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On Thursday, 17th
April 1924, Ethel Primrose Duncan, thirty-two years old and single,
received at her Isleworth home a telegraphic order for £4 and a telegram
that read "Meet train as arranged. Waller." The money was to buy a train
ticket to Eastbourne where she was to spend the Easter holiday with a
man she had met a week earlier.
In the pouring rain near Richmond
Station, she had met a tall, attractive man in his thirties. He escorted
her part of the way to her home, where she lived with her sister. He had
told her that his name was Pat and that he was married, but unhappily.
When they parted they agreed to meet again. On 15th April she received a
telegram that suggested a meeting the following day at Charing Cross
Station. At 7pm she duly turned up at Charing Cross but Pat did not
arrive until about 7.50pm. He told her that he had just travelled up
from Eastbourne where he had borrowed a bungalow from a friend. His
wrist was bandaged after, he said, spraining it saving a lady from
falling from a bus. Over dinner at Victoria Station he asked Ethel if
she would like to spend the Easter holiday with him at the bungalow and
she agreed.
On Good Friday she caught the
11.15am train to Eastbourne, where Pat met her at the station. They left
her luggage at the station, took lunch and went for a ride in a taxi.
That evening they dined at the Royal Hotel before taking a taxi to
collect her luggage and driving the three miles to the seaside bungalow
at Langley. They spent the next three days together. Ethel knew that
another woman had been there before her. She found cosmetics on a chest
of drawers in their bedroom and a pair of buckled shoes. Pat explained
them away by saying that they belonged to his wife who had been at the
bungalow before Easter.
On the Saturday the pair went into
Eastbourne. Pat left Ethel shopping while he took a taxi to Plumpton
races. On the way he stopped at a post office in Lewes and sent himself
a telegram that read "Must see you Tuesday morning nine Cheapside" and
signed it "Lee." That evening they dined at the Sussex Hotel before
returning to the bungalow. The next morning saw Pat changing the lock on
the door of one of the other bedrooms at the bungalow. He struggled with
it and in the end screwed the door closed, but not before Ethel had
noticed a large brown trunk in the room. Pat showed her the telegram and
told her that they would have to go back to London the next day. They
boarded the 3.30pm train back to London and, that evening, they dined
together before going to a show at the Palladium. After the show he took
her home to Richmond, leaving her there around midnight.
Pat Waller was really Patrick
Herbert Mahon. He was born in West Derby, Liverpool, in 1889. He was
married to 23-year-old Jessie on 6th April 1910. A year later he took
another girl for a weekend on the Isle of Man and paid for the visit
with forged cheques. For this offence, his first, he was bound over, but
he was soon in prison after being found guilty of embezzlement. On his
release he moved to Surrey. Mahon had a constant stream of women in his
life and, in 1916, while attempting a robbery, he hit a maidservant with
a hammer. He received five years.
On his release his wife got him a
job as a salesman with a firm, Consol Automatic Aerators, selling soda
fountains. In May 1922 the company went bankrupt but Mahon and his wife,
who also worked at Consol, were kept on. Mr Hobbins, the receiver,
appointed Mahon sales manager and one of Mahon's duties was to visit the
receivers' head office in Moorgate, London. Here he met Mr Hobbins'
secretary, Miss Emily Beilby Kaye.
Miss Kaye was thirty-eight years old
and a tall, athletic woman who lived at the Green Cross Club, off
Russell Square. She was careful with her money and had over £600
invested in stocks and shares. She often spoke to Mahon over the
telephone with regard to the business and knew that he was married but,
sometime toward the end of the summer of 1922, she suggested that they
spend a day together on the river. They duly spent the day on the Thames
and, as Mahon later described it, she showed him that she was "a woman
of the world." Miss Kaye lost her job at the end of October but managed
to get another job as a typist for a financier in Old Bond Street. She
was there just one month.
Emily started to sell her shares in
February 1924. In March she fell ill with influenza and went to
Bournemouth to recuperate. Mahon travelled down to see her at the end of
her stay there and they shared a double room in the South Western Hotel,
Southampton, where they registered as Mr and Mrs Mahon. Mahon had bought
a diamond and sapphire cluster ring from a jewellers in Southampton and,
on their return to London, Emily was telling her friends that she was
engaged to Mahon.
At the beginning of April Emily told
her close friend, Edith Warren, that a date had been fixed for the
wedding and that the pair were then going to emigrate to South Africa.
Emily wrote to her sister on 5th April and told her the same story. Also
on the 5th, Mahon, calling himself Waller, had travelled down to Langley
in response to an advert in Dalton's Weekly and had agreed to rent the
Officer's House, Crumbles, from 11th April to 6th June at a rent of
three and a half guineas a week.
Emily Kaye packed her bags on 7th
April and travelled to Eastbourne where she stayed at the Kenilworth
Court Hotel. On Saturday, 12th April, two days after Mahon had first met
Miss Duncan, Emily received a telegram requesting her to meet Mahon at
the station that afternoon. She checked out of the hotel requesting the
receptionist to forward any mail to Poste Restante, Paris. Earlier,
Mahon had paid a visit to Staines' Kitchen Equipment Company and had
purchased a ten inch cook's knife and a small meat-saw. Emily met Mahon
at Eastbourne station and they took a taxi to Officer's House.
Miss Kaye was still alive the next
morning, when a butcher delivering meat saw her. She was also still
alive on either the Monday or Tuesday when she enquired about any post
at the Kenilworth Court.
On the 30th April Jessie Mahon, who
knew that something was going on, confided in a friend, a former railway
policeman. She also gave him a left-luggage ticket that she had found in
the pocket of one of her husband's suits and, suspecting that her
husband was having an affair, asked her friend to investigate. He went
to Waterloo station and, in exchange for the ticket, received a locked
Gladstone bag. By carefully easing the sides apart he could see a knife
and bloodstained female underwear. He put the bag back and, giving the
ticket back to Jessie, told her to replace it in her husband's pocket.
The next day the ex-policeman told
Frederick Wensley, Chief Constable, what he had seen in the bag. DCI
Savage was sent to investigate and, after verifying the contents, he
replaced the bag and instigated a watch on it. The following day, 2nd
May at 6.30pm, Mahon turned up and presented the ticket. He was given
the bag and, as he was leaving the station, was apprehended by DS
Thompson. Mahon was taken firstly to Kennington police station and later
to Scotland Yard.
DCI Savage began the questioning of
Mahon at around 9.45pm. The bag was on the table, still unopened. Mahon
admitted that the bag was his and Savage opened it. In it were several
bloodstained items including a torn pair of bloomers and a canvas racket
bag initialled "EBK". Everything had been liberally sprinkled with
disinfectant. When asked about the blood he said, "I suppose I have
carried home meat for dogs in it" to which Savage replied "That
explanation won't do." They both sat in silence for fifteen minutes when
Mahon said, "I wonder if you can realise how terrible a thing it is for
someone's body to be active and one's mind to fail to act." Savage said
nothing and it was another thirty minutes before Mahon spoke again when
he said, "I'm considering my position." Another fifteen minutes passed
in silence when Mahon said, "I suppose you know everything. I'll tell
you the truth."
It took over two hours to take down
Mahon's statement. In it he recounted of how he and Emily had quarrelled
on the 16th. That she had thrown an axe at him, hitting a doorframe, and
that, during the struggle, the woman had fallen and hit her head on the
coal-scuttle and had died. He said that he had bought the knife on the
17th and dismembered the body on the 18th. Early the next morning Savage,
accompanied by Wensley, drove down to the Crumbles. In a large trunk
marked "EBK" they found the quartered body of a woman. In a biscuit tin
and a hatbox they found a heart and other organs and, in a saucepan,
were body parts that had been boiled. While there were plenty of
bloodstains in the living room there was no sign of any mark on the
doorframe that had supposedly been struck by an axe.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury arrived and
started to piece together the remains. The limbs and head were never
found and Mahon claimed that he had burnt these on the living-room fire.
Emily Beilby Kaye had been about two months pregnant.
Mahon was charged with her murder
and his trial began on Tuesday, 15th July 1924, at Sussex Assizes, Lewes.
Spilsbury testified that Emily could not have received the fatal
injuries from falling onto the coal-scuttle. It was a cheap, very flimsy,
object and it was completely undamaged. This, coupled with evidence that
Mahon had bought the knife and saw before the woman's death, sealed his
fate. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Mahon's execution,
carried out by Thomas Pierrepoint and William Willis, took place at
Wandsworth Prison on 9th September 1924.
Murder-UK.com
Murder at the Crumbles
The Case of Emily Kaye
Patrick Herbert Mahon was a handsome
philanderer with winning ways who committed what an Appeal Court judge
described as a 'most cruel, repulsive and carefully planned murder'.
Mahon led and exemplary life until he
married at the age of 20 in 1910. There followed a succession of charges
for fraud, embezzlement and robbery with violence. In 1922, through his
wife's influence, he was made sales manager of a firm at Sunbury. He
became attracted to 37-year-old typist Emily Beilby Kaye.
They decided to engage in a 'love
experiment' by living together in a bungalow rented for the purpose on a
lonely part of the Sussex coast between Eastbourne and Pevensey Bay
known as the Crumbles.
On April 12th 1924 Mahon bought a saw
and knife before travelling down to Eastbourne to meet Miss Kaye. His
firm and his wife thought he was travelling on company business, while
Miss Kaye, completely infatuated with Mahon, told friends she was
engaged and planned to visit South Africa. When Mahon failed to obtain a
passport as he had promised, there was an argument in the 'love
bungalow' during which Mahon claimed Emily attacked him and, falling
down in the process, struck her head on a coal bucket. She allegedly
died from this blow.
Mrs. Mahon, concerned by her husband's
pursuit of other women, went through the pockets of one of his suits.
There she found a cloakroom ticket which, when presented a Waterloo
railway station, produced a Gladstone bag containing bloodstained female
clothing. Mahon was stopped by the police when he turned up to collect
his bag. His excuse that he had carried dog meat failed, it having been
established that the bloodstains were human.
Detectives visited the bungalow at the
Crumbles. They found pieces of boiled flesh in a saucepan; sawn-up
chunks of a corpse in a hat box, a trunk and a biscuit tin; and ashes n
the fire containing bone fragments. Sir Bernard Spilsbury pieced
together the body of the pregnant Emily Kaye, but no head was ever found.
Patrick Mahon was tried at Lewes
Assizes in July 1924. He maintained that Miss Kaye died accidentally by
hitting her head on the coal bucket. But the purchase of a knife and saw,
together with the information that he had been fleecing Kaye of her
savings, went against him. He was found guilty and told the judge that
he was 'too conscious of the bitterness and unfairness of the summing
up' to say anything except that he was not guilty. Avory passed the
death sentence and unfair or not, he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on
September 2nd, 1924.
Eastbournecousins.com
Murder at the Crumbles
A second murder
took place on the Crumbles in 1924 and was known for years
afterwards as 'The Bungalow Murder'. A few cottages, once Occupied
by coast guards, stood isolated on the beachland at the border of
Eastbourne and Pevensey. One, called the
Officer's House, was a neat whitewashed building and in the spring
of 1924 was leased for two months at a rent of three and a half
guineas a week to Patrick Herbert Mahon, a man of thirty four,
using the name of Wailer.
Mahon had taken on the bungalow
ostensibly as a romantic hideaway fohimself and his mistress, Emily Kaye,
and on 7 April 1924 Emily traveled to Eastbourne and moved into the
bungalow believing that this was the start of a new life with her lover.
Oddly enough she was also a
shorthand typist but unlike Irene Munro she was not a foolish young girl
but a woman of thirty seven, tall, fair-haired and coolly attractive. A
thoroughly nice person according to a cousin who said a better girl
never lived'.
However, the warning bells had
not rung for Irene Munro and they did not ring for Emily Kaye. She
worked for a firm of accountants in London and had met Patrick Mahon who
often called at her office and soon began an affair with him. She knew
he was married but believed he would leave
his wife and that they would start a new life
together. She also knew by chance that Mahon had previously been in
prison for a bank raid but she was pregnant and very much in love with
the dark good-looking Irishman. She readily agreed to leave her job and
embark on the venture he proposed.
Unfortunately for Emily she did
not know that Patrick Mahon was an indefatigable and practised womaniser
with an unsavoury past which included fraud as well as the bank raid
which had landed him in prison for five years.
He had married a young Irish
girl when he was twenty one and his wife, Mavourneen, had stood by him
when he was imprisoned. Now Mahon was involved with a woman who did not
take the affair lightly, who was pregnant, and who expected him to leave
his wife. He was in a fix.
Having installed Emily in the
Crumbles cottage Mahon continued to go home to his wife most days during
the week. True to form he struck up a new acquaintance with a young
woman at Richmond, an Ethel Duncan. Never one to miss another romantic
interlude he arranged to take her out to dinner during the following
week.
On 11 April Mahon returned to
Eastbourne and moved Emily's large travelling trunk to the bungalow. He
then returned to London, apparently to make arrangements to secure a
passport but on Saturday, 12 April, he went to an ironmonger's shop in
Victoria and bought a large cook's knive and a tenon saw.
He returned to Eastbourne and
Emily, and the two were together in
the bungalow for the next three nights.
On Tuesday evening, 15 April,
Emily Kaye met her fate. Afterwards Mahon swore that her death was an
accident,
the result of a quarrel about their future and
that she had fallen heavily and hit her head.
Mahon dragged the body into the
spare bedroom and locked the door. The next day he returned to London,
met Ethel Duncan and took her out to dinner. Incredibly he invited her
to spend the coming Easter weekend with him at the bungalow on the
Crumbles, to which the unsuspecting girl agreed.
On the morning of Good Friday
Mahon was back in Eastboume and a further horror began. He dismembered
Emily's body with the saw and knife bought in London and the dreadful
parcels were put in Emily's trunk in the spare bedroom.
In the evening Mahon met Ethel
Duncan at Eastbourne station and they spent the weekend together at the
bungalow. Ethel saw the trunk in the spare bedroom and Mahon said he was
it was full of valuable books he
was looking after for a friend. While she was
there he screwed up the door. Ethel Duncan did not find his behaviour
suspicious and on Easter Monday she returned to her home in London.
During the following week Mahon
built a fire in the sitting room grate and burned Emily Kaye's head,
which had been severed from the body. Other parts followed, disposed of
in the same way, then the torso was further dismembered and boiled in
stewpans in the kitchen so that they could be cut into smaller
pieces. Mahon put most of these last remains into a Gladstone bag and
threw them from the carriage window of a train when he later
travelled to Waterloo Station in London.
It was then that he made the
first and only mistake in his cold and methodical plans. He left the
Gladstone bag at the left luggage office at Waterloo station and while
he was away from home on the weekend of
25 April his wife searched the pockets
of his suits and found the cloakroom ticket.
Mavourneen had been worried by
his absence over the two previous weekends and believed he might be
frequenting racecourses and returning to his old ways. She said nothing
to her husband but enlisted the help of a private investigator, John
Beard.
On 1 May they went together to
Waterloo and retrieved the Gladstone bag. Beard was no fool and although
the bag was locked he probed into one end and found something that
prompted him to call Scotland Yard. When the police arrived they took a
small piece of cloth from the bag which revealed human blood. Mavourneen
was sent home, still unaware of the find, to return the cloakroom ticket
to Mahon's suit.
Now a trap was set. Two
detectives kept watch on the left luggage
office and on 2 May Mahon collected the bag prior to another trip to
Eastbourne. As soon as it was in his possession the police pounced and
Mahon was taken to Cannon Row police station and confronted by the
Contents which included a few pieces of blood stained clothing, a large
Cook's knife and a canvas tennis racket bag with
the initials E B K.
He remained cool and told the
police he supposed 'he had carried meat home for the dogs' in the bag,
but finally after hours of interrogation he admitted the death of Emily
Kayc and his disposal of the body.
Two police inspectors were sent
to Eastbourne to the Officer's House and what they found there was a
scene described by the experienced
Home Office pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, as
the most gruesome he had ever come across. There was a terrible stench
in the small bungalow as four parcels still remained in the trunk in the
bedroom.
The presence of the police and
the pathologist soon became known and while Spilsbury made his
painstaking study of what was left of poor Emily Kaye, a task which took
eight hours, a crowd of horrified people gathered outside.
On the following Tuesday Mahon
was charged with murder at Hailsham magistrates court and the next day
an inquest was held at the bungalow, attended by Mahon at his request.
A thousand sightseers surrounded
the building, booing and jeering as the accused man was led in under
heavy
police escort.
Strenuous efforts to find other
parts of the body were made but despite searching nearby areas and
digging up the garden of the cottage, nothing was found.
The inquest resumed in May and Patrick Mahon was
sent for trial at Lewes Assizes on 15 July.
Sir Henry Curtis Bennett led for
the prosecution and Mr J D Cassels defended Patrick Mahon. The
unfortunate Ethel Duncan, considerably distressed, spent an hour in the
witness box and maintained she had seen nothing to arouse her suspicion
during the weekend she spent with Mahon. As the trial continued and the
macabre story unfolded two jury-men collapsed. They were replaced and
Mahon gave evidence for more than five hours.
The story he told was of a woman
infatuated with him and one who had drawn him reluctantly into an affair.
He told the court on the evening of Emily's death they had a furious
quarrel and according to him he was attacked by his lover.
At this point he broke down in
tears and still sobbing went on to relate
that in the struggle they fell and Emily's head
hit the coal scuttle. This, he said, must have caused her death and,
because he was in a state of fear and shock he remembered little of the
next hours except that he went outside. When he returned he panicked and
decided to conceal everything.
At the end of this dramatic
story Mahon's counsel asked him: "Did you desire the death of Miss Kaye?"
Mahon, calm again, replied: "Never at any time".
The defence did its best to
plead that Mahon was the victim of extraordinary circumstances rather
than cold hearted murderer, but members of the jury, who had no
knowledge of his previous record, were not convinced.
The cause of death given by the accused man was
refuted by the pathologist who said a fall on a coal scuttle would not
have caused injuries that would have had such a rapidly fatal result.
Most damning of all for the
jury's opinion of Mahon's character was his assignation with Ethel
Duncan, at a time when he had a wife and child at home and a mistress in
a bungalow at Eastbourne. He was found guilty of murder.
The bungalow on the Crumbles
became a strange tourist attraction when the lease was taken over by a
group of entrepeneurs of doubtful taste but sounds business instinct.
Visitors were charged a shilling each for guided tours of the cottage
and as the queues increased cold drinks were served from the front gate.
There was considerable local protest and for two weeks the bungalow was
closed, only to open again with the entrance fee increased tols 2d as
coachloads of the curious continued to arrive.
Before his execution on Wednesday 3
September Mahon wrote a kind and loving letter to his wife from his
cell. Mahon's wife remained loyal to the end !
Kwackers.com
The Incomparable Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury
By Katherine Ramsland, PhD, CMI-V
The ForensicExaminer.com
Spilsbury admitted to the difficulty of a 1924
case in which he had been involved. It took place in a rented
bungalow along a two-mile strip of the Sussex shore known as the
Crumbles. Emily Kaye, a 34-year-old secretary, was involved with
an Irish crook and philanderer named Patrick Herbert Mahon. When
she became pregnant, he invited her for a “romantic” weekend at
the Crumbles.
In the bungalow, he killed and dismembered her. He
used a knife and saw to carve her up and tried boiling pieces of her
over the fire. The rest he placed into a trunk, locking it in the
bedroom. He then brought back another woman with whom he had made a
date, and they spent the weekend there. When Mahon returned to London,
he left a bag at the luggage office of Waterloo train station and went
home to see his wife.
Mahon’s wife found a ticket for the bag and asked a
former member of the railway police to check it out. Inside, he found
blood-soaked women’s underwear, a case with Emily’s initials on it, and
a bloody carving knife. These items were turned over to the police, who
placed Mahon under arrest. He quickly contrived a story about how he and
Emily had quarreled, whereupon she had come at him with a hatchet. He’d
pushed her away, killing her accidentally when she fell and hit her head
against a coal pot. He’d worried that he would be charged with murder,
so he had dismembered her body.
Spilsbury traveled to the bungalow to look at the
body and found pieces literally everywhere, including some that had been
partially boiled over the fire. There were organs in a biscuit tin, and
body grease and human blood splashed all over the place. He would say
later that this was the most gruesome crime scene he had ever
encountered. His task was rather odious as well: He had to collect the
hundreds of fragments, already several days decomposed, and reconstruct
the body to prove identity and ascertain the cause of death. He found a
bruised shoulder that indicated a sharp blow inflicted ante-mortem.
However, once the body was assembled, he discovered that the victim’s
head, uterus, and right leg were all missing. Police took dogs all along
the train route, in case these items had been tossed out the window as
Mahon returned to London. They did not find any of the missing parts.
Since Mahon claimed that Emily had hit her head,
without it, Spilsbury could not establish a cause of death. Nevertheless,
he did determine from the condition of her breasts that Emily had been
pregnant. He also found that she could not have died from hitting her
head on the coal bucket, as it showed no sign of blood, hair, or damage.
But there was more. Mahon claimed to have burned
Emily’s head in the fire and broken up the charred remains with a poker.
In his usual thorough manner, Spilsbury burned a sheep’s head to try to
duplicate these conditions and see if the ashes from the fireplace
matched those in the bungalow’s grate. It did turn out to be possible to
use fire to turn a head into something brittle enough to smash into
pieces. Nevertheless, when Mahon claimed he had purchased a knife and
saw after the “accident,” he caused his own undoing, as the police
proved he had purchased these items before Emily died. Thus, his
intention to kill her was clear. That she had been pregnant provided
motive, and the jury took 40 minutes to convict.
Always thinking, Spilsbury then performed a complete
autopsy on Mahon’s executed corpse—the first of many he would use to
study the results of this type of sudden death. Since the time of death
was known with accuracy, he believed a comparative analysis of many such
corpses would yield useful information.
