied weedkiller for Mrs Hearn’s garden four years earlier. The powder, he said, was practically “all arsenic”. The verdict of the inquest was given on 26 November: “Murder by arsenical poisoning by some person or persons unknown.”

The original assumption of the police that Annie Hearn had jumped to her death had changed dramatically after the local fishermen pointed out that, if she had fallen from the spot near where her coat was found, her body would have struck the rocks and remained on the beach. If she had been swept out, she would have been washed up almost at once because of the home winds that had been prevalent for the previous ten days. Two people had drowned in the area recently, and both were washed ashore within two days. Had she faked her suicide?

The police issued the following description, together with a photograph:

The police now began to take an interest in the death of Annie’s sister Minnie (Lydia) who had joined her at Trenhorne House in 1925. The sisters lived there with two other shadowy figures: an old Cornish woman called Mrs Aunger, who had since died; and Annie’s aunt, Miss Mary Everard, who had fallen ill and died in September 1926 after being nursed devotedly by her niece. Now people remembered that the aunt had left everything she possessed “to my dear niece Sarah Ann Hearn, except my mother’s picture.” The deaths of her aunt, who was seventy-six, and her sister, who was only fifty-two but who had suffered from chronic gastric catarrh and colitis, had seemed natural at the time. Now, however, the Home Office announced a decision to exhume the bodies, because the symptoms of their illnesses were also consistent with arsenical poisoning.

In Lewannick they still remember that macabre exhumation, which took place on Tuesday 9 December 1930 in a storm of snow and sleet. Mrs White, who was a girl at the time and still lives in Lewannick today, recalled the two policemen who guarded the gates of the churchyard and the trouble they took in erecting a screen of tarpaulins to prevent the public looking on. But since they completely forgot the houses at the back that overlooked the churchyard, she had a good view: “We could see all their pots and a box on the grave. They had the coffins taken up and we could see them with their tongs dropping things into jars.” These “things” were forwarded to Dr Roche Lynch, the Home Office analyst. In the remains of both bodies he found “distinct quantities of arsenic”.

And, on the same day that the exhumations took place, the
Daily
Mail
brought the sensational case to a head with the spectacular offer of a reward of
£
500, a very great deal of money in those days, “for the discovery of Mrs Annie Hearn, the missing witness”.
WHERE IS MRS HEARN
? asked the headline,
IS SHE STILL ALIVE
?

Now Annie Hearn had been revealed in a more sinister light as the possible murderer of
three
women. What had happened to her? The answer was that she had indeed faked her suicide. She had calculated her movements from the moment she arrived in Looe with a wicker basket as her only luggage. Half an hour later she bought an attaché case for three shillings and eleven pence. By ten p.m. she had arrived in Torquay by train, and signed the register at St Leonard’s Hotel as Mrs Ferguson of Heavitree, Exeter. The next day she moved to simpler lodgings in Ellacombe Church Road, using yet another name, Mrs Faithful, with the explanation that her husband was ill in the local hospital.

She ordered some calling cards in the new name, and answered an advertisement for a cook – housekeeper. A week later she was employed by an architect, Cecil Powell. He was impressed by his new servant, who went to church on Sundays and seemed of above-average education, though he thought that at times she seemed preoccupied. This was hardly surprising—when she was alone in her room she was busy cutting out the pictures of herself in the national newspapers. One of these photographs, accompanying the
Daily
Mail
’s reward announcement, had seemed familiar to Powell “in a vague sort of way”. Though he saw a similarity, he was reluctant to act because of his wife’s delicate health and his own aversion to publicity. It was Annie’s own furtive behaviour that caught her out.

On 1 January 1931 she set out for the new year sales and chose a coat at Williams & Cox in the Strand, Torquay, presumably to replace the one she had abandoned at Looe. She needed to have it shortened, and left it in the shop with a deposit in the name of Mrs Dennis. When the errand boy delivered the coat a few days later, the door was opened by Powell’s son, who said that there must be some mistake because no one of the name of Dennis lived there. Annie’s subsequent attempt at explanation was so suspicious that the architect consulted his friend the mayor, who informed the police in Launceston.

In the fading light of the afternoon of 12 January, Powell asked his housekeeper to go on an errand, knowing that she was to be watched and followed by a police sergeant. As she passed him under the lamplight, the constable stepped forward. “Mrs Hearn?” “Yes?” “I believe I know you. I think you know Lewannick.” “Yes, I have been there.” “Then I must ask you to come to the police station.”

There she was charged “that between 18 October and 3 November 1930 at the parish of Lewannick, you did kill and murder one Alice Maud Thomas”.

On 11 March Annie made her twelfth appearance before the Launceston magistrates, standing in an easy attitude with her hands clasped in front of her, wearing a long, claret-coloured coat with fur collar and cuffs. Percy Parsons told the court about the day of his sister’s funeral: “Some lady met us at the door. I didn’t know who she was.” But he identified her now as “the lady sitting over there”. He agreed that he had never visited the farm before in order to see his sister. “Was that on account of a family feud?” he was asked. “I can’t say. I was never invited.”

Superintendent Pill read the statement made to him by Annie shortly after midnight on the day of her arrest: