The Murder That Defeated Whitechapel's Sherlock Holmes: At Mrs Ridgley's Corner

By Paul Stickler

A real-life murder mystery in turn-of-the-century London, and Scotland Yard’s “greatest detective of all time” who was determined to discover whodunit.
 
By 1919, Det. Chief Inspector Fred Wensley was already a legend, having investigated the Jack the Ripper slayings, busted crime syndicates, and risked his life at the notorious Siege of Sidney Street. But the brutal murder of kindly fifty-four-year-old widow and shopkeeper Elizabeth Ridgley was an unexpected challenge in a storied career.
 
Elizabeth and her dog were both found dead in her blood-spattered shop in Hitchin. But even in the early days of forensics, Wensley was stunned by the inept conclusion of local Hertfordshire police: it was a freak, tragic accident that had somehow felled Elizabeth and her Irish terrier. At Wensley’s urging, Scotland Yard proceeded with a second investigation. It led to the arrest of an Irish war veteran. The only real evidence: a blood-stained shirt. But the Ridgley case was far from over.
 
Drawing on primary sources and newly-discovered material, Paul Stickler exposes the frailties of county policing in the years after WWI, reveals how Ridgley’s murder led to fundamental changes in methods of investigation, and attempts to solve a seemingly unsolvable crime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526733863

Paul Stickler

Paul Stickler joined Hampshire Constabulary in 1978 and spent the majority of his time investigating murders for CID. He was seconded to the FBI Academy at Quantico to study international perspectives of crime investigation. Since his retirement in 2008 he has indulged his passion for history, researching murders in the first half of the twentieth century.

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2017

Introduction

Murder narratives are relatively commonplace and occupy a prominent position in the public imagination. The enduring fascination with people’s behaviour seems never-ending, particularly when it involves the ultimate act of violence and the quest to find out who was responsible. Many cases will remain in the memories of people for considerable time such has been the amount of attention that has been paid to quite extraodinary events in the past.

Every now and again, though, an unwritten story, hidden away in dusty archives, rises to the surface which has received no attention, no analysis and involving someone who has been long forgotten. At Mrs Ridgley’s Corner is such a case, a victim buried in an unmarked grave, her plight unknown and consigned to history. Her story needs to be told for it has an important contribution to make to understand a piece of history, to throw light on rural policing immediately after the First World War and, importantly, ensure she is not forgotten.

I have chosen to adopt a different approach to the conventional method of analysis, preferring instead to examine the detail through the eyes and emotions of the characters involved, as if the reader was there listening to their thoughts, and without a narrative which has the benefit of knowing what is yet to come. Such an approach gives the reader a greater understanding of not only what happened, but why. The decisions taken by the police, by neighbours and other key actors are seen through an untainted lens, and in the order it happened.

There are no assumptions made about any of the characters involved, no unnecessary dramatisation, but rather it draws on the original material, documents and photographs, which exposes sufficent drama in itself.

It is, ultimately, an account which would, I hope, address the frustrations of those who were involved and if it was of course possible, allow the victim lying in her grave, to rest a little more in peace.

‘Where a person of sound memory and discretion – unlawfully killeth – any reasonable creature in being – and under the King’s Peace – with malice aforethought – either express or implied – he shall be guilty of murder.’ (Edward Coke 1552-1634)

‘I, ______, do swear that I will well and truly serve our Lord The King in the office of Constable for the County of Hertfordshire, without favour or affection, malice or ill-will: and that I will to the best of my power cause the peace to be kept and preserved, and prevent all offences against the persons and properties of His Majesty’s subjects: and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to law. So help me God.’ (Police Oath of Office)

Chapter 1

Death on the Corner

Hertfordshire, Saturday, 25 January 1919

Unusually, the front door was open. A dim light shone from inside. People who passed the grocer’s shop on the corner of Garden Row and Nightingale Road in the Hertfordshire town of Hitchin thought it odd but ignored it. Saturday, 25 January was a bitterly cold night, snow thick on the ground, sleet blown into the faces of the few who braved the weather. It wasn’t the night to hang around; a night to be at home in front of the fire. Everyone knew that at nine o’clock Mrs Ridgley routinely closed her shop, locked the front door and extinguished the paraffin lamp in her converted front room, but perhaps she was busy dealing with a customer. Ten minutes later, the front door was closed, its blind still up and the lamp still emitted its faint glow. Unusual, but those who saw it were more concerned about getting home.¹

The following morning, Sunday, Gertrude Day edged carefully along Garden Row having twice already slipped up on the fresh snow that had fallen overnight. As she approached the junction, taking her alongside the rear of Mrs Ridgley’s shop, she saw the back door open and subconsciously expected to see the 54-year-old woman either emerge or to see her somewhere in the back garden, but she saw only the small, cluttered yard, though barely visible through the six feet of untidy hedgerow.² Sheets of wood leant against the back wall and a couple of wooden boxes were piled on top of one another. She saw the piece of loose fence trellis which the grocer used at the entrance to her back door to keep her Irish terrier dog in the garden in the summer, a water butt hard against the rear scullery wall and a drainpipe awkwardly placed above it to catch the water from the gutter. Now, its chaotic appearance was masked by the heavy snow and the icicles hanging dramatically from the guttering. Other than noticing that the back gate to the garden appeared to be firmly closed, she thought no more and concentrated on maintaining her footing on the slippery surface. As she turned the corner and passed the front door of the shop, nothing caught her attention. It was, after all, a Sunday and everything was closed.

At half past eight the following morning, she returned. She needed matches and firewood, and as she approached the front door, she saw schoolchildren giggling, trying to peer through the window. The door was closed and the blind drawn down on the inside. Strange, she thought, since Mrs Ridgley always opened up at eight o’clock and she was sure that the weather wouldn’t have put her off from trading as normal. She tried opening the door but it was locked. She banged again and called out. She had known the shopkeeper for nine years, since she had moved to Hitchin, and had got to know her fairly well, particularly since she had become widowed two years earlier. There was no response and so she banged the door again.

There was still no reply, so she made her way back to St Saviour’s Working Men’s Club some eighty yards away where she worked as a caretaker and returned an hour later.³ With still no answer to her repeated banging, and the blind still drawn on the inside, she walked into Garden Row, where she could see the back of the house. Nothing appeared to have changed, and alarmingly, the back door was still open. There was no sign of Mrs Ridgley and no sign of her dog, which never left her side. Something was wrong. She was deciding what to do next when a neighbour, James Knight, appeared who told her that he had also tried to enter the shop but found the door locked. Now beginning to panic a little, she explained what she had done and they agreed to go to the police station in the centre of town. They reported their concerns to the sergeant behind the desk, and Police Constable Alfred Kirby, an officer with nearly six years’ service, was instructed to accompany the couple back to the shop to investigate further. They arrived at twenty past ten.⁴

Constable Kirby went through the same routine of banging and shouting. He went round to the side of the house and saw that the gate to the back garden was padlocked from the inside. He had been here before; Mrs Ridgley had been involved in a house fire the previous May and he and PC 187 Josiah Selby had helped to rescue her. He reflected on this for a while, remembering the details. The shopkeeper had needed to be carried from the premises suffering from suffocation and had been taken to hospital, and once he had managed to examine the house he found that there had been a small fire in the rear living room. On the table, there had been a bottle of gin, and having spoken to her later it appeared as though she had become ill in her kitchen, collapsed and was completely unaware of the fire that had developed, probably caused by a paraffin lamp she had fallen on. Had she done the same thing again, he wondered, as he stood staring at the back door? He also recalled that she had a dog, and he whistled in an attempt to arouse the animal, but there was no response.

Other neighbours were beginning to gather at the shop door, shaking its handle and shouting through the letterbox. Two men approached Kirby to see if they could help. The constable announced he was going into the house and asked them both to accompany him.⁵

As Kirby approached the back door, he made a mental note that it was three-quarters open and the blind on the inside of the living room was fully down. This was where the fire had been the previous year. At the door, he shouted once again to get the attention of the shopkeeper but got the same result. He stepped into the house, feeling no discernible increase in air temperature, and moved slowly forward, his eyes scanning around the small kitchen. Turning right into the scullery, or at least a room which was seemingly used more as some sort of storage area, he continued to peer into the house, his eyes squinting as they adjusted to the poor light. Just inside the door, crates of sugar neatly piled on top of one another rested alongside a large pile of new broom heads. Next to them, a cloth protected something piled halfway up the wall, masking the worn and heavily tarnished floral wallpaper. On the opposite side, he could see a flour barrel with a set of scales sitting on the top, a pestle resting in its cradle. Although filled with shop provisions, the room still had the appearance of being tidy – busy, but organised. The floor, though, was empty, an obvious pathway running through to the hallway which led to the front of the house and the room which had been converted to a shop.

With the two men still behind him, Kirby slowly crossed the scullery floor heading for the hallway. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and could see his breath in the air silhouetted against the faint light emanating from the opened back door. He moved further into the house, the light gradually diminishing. Suddenly, he stopped. His eyes had acclimatised and he could see the clear outline of someone lying on the floor, the head resting against the bottom of the stairs, the torso across the width of the hallway, the lower half of the body disappearing into the entrance to the living room. With no torchlight to assist him, he turned back to the scullery to retrieve a candlestick he had seen, lit it, and went back. With more light, all three men could now see the body of a fully clothed woman face down on the floor, her arms resting underneath her chest and what appeared to be a cloth wrapped around her neck. Peering into the doorway to the right, Kirby could see the woman’s legs outstretched but with her heels facing upwards and her toes pointing towards the floor. The neighbour who had followed the constable in stepped carefully over the body, went to the rear of the living room and opened the heavy set of curtains which were hanging untidily over the rear window. He raised the blind behind them and daylight spread instantly across the prostrate body.

The other man who had accompanied Kirby into the house immediately remarked, ‘She’s been done in,’⁶ and pointed to her head, which was saturated in blood and resting on top of a piece of sacking, probably a doormat, itself heavily bloodstained. Even though the body was face down, the man, who had known Mrs Ridgley for seven years, instantly recognised her, and he confirmed her identity to the constable.

Elizabeth Ridgley had run the corner shop by herself in recent years and many had commented that she was rather a serious woman who rarely smiled and was very focused on making money from her business. She had few friends, no children from her marriage and probably her only real companion in life was her Irish terrier dog. A lonely woman, who now lay dead in the passageway of her house.

Kirby slowly surveyed the hallway. He immediately noticed an iron weight resting on the floor two feet from the woman’s head. His mind was racing; if she had been murdered, was this the weapon which had been used to attack her? He crouched down and picked it up, not really knowing what he was looking for, though he could clearly see that it was covered in blood and had short, gingers hairs stuck to the bottom of it. He put it back down again, making sure he returned it to the exact same place. He touched the side of Ridgley’s face and neck and quickly realised the body was cold. He stood up, examining the passageway in more detail, still trying to understand what he was looking at. Halfway between the body and the weight, an empty cigar box caught his attention. Looking back towards the scullery, he stared at the scales he had seen just a few minutes earlier. He now knew where the weight had come from.

A makeshift structure of wooden planks, measuring about three feet square, and which he recognised as a dog-gate used by Ridgley to keep her pet from going into the shop during opening hours, rested against the stairs. He turned towards the front of the house and suddenly jolted. He was staring at the body of a motionless dog lying on its left side further along the hallway and facing the front door. He instantly recognised it as the grocer’s Irish terrier and saw a large gathering of foam next to its mouth and three motions where it had clearly evacuated its bowels; one immediately next to its rear end, another in the passageway and the third in the living room. The dog lay about three feet away from its owner. Kirby, now realising what he was dealing with, instructed one of the men who had come into the house with him to go to the police station, raise the alarm and fetch a doctor. With two dead bodies to deal with, it was going to be a busy day, and more cold and snow was on its way.

Chapter 2

Outbreak of War

Ireland, 1910

John Healy was sitting in the prisoner’s dock inside the quarter sessions court building in Tralee, County Kerry. He had been at the magistrates’ court three years ago, when he was fined for being drunk, but this was different. Yet he was unconcerned and briefly allowed himself a glance at the two prisoners in the dock with him. His brother Thomas and their friend John Browne looked smart in their suits. They always did when they dressed up, quite different from their farm labourers’ trousers and shirts which they usually wore when herding cows in their field at Listowel. It was cold inside the building. The winter of 1910 was bitter but they were sitting patiently listening to the proceedings droning on in front of them. Their solicitor was doing a good job and had already shown the alleged victim in the case to be someone who couldn’t really remember anything. Unlawfully and feloniously assaulting Patrick Keogh was the charge, but in cross-examination he had failed to identify the three prisoners in the dock. Not surprisingly perhaps. He had been kicked half to death and had his teeth knocked out as he had walked through Listowel town centre. He remembered being confronted by three men who had asked him for a light for a cigarette, but after that everything had been a blur. He vaguely recalled being pushed up against an archway, into a passageway, and then took several blows to the head and legs before collapsing unconscious. He had been laid up for two weeks, unable to work, and whoever had done this had stolen the fourteen shillings he had in his pocket. He was permanently dizzy and was scared to go out of his house now. The defendants listened dispassionately.

The prosecution then called their other witnesses. Publicans in the small market town spoke of the three men drinking all afternoon in their pubs, and a barmaid, Mary Enright, working in Stack’s public house saw them walk past heading towards the archway where Keogh had been attacked. They disappeared from view, and very shortly afterwards she went out the back of the pub to close a gate and saw the victim lying unconscious on the ground. She looked up and saw the same three men running away. She had called for them to stop but they’d kept going.

Once again, the solicitor rose to his feet and told the judge that he considered the case too weak, with only one witness who could say that she saw the defendants in the area at the time. This didn’t prove the case, nor did it mean that just because his clients were drinking nearby that they could reasonably be held to be responsible. He asked the judge to direct the jury to find the prisoners not guilty on the grounds of insufficient evidence. The judge, Stephen Woulfe-Flanagan considered the application and directed the jury to find the prisoners ‘not guilty’. The Healy brothers and their friend walked free from court.

Mons, Belgium, 23 August 1914

Healy stared down at the face looking back at him. If it could talk it would be begging for help, but the bottom half of the jaw was missing and the man was bleeding badly from his stomach. His eyes were doing the talking. Healy thought about leaving him and moving on to the next soldier lying a few feet away, but somehow his conscience got the better of him and he pulled out some bandages from his bag and tried to stem the flow of blood.

He reacted instinctively to the occasional bombardment of German shells landing nearby, wondering when his turn would come but focussed on getting the Royal Irish infantryman on a stretcher and hauled back to the advanced dressing station. Not that it would be easy. The Royal Army Medical Corps had been caught by surprise as much as every other British soldier who was dug into trenches on the outskirts of Mons. They hadn’t prepared for this. Only minor skirmishes were expected they’d been told as they’d marched from Le Havre to the Belgian border, often covering fifteen miles in a day, but all of a sudden, the merciless and ruthless reality of war had hit them full on. Only the night before they’d established a hospital a few miles away in Dour but they’d suddenly been sent forward to deal with Allied soldiers who had been cut down by German lancers and machine-gun fire as the two enemies met for the first time at the Mons-Condé canal. Stretcher bearers were not normally deployed during battle; their role began once firing had finished. But there seemed no obvious end. A break in the shelling was followed by the order for them to go forward, but then the firing started again and only a few days after the first shots had been fired, the allies were in retreat.

Another soldier helped Healy clumsily bundle the injured man onto a stretcher and he moved on to the next casualty. He was already dead, half his left leg missing. A severed arm rested a few feet away, its owner nowhere to be seen. A shell landed thirty feet away and the blast knocked him over, but he stood up and walked towards a soldier waving and shouting at him. The side of his face was ripped open by shrapnel, but he was more in shock than anything else. Healy pulled him up, and with the injured man’s arm slung around his shoulder, he walked him back towards the trenches.

This was all a far cry from what he had expected when he had casually joined the Royal Munster Fusiliers back in County Kerry in 1903. Being a farm labourer was not what he had wanted, and the army offered him a regular wage. He had even performed well in his army exams, been promoted to lance corporal and been posted out to Gibraltar for eighteen months, but when he left three years later as a reservist, he hadn’t expected a full-scale war to break out. No one had. When he wasn’t being arrested by the police for being drunk or for things he hadn’t done, he had transferred as a reservist to the Medical Corps but when Britain declared war on Germany he was swiftly recruited in to the regular army and put onto the Archimedes supply ship in Dublin, destination France. Over by Christmas, they said, and on the way across the troops had all sung ‘God save the King’. They’d marched up from the French coast to rapturous applause from French villagers who had decorated their houses in Union Jacks; this was all going to be another soft touch, like Gibraltar. That was on 16 August 1914, and now here he was, a week later, facing the full force of the Battle of Mons as part of 13th Field Ambulance. The war was turning into a barbaric exchange of mutilating explosives between invisible enemies.

Healy was never quite sure why Ireland was fighting in the first place. The British government had agreed to Irish Home Rule and it was only a matter of time, once the short war in France was over, that Ireland would be a separate country. There was already strong anti-British sentiment in the country so fighting alongside them didn’t make a lot of sense to him. Not that he was the only Irishman here; there were hundreds, including the Royal Irish Regiment. But, as he now recovered injured soldiers, he didn’t have much time to reflect on that, and in a rather accepting mood he moved among the dead and injured. The battle had started early that morning, with the British trying to defend a seemingly indefensible canal system, and as the day progressed there was an endless onslaught of German artillery fire followed by swathes of German soldiers flocking towards them, themselves being slaughtered by British snipers. The Germans retreated, reformed, and, apparently under threat of being shot by their own officers for cowardice, they ran forward again. Hundreds of soldiers, British and German, were being cut down each time, and the field ambulance teams ran along behind picking up the pieces. At one point, Healy couldn’t believe his eyes when, instead of