Christmas Murders

Jonathan Goodman

Description

A seasonal gift for connoisseurs of true crime Here are ten murder cases of "the old-fashioned sort"-evoking a nostalgia more obviously associated with fiction-that all took place during the festive period from mid-December to Twelfth Night between 1811 and 1933. The settings of these grisly tales range from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club in New York (where a gentleman named Molineux provided a drastic cure for hangovers by putting cyanide in a gift-wrapped bottle of Bromo Seltzer) to an apartment in Glasgow (home of a wealthy Scotswoman whose demise seemed to have been satisfactorily explained by local constables, until Arthur Conan Doyle assumed the role of Sherlock Holmes) and from a builder's workshop in North London (site of a murder committed by a man called Furnace, who suited his criminal action to his name) to the elegant dwelling of a mnage trois near the Thames (scene of a puzzling poisoning that, years later, Raymond Chandler tried, unofficially, to solve).In The Christmas Murders, Jonathan Goodman has collected stories as fascinating and compulsively readable as one would expect from a writer described by Jacques Barzun as "the greatest living master of true-crime literature" and by Julian Symons as "the premier investigator of crimes past."

Sujets

• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 05 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612779300
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE CHRISTMAS MURDERS
TRUE CRIME HISTORY SERIES
Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts
James Jessen Badal
Tracks to Murder
Jonathan Goodman
Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome
Albert Borowitz
Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon
Robin Odell
The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair
Diana Britt Franklin
Murder on Several Occasions
Jonathan Goodman
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories
Elizabeth A. De Wolfe
Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist
Andrew Rose
Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett
Thomas Crowl
Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon
Albert Borowitz
The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age
Virginia A. McConnell
Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones
Jan Bondeson
Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation
James G. Hollock
Murder and Martial Justice: Spying, “Terrorism,” and Retribution in Wartime America
Meredith Lentz Adams
The Christmas Murders: Classic True Crime Stories
Edited by Jonathan Goodman
Contents
Albert Borowitz Preface
Jonathan Goodman Murders of Christmases Past
Richard Whittington-Egan The Christmas Sack Murder
Harold Furniss The Ratcliffe Highway Horrors
Albert Borowitz Packaged Death
Arthur Conan Doyle The Case of Oscar Slater
Anonymous The Distribution of Hannah Brown
Richard D. Altick A Bedroom in Pimlico
H.M. Walbrook The Slaying of Léon Beron
Anonymous Murder of a Minder
Jonathan Goodman Sam’s New-Year Resolution
Jonathan Goodman The Thirty-Guinea Murder
Acknowledgements and Sources
THE CHRISTMAS MURDERS
Classic True Crime Stories
Edited by Jonathan Goodman
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
For Thomas M. McDade, President of The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder
© 2011 by the Estate of Jonathan Goodman
All rights reserved
First published in 1986 by Allison & Busby Ltd., London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2011003219
ISBN 978-1-60635-082-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Christmas murders : classic true crime stories / edited by Jonathan Goodman.
p. cm. — (True crime history series)
Originally published: London ; New York : Allison & Busby, 1986.
ISBN 978-1-60635-082-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Murder—History—19th century—Case studies. 2. Murder—History—20th century—
Case studies. I. Goodman, Jonathan.
HV6513.C48 2011
364.152'309034—dc22
2011003219
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
15  14  13  12  11     5  4  3  2  1
Preface
Albert Borowitz
J ONATHAN G OODMAN , my dear friend and literary colleague for more than a quarter of a century, passed away on January 10, 2008. We knew each other’s literary work before we met for the first time in London, introduced by another English crime historian whom we both admired, Richard Whittington-Egan. My wife Helen and I quickly formed a strong attachment to Jonathan. After our first meeting we saw him at least once a year until 1995, most often in England, but frequently in America (which he adored) and once in Paris (only after we swore to protect him from his cross-Channel neighbors).
Many years ago Jonathan Goodman was recognized by Jacques Barzun as “the greatest living master of true-crime literature”; the high regard for his accomplishments continues after his untimely death. At first it appeared that Jonathan was destined for a career in the theater. After National Service in the Royal Air Force, he became first a stage manager and then a director, working in the West End, on touring productions, and in repertory companies. These years gave Jonathan an endearing dramatic flair that he never lost.
During his tenure at the Liverpool Playhouse, he became interested in Liverpool’s puzzling Wallace murder case, for which he propounded a convincing solution in his successful debut as a true crime writer ( The Killing of Julia Wallace ). He went on to publish forty books, usually in the true crime genre but also novels and poetry; works of his have been translated into French, German, and Japanese. Jonathan won all the honors that his literary field could offer, including the Gold Dagger of the United Kingdom’s Crime Writers’ Association.
One of Jonathan’s specialties was the editing of thematically devised true crime anthologies. In his memory the Kent State University Press, a longtime publisher of his work, is issuing two of his anthologies not previously released in the United States. The present collection, The Christmas Murders , focuses on murders committed, as Jonathan tells us in his introduction, during the festive seasons encompassing Christmas, “each dating uncertainly from when greetings cards start arriving till Twelfth Night.”
Richard Whittington-Egan, a gifted crime historian and chronicler of his native Liverpool, is irresistibly drawn to a play on words. He hopes that his readers will assume that his title “The Christmas Sack Murder” will refer to Santa Claus’s bundle of gifts or to “a certain, and delectable, variety of sherry.” In fact, what the author has on his mind is something quite gruesome, the sack in which, on December 10, 1913, George Ball (alias Sumner) and Samuel Angeles Elltoft carted the murdered and trussed Christina Catherine Bradfield for deposit in the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. In recounting this case, Whittington-Egan notes the prominent role played by chance.
“The Ratcliffe Highway Horrors” is Harold Furniss’s gripping review of London’s first serial murders: the East End massacres of the Marr and Williamson households on the nights of December 7 and 19, 1811; these outrages were attributed to John Williams, a former seaman living in the vicinity. Furniss corrects some errors in Thomas De Quincey’s classic account of the case in his “Three Memorable Murders” (1854), but supports De Quincey “in giving all the credit, or discredit, to the diabolical Williams alone.” There was no judicial determination of Williams’s responsibility for the crimes, because he hanged himself in prison while the investigation was still incomplete. In 1971 P. D. James and police historian T. A. Critchley in The Maul and The Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811 opined that John Williams “was virtually condemned and his memory vilified on evidence so inadequate, circumstantial and irrelevant that no competent court of law would commit him for trial.” I am inclined to believe that Jonathan Goodman, who generally opposed revisionist interpretation of murder cases, would have continued to believe in Williams’s guilt.
“Packaged Death,” an article of mine that Jonathan Goodman chose for The Christmas Murders , discusses the two trials of Roland Molineux for the murder of Katherine Adams, who had ingested cyanide of mercury contained in a fake bottle of Bromo-Seltzer mailed to Mrs. Adams’s nephew at a New York City athletic club on the day before Christmas 1898. This essay originally appeared as the cover story in a 1983 issue of The American Bar Association Journal to provide historical background for a discussion of the 1982 Tylenol poisonings in the Chicago area. I have noted several points of similarity between the Molineux and Tylenol cases: “the lacing of a painkiller with cyanide, the use of an ostensibly original sealed drug package, and the indirect means of delivery of the poison.” On January 10, 2010, the Chicago Tribune reported that a longtime suspect in the Tylenol case had been ordered to give DNA samples and fingerprints.
“The Case of Oscar Slater,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the most historically significant writing selected by Jonathan Goodman for The Christmas Murders . Doyle originally published this work in 1912 (in the form of a little book) to argue for the release of Slater, then serving a life sentence for the theft-motivated murder of an elderly Glasgow woman, Miss Marion Gilchrist, on the night of December 21, 1903. Doyle attacked inconsistencies in the eyewitness testimony and argued that the actual murderer knew where Miss Gilchrist’s jewelry was located in her flat. This was Doyle’s second intervention on behalf of a man he believed to have been wrongly convicted, the first being a set of articles asserting the innocence of a young solicitor, George Edalji, charged with killing a mining pit pony and mutilating other farm animals in 1903; the Edalji case inspired Peter Shaffer’s Equus .
Jonathan has culled from an early Victorian Newgate Calendar the first crime sensation of the young queen’s reign, the killing and dismemberment of Hannah Brown by her intended bridegroom, James Greenacre, in late December 1836. A memorable horror of the case is Greenacre’s conveyance of his victim’s severed head for watery burial in the Regent’s Canal; it was wrapped in a silk pocket-handkerchief and sat on his lap as he rode an omnibus toward his macabre destination.
Unsurprisingly, abuse or concealment of a corpse is often a main obstacle to securing acquittal on a murder charge. Greenacre claimed to have caused Brown’s death by accidentally causing her chair to fall over backwards during a quarrel. However, in sentencing him to death, the judge stated that “the amputated limbs and the dissevered body were united to the bloodless head of the murdered woman, and every injury to her by you inflicted after death has afforded the means of proving by comparison, beyond doubt, that the wound on the eye was inflicted by you while the victim was in life, and strength, and health.”
In “A Bedroom in Pimlico,” the polymath scholar and elegant crime historian Richard D. Altick addresses the death of Edwin Bartlett on New Year’s Eve 1885 of liquid chloroform poisoning. Professor Altick notes that the prosecution o