The Nightingale Shore Murder (25 page)

As well as his good fortune in having several face-to-face conversations with the desperate fugitive murderer without himself being so much as wounded, PC Fulton was able to add some telling information about how Toplis had operated whilst on the run.

After the shooting, Inspector Ritchie expressed his ‘profound regret' that Toplis had not been taken alive; the police had fired in self-defence, he said, and hoped only to ‘wing' the suspect, not to kill him. The post-mortem on Toplis' body showed that a bullet had entered the left side of his chest, passed through the upper part of his chest and exited through his left shoulder blade. At his inquest, the Coroner noted that it was not normal practice for police in England to carry revolvers as part of their equipment, and he asked Superintendent Oldcorn why he had authorised the arming of the three officers who went to arrest Toplis.
‘Owing to the dangerous character of Toplis and his threatening to shoot Fulto
n,' was the reply. ‘
I considered from a common sense point of view that these officers should be in a position to protect themselves
.' The revolvers were produced at the inquest; and the Superintendent explained that they were not Government issue but some in the possession of the Chief Constable. The Coroner instructed the jury that ‘
Where an arrest is resisted with such force that is necessary in self-defence to kill, it becomes justifiable homicide'
. The jury's verdict, after very short deliberation, was justifiable homicide, by a police officer in the execution of his duty.

There was some debate later as to who actually fired the shot that killed Toplis; and in particular whether it had been the Chief Constable's son, Charles de Courcy Parry. He, as a civilian, was not entitled to the defence of justifiable homicide of someone resisting arrest. But there was no clear proof that this was the case, and the matter was not pursued.

After a secret funeral, Toplis was buried in an unmarked grave in Beacon Edge cemetery at Penrith. But his death did not clear up all the confusion of his criminal career. The Andover police followed up clues from the dead man's possessions suggesting that he had been in contact with someone throughout his six weeks on the run: they were particularly interested in a letter from ‘Dorothy'. Toplis had also had a diary in his possession when he died. Though mostly cryptic and undecipherable, the diary entries suggested that he had been in Chepstow at the time of another attack on a taxi driver, when the car had been driven off. He also had in his possession a gold ring set with three diamonds, and a pawn ticket for a wristlet watch.

It was the Daily Mail that first speculated on a link between Percy Toplis and the murder of Florence Shore. Under the headline ‘Unsolved crimes – was Toplis responsible?' on Tuesday 8
^th
June 1920, the paper listed three crimes which had taken place since the beginning of the year, and with which no-one had yet been charged. There was the murder of Police Constable Kelly in Acton on 11
^th
February; a double murder at a lonely Cornish farm, at Skinner's Bottom, near Truro, of Joseph Hoare and his housekeeper, Laura Sara, on 25
^th
January; and the attack on Florence on 12
^th
January, which ultimately proved to be murder. In each case, according to the paper, ‘the description given was that of a soldier.'

In fact, no-one had mentioned a soldier in Florence's case. Mabel Rogers was clear in her description of a man in a brown tweed suit – civilian clothes – and, when asked to suggest what class of man he was, she suggested a clerk, not a soldier. The train guard described the man he saw leaving Florence's compartment as ‘athletic' but did not suggest military. The description of Toplis did not entirely match that of the man in the brown suit given by Mabel or the train guard – he was in any case younger than they described at only 23 – though he was known to use false moustaches as part of his many disguises, making any description unreliable.

Percy Toplis did possess a brown suit – but so would thousands of men. More interestingly, he had been picked up previously by the police for loitering at a London railway station with a revolver. He had a history of theft, and previous convictions for violent crimes, including, in at least one case, against a woman. When he died, he had in his pockets a gold ring with diamonds, like Florence's, and a pawn ticket for the kind of watch Florence had been wearing – a gold wristlet watch. But these are not rare items, he had never before obtained items through straightforward violent theft, preferring deception and cunning; the parallels could be just tantalising coincidence.

According to his diary entries, Toplis had been in Bristol on 12
^th
January, the day that Florence was attacked, in Cardiff the next day, and Swansea on 14
^th
. If his entries are true – and later entries charting his life on the run from the West Country, to Wales, Scotland and North West England are all accurate – then he hardly had time to get from Bristol to London to share a train carriage with Florence for two hours towards the South coast, before fleeing back into Wales. It is most likely that the link between the Monocled Mutineer and Florence Nightingale Shore was mere newspaper speculation; another blind alley for the police.

There was to be one more hopeful development in the case that year. In November 1920, a man named George Leonard Cockle was admitted to Shirley Warren Infirmary, a Poor Law institution in Southampton. He said he was an actor, and an ex-Service man, and lived in Camberwell, in South East London. Though aged about 30, he looked much older, and his health was very poor. He asked to make a statement to the police; and in it, he claimed that he had murdered Florence Shore in the Victoria to Lewes train in January. For the second time since the crime was committed, the police had a real hope of bringing someone to justice for it – they had a confession.

They immediately isolated the man from the other inmates of the Infirmary, and placed a guard on his room. Together with the Sussex police and Scotland Yard, they began to investigate Cockle's story. They found that some aspects of his statement matched the details of the crime; and they planned to ask Mabel Rogers and Henry Duck the train guard to come and try to identify him as the man seen on the train, as soon as Cockle was well enough to leave his bed.

It only took a week to dash their hopes again. By 17
^th
November, Scotland Yard was able to rule the man out as a possible suspect. All the details that he claimed to know had been made public in newspaper coverage of the inquest into Florence's death. And on 12
^th
January, George Cockle had been a patient in a London military hospital. He was either mentally ill, or one of those strange people who feel compelled to confess to crimes they did not commit; whichever was the case, he was not the murderer, and he sank rapidly into obscurity again.

There were no more suspects, or would-be confessors, that year, or in the decades that followed. The Coroner's records on the case were destroyed; and the police records consigned to inaccessible archives. The case was all but forgotten. Until, nearly ninety years later, a new and bizarre theory surfaced about who killed Florence Nightingale Shore.

This is the description, on an internet site which details some of the genealogy of the Shore family, of an unpublished book called ‘Who murdered Nurse Florence Nightingale Shore?' It was written by Patrick Paskiewicz, a distant relative of the Shore family by marriage. After detailed research into newspaper reports of the crime and the investigation, he came to the conclusion that the police had been incompetent in their investigations. They had failed to spot the killer, who was in front of them all the time: Mabel Rogers.

The Paskiewicz book suggests that Mabel never in fact left the train in London. Instead, she travelled with Florence and, in a fit of rage, struck her three sharp blows to the head during the journey, before leaving the train at Lewes to catch a return to London, using Florence's ticket. The murder, he believes, was the result of a jealous rage.

Jeremy Stone, a great-grandson of Florence's cousin Clarence Hobkirk, and a former Detective Chief Inspector of the Royal Hong Kong police, builds on this theory. He speculates that Mabel and Florence had once been engaged in a long-term homosexual relationship, with Mabel being the dominant partner. When it dawned on her that she could not resurrect her relationship, long suspended during the war years, with the now independently-minded Florence, she attacked her in a rage. The taking of the banknotes and Florence's jewellery (if those items existed and were not a fabrication) was to make the scene look like one of robbery. Similarly, Mabel ripped Florence's clothing and her hat to suggest an attempted sexual assault, or to indicate a violent struggle, either of which would have encouraged the police to look for a male suspect.

Mabel also took Florence's umbrella because its handle was used as the instrument to strike the three blows to Florence's head while she was seated in the carriage. The shape of the umbrella handle, according to this theory, could have produced the marks and indentations on the victim's head, being consistent with the shape of a revolver butt, the weapon suggested by the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury.

As a former detective, Stone questions why the police did not focus more closely on the last person to see Florence alive, and why they did not press Mabel harder on her vague description of the man she said she saw in the railway carriage at Victoria. He speculates that the status and royal connections of the Queen's Nurses could have blinded the police to the possibility that such a woman could have committed such a crime – particularly as the details of the crime scene pointed to a male assailant.

So ‘the Mabel theory' warrants serious examination – though reconstructing this proposed sequence of events raises some difficult logistical questions.

If Mabel travelled with Florence as far as Lewes, beat her almost to death with her umbrella on the way, set the scene to look like a robbery, then returned to London using Florence's ticket – why didn't Harry Duck, the train guard, notice Mabel getting off at Lewes from Florence's carriage? He did notice the man in the brown suit, so he was looking that way. Surely he would have noticed a woman in a long dress jumping down onto the tracks then climbing up onto the platform, which is what the man in the brown suit had to do, because the train was too long for the last two carriages to draw up alongside the platform. And, given that Duck was sure he had seen a man getting out of one of the last carriages, why didn't that man also see Mabel, and come forward as a witness? (He would have to have travelled in the last carriage, not Florence's as in Mabel's account, or he would have actually witnessed the murder.)

If Mabel did manage to get out of the carriage and onto the platform unseen, surely some-one at the station or on the return journey would have noticed blood-stained clothing or signs of agitation when she joined a return train to London. And if Mabel used Florence's return ticket, as suggested, why didn't the guard on the return train question the use of a St Leonards ticket – with a return date a week hence – being used on the same day on a journey from Lewes to London?

This scenario has Mabel using Florence's umbrella as the weapon to deliver the three blows to her head. However, it is questionable whether it would have been strong enough to cause the severe injuries that Florence suffered. Bernard Spilsbury was specifically asked at the inquest whether a cane or walking stick could have caused the injuries, and he said no. He insisted it was something like the butt of a revolver, which would be a much heavier weapon. This was in spite of him noting that Florence's skull was ‘rather thin' on top: at no point did the experienced pathologist suggest that the thinness of her skull meant that less force, or a lighter weapon, would have been required. If Mabel did manage to use the umbrella to such deadly effect, what did she then do with it? She must have carried the blood-stained umbrella with her all the way back to London, since the police search of the trackside between Lewes and London didn't find any such object.

The timing of the crime is also something of a problem for the Mabel theory. The first stop for the train after leaving London Victoria was Lewes. The train arrived there just after four thirty in the afternoon: a journey time of an hour and 10 minutes. Even if Mabel had been able to catch a train back to London within 30 minutes, she could not have reached Victoria before six thirty. Then she had to travel out to Hammersmith to change her clothes and make her way back to Covent Garden to get to the theatre in time for the evening performance, where she later received the news about Florence. It seems likely that someone at the Hammersmith Home would have mentioned it if Mabel had returned unexpectedly from a planned trip with her friend, and instead rushed off to the theatre that night; and Mabel must have called at the Home, or they would not have known where to send the message from Hastings when it arrived.

Since the logistics of Mabel making the journey to Lewes are so difficult, could the attack have been carried out in London? Perhaps the argument broke out while they sat in the stationary carriage together. Then Mabel hit her friend over the head three times, with sufficient force to break open her skull. To cover up what she had done, she rifled through Florence's jewellery case, tore her friend's clothes and removed money from her purse to simulate a robbery. Leaving the train at the last moment before departure, she closed the door and shut the window, to ensure that no-one else entered that compartment. She then waved off the train carrying the semi-conscious body of her friend, before returning to Carnforth Lodge and her trip to the theatre that evening, waiting for someone to give her the news that Florence had been found at one of the stops en route to Hastings.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of probability, did Mabel Rogers have the means, motive or opportunity to do this?

The means to procure the injuries that killed Florence was a heavy blunt instrument with a fairly broad striking surface, according to the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury. In his opinion, it could not have been an umbrella or a cane, he stated at the inquest: it was most likely the butt of a revolver. The blows were delivered with Florence in a seated position, and were delivered with great force. So the theory requires Mabel to be carrying a revolver concealed on her person when she saw Florence onto the train at Victoria; and to wield it ruthlessly and repeatedly on her unsuspecting friend in the few minutes in the carriage when she would be unobserved. How the Superintendent of the Hammersmith Nurses Home would know how to obtain a revolver, and dispose of it afterwards, and why she would carry one on a routine trip to the station, adds to the implausibility of this part of the story.

The proposed motive for an assault by Mabel is jealous rage on the part of a rejected former lover. Yet there is nothing tangible, such as letters or mementoes, to suggest that Florence and Mabel were in fact lovers as well as friends. Certainly, they must have made conscious efforts to stay together throughout their training, war service in South Africa, and long years in Sunderland. And Florence did choose to return to Mabel in Carnforth Lodge after her war service in 1919, rather than to her aunt's house or her cousin, or to independent lodgings. It is clear that the two women were extremely close. At the inquest, Mabel told the Coroner that Florence had returned on the Sunday night ‘to me' – not ‘to London' or ‘to Carnforth Lodge'. Her choice of words may have been telling.

But it is important not to judge these women living in the first decades of the 20
^th
century by the norms of today. Close, even intense, female friendships were not at all uncommon, when women lived and worked together, including in war service. At that time, Queen's Nurses were not allowed to be married (if they wanted to marry, they had to resign their post), and in most towns, the QNs routinely lived together in a Nurses' Home, relying on each other for social company in their brief time off, as well as for professional companionship. So the fact that Florence and Mabel lived together as unmarried women does not imply anything unusual. Nor were they living together in a two person household in either Sunderland and Hammersmith: they were part of a household of nursing staff and domestic staff. The only other clue suggestive of a closer relationship is Offley Shore's intense dislike of Mabel – perhaps he was so virulently opposed to Mabel because he had reason to believe the two were more than close friends and colleagues? After all this time, it is impossible to judge. But a bitter argument between former lovers could have been a motive for a furious attack.

Or maybe it wasn't an unpremeditated crime of passion at all. There is an even more bizarre twist to this theory, which was suggested to archivist and author Dr Jonathan Oates, whilst giving a talk on train murders. This claims that Mabel Rogers was secretly married to Florence's cousin, Brigadier Clarence Hobkirk, who was also a beneficiary of Florence's Will. Mabel killed Florence so that they could inherit her money. The Hammersmith nurses' home was to be sold, and the nurses needed new premises – was Mabel desperate to find money to re-house herself and her colleagues? If so, and presuming she could contemplate murdering her best friend of 25 years just to buy a new building, almost any other place, time and method would have been simpler than attacking Florence on a train in the middle of the afternoon in a busy London railway station.

There is no documentary evidence of such a marriage (unsurprisingly, since Clarence Hobkirk was married to someone else). Nor is it easy to believe such an unnecessarily complicated scenario in which two people are involved in a murder conspiracy, with the physically weaker and emotionally more vulnerable partner carrying out the brutal attack.

Mabel did have the opportunity to carry out the attack on Florence, while they sat in the carriage together before the train left. But it was only by chance that she was not discovered. Another passenger could have joined them at any moment. And this scenario requires Mabel, after the sudden, deadly loss of control (or audaciously pre-meditated assault), and the rapid actions to set the ‘robbery' scene, to leave the carriage in the middle of the afternoon, in full view of station staff and the travelling public, trusting that neither her demeanour nor the state of her clothes would give away the strenuous and bloody attack she had just undertaken.

The most obvious difficulty with the Mabel theory – whether the attack happened in London or on the way to Lewes – is the need for Mabel to be emotionally capable of carrying it off. Could she hide the emotions of either the rage-filled, impulsive murder, or the calculated assassination, of her close friend of 25 years, throughout the four days that Florence took to die, as well as the inquest, the funeral and memorials that lasted for years? That presumes an almost psychopathic degree of detachment and deceit at odds with her upbringing and her impeccable professional life.

Whatever the truth of the relationship between them, there is nothing convincingly to suggest that Mabel murdered Florence, by impulse or design. And there are many circumstantial details that make it highly unlikely, if not impossible, that she could have done so. The theory is merely a diversion from the fact that no-one was ever charged with the crime.

The most likely scenario seems to be that the man in the brown suit – the man who got off at Lewes – attacked Florence on the journey from Victoria. It is feasible that either he was one and the same man as the Eastbourne burglar, William Clements (if he managed to hoodwink the police over his movements on that day) or that he sold on the gun he used on Florence to Clements, in order to rid himself of the evidence. Today, DNA testing would be able determine whether the blood on the revolver was Florence's, and so whether the revolver was the murder weapon. If they had been able to prove that it was used in the crime, the police would have had much stronger grounds to question the man found with the weapon.