Great Train Crimes: Murder and Robbery on the Railways (21 page)

This was not an easy case. The judge gave the jury a summary and then added:

It is the sort of thing which makes one’s blood boil to think that in the year 1964 there is or was on 29th June any man capable of such a foul deed … It is quite improper and quite the wrong approach for you to say ‘Well, here is a ghastly crime, somebody’s got to suffer’.

The jury took six and a half hours to reach their conclusion. They decided that Pye was not guilty. However, Pye could not leave as a free man because he was accused of lesser crimes. In the following year he was given an 18-month sentence for arson attacks in 1962–3.

The question remains as to who the mysterious stranger was who killed Yvonne and why he should do so. He presumably boarded to same compartment as her at Winchester, as did Pye. Waiting until his fellow male passenger was out of the way, he struck the poor girl over the head and when Pye returned, took her into the toilet and there cut her throat, throwing her beret and shoes out of the window, though we do not know why he did this. Presumably he must have had some form of mental kink to have killed for no apparent reason. It was certainly a dangerous act, with Pye so near at hand, but he managed to escape unscathed and unsuspected. Pye was obviously not very quick-witted and so the man was able to do what he did and evade justice.

‘I haven’t the guts to kill a cat.’

Ash Vale railway station has had more than its fair share of murders associated with it. Two to be precise. It says much about the lack of historical knowledge, or memory, for when this second murder occurred, the local paper chose not to recall the earlier one, which has been chronicled in this book in Chapter 16. Oddly enough, they were only thirteen years apart.

Mrs Enid May Wheeler was the most ordinary of women. She had been married to her husband, Derek Francis Wheeler, a maker of electrical equipment, since 1955. They lived in a bungalow at Fireacre Road, Ash Vale, since 1959. There were no children. She had once worked at a factory at Ash Vale, but in the third week of March 1965, she had taken a job at Boots the chemists, in Wellington Street, Aldershot. She was clerk to the manager, Mr Burridge. He described her thus, ‘a quiet, efficient sort of girl … I was very pleased to have her working for me.’ It was a part-time job and she only worked in the mornings, taking a train home at lunch time. It was early closing day. Husband and wife usually said their goodbyes between 8.15 and 8.30 in the mornings. All very ordinary.

Yet her journey from Aldershot on Wednesday 7 April 1965 was to be different. She boarded the 12.24, in order to be home for lunch. This train had previously stopped at Guildford and was to travel on to Camberley, Staines and Waterloo. The journey from Aldershot to Ash Vale was only three miles and took about five minutes, the train travelling at 50 mph. It even passed Mrs Wheeler’s home. However, when the train arrived at Ash Vale, one Patrick John Jenner alighted. Mrs Wheeler did not. He was 21 years old and was an unemployed labourer of Downshill Cottage, Runfold. He had lived in the district for all his young life.

Jenner told the porter there that he had seen a man, whom he had only
caught a glimpse of and could not recognize or describe, and a woman together on the train. He was very agitated. His name and address were taken for further reference. Ivor Lawes, another member of rail staff, had noticed that one of the carriage doors was open before the train’s arrival at the station. But no one got out and there was no one in the compartment. Although there was no sign of any blood, some of the seats there had been slashed. Furthermore, there was, however, a bag, an umbrella and a parcel of towels there, with no apparent owner. Where was their owner?

Richard Powell, the stationmaster, was trained in first aid. He wondered if there had been an accident. So he and two colleagues took the first aid kit and walked by the line from Ash Vale station. They found Mrs Wheeler, lying near the track and stained with blood from several wounds. Powell tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but without any success.

The still breathing body was taken by train to Aldershot and then conveyed to the Cambridge Military Hospital, where she was dead on arrival. Major Kenneth Ellis certified this. Her husband formally identified her at 5 pm. The post mortem was carried out by Dr Keith Mant, a Home Office pathologist. He found 17 stab wounds on the body, some of which had penetrated the lungs and heart. Her hands had been injured, indicative of the fact that she had tried to defend herself from attack. There were also other injuries which were consistent with the woman being thrown from the train. He thought her neck had been gripped for a short time. There was no evidence of any sexual interference. This was now a murder investigation and Detective Chief Superintendent Walter Jones of Hampshire CID was in charge. He was soon replaced by Detective Superintendent John Place of the Surrey CID, but men from the two forces worked together on the case. Two other officers saw the corpse in the mortuary that evening; Detective Chief Inspector Owen Breach and Detective Inspector Gibbs.

Meanwhile, Jenner proceeded on his journey to Frimley. He spent the trip in the same compartment as Mary Broad, a housewife, who worked part-time in Farnborough. For a minute he sat opposite her and said nothing. Then he asked her to light his cigarette. She did not smoke and said so. Then he told her that he had seen a man and a woman alone in the train a few minutes previously, and that he was going to the Southern Counties Car Auction in Frimley that afternoon. Arriving at the station, which was also her destination, he opened the door for her and then fell out, putting his hands in front of his body to stop himself.

At first, Jenner followed Mrs Broad, but she redirected him in the correct route to the motor show. Presumably he never went there, because at 12.45, Anthony Grant, conductor on a bus from Camberley, took his fare from Frimley to Aldershot. There, he went to the police station and asked if there was any news about what had happened on the railway that afternoon. At first, the police there saw him as a potential witness. Perceptions were to change that night.

Jenner was there for a considerable period of time. At 11.10 pm, Breach and Gibbs went to see him. Breach began to talk to Jenner:

I told him that the body had been found on the railway line between Aldershot and Ash Vale, and it appeared she has been stabbed to death in a railway carriage … I told him that it was believed he could help us with inquiries into her death because he had travelled in the carriage which Mrs Wheeler had also travelled. ‘Oh God! Is she dead?’ I asked him if he could throw any light upon her death. ‘Not me. I haven’t the guts to kill a cat’.

Breach was unhappy with how truthful Jenner was being and told him that further enquiries were under way, but the latter persisted in denials, ‘Well, I didn’t kill her.’ He was charged and then given a caution. Jenner refused to say any more, ‘Not until I have seen a solicitor and got legal aid.’ Mr Stredder, a Farnham solicitor, agreed to represent him.

Jenner was charged with the murder on 8 April and was taken before the magistrates’ court at Farnham fire station on the following day. The room used was small for the purpose and was filled with reporters. Jenner was ‘a smallish figure with short dark hair’.

Meanwhile, the police had investigated the land near the railway track between Aldershot and Ash Vale, as well as the railway carriage where it was assumed Mrs Wheeler had been attacked. Taken together, it was pretty damning. There was a tie clip and an ignition key near the corpse. Neither belonged to Mrs Wheeler, but a tie clip of the same kind had been given to Jenner as a present in the previous year. A white-handled sheath knife and sheath was also found nearby. It was 24 feet from the line and could easily have been thrown out of the train window. Jenner was known to possess such knives and had been seen with one on the previous day. James Newbury, Jenner’s ex-boss, and John Barker, Jenner’s brother-in-law, identified it as being very much like the one in Jenner’s possession. He claimed he had lost one sometime before and another had been thrown in a specified rubbish tip recently. On investigation, the latter could not be
found. Jenner said that his interest in knives was restricted to throwing them at trees. In the carriage, on the door which had been swinging loose, was a palm print and a fingerprint. There was blood on Jenner’s shoes and jacket. It was type AMW. Jenner’s blood group was O. Mrs Wheeler’s was A. Finally, Jenner’s hands were cut. He tried to explain this by his fall from the train to the platform at Frimley, but evidence was given that the platform was smooth, so that this would have been impossible.

The railway staff were interviewed by the police. Although Eric Cottam, who had been manning the signal box, had not seen anything unusual, one of his colleagues was more helpful. Ivor Lawes, waiting on the Ash Vale platform, had been able to see both sides of the train as it pulled into the station, so could see the open door. He recalled Jenner appearing agitated and nervous. Yet Edward Chater, a junior porter and an acquaintance of Jenner’s, talked to him and thought he was ‘perfectly normal’. Jones, the guard, had inspected the train at Guilford and had not seen anything out of the usual there.

At the magistrates’ court, a little more was learnt about Jenner’s movements up to the time of the murder. On the Saturday beforehand, he and Alec Kellett, a porter at Ash Vale, went to London by train, returning on the following day. Kellett recalled Jenner wearing a tie clip. They had been ‘stung’ in the capital. Jenner told his friend that on their next trip there, he would take his sheath knife with him and he showed Kellett the weapon when they returned home. Kellett assumed this was merely a jest.

On the Wednesday morning of the murder, Kellett and Jenner drove around Aldershot in the former’s car. Jenner talked about attending the car auction later that day. Kellett dropped Jenner off at Aldershot station. Jenner wondered whether he should take the bus from Aldershot to Frimley or the train. Because the train was arriving first, he boarded that and shared a compartment with Mrs Wheeler. The rest we can surmise. Jenner attacked Mrs Wheeler, then opened the door and threw her and the knife out of the train.

Although he pleaded not guilty at the Surrey Assizes held at Kingston on 8 July 1965, Jenner was found guilty after the jury had 28 minutes of discussion. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. In an earlier decade he would have been hung. It is unclear what his motive was. However, he was known to be an enthusiast about knives and clearly this had much to do with what he did. Mrs Wheeler was very unlucky to have been in the same compartment as him on that day – had the bus to Frimley had been scheduled to arrive before the train, Jenner would have boarded that and her life would have been saved. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

‘if she had not led me on I would never have got into
the situation which I did’

Patricia Grace Woolard’s life had been a mixed one, but it seemed to be looking up in the 1960s. She had been born on 19 February 1934 at Ramsgate. Her father, Leslie Ward, was employed in the railways and was a keen trade unionist. His daughter attended Barnehurst Primary School at Derby Heath, when the family lived at Barnehurst. Clearly a bright girl, she passed her 11 plus exam and went to Dartford Grammar School, where she did well, but declined a place at university. She had a number of jobs on leaving school aged 17. These included working as a bank clerk, at a TV firm in Erith and as a clerk at a plywood manufacturers. However, she fell in love with an older man whom she met when she accompanied her father to a trade union conference. This was Alfred Britten (born in 1924), a railway clerk. They married in 1953 and lived in Edendale, Bognor. The marriage, which was childless, fell into difficulties due to a perceived lack of compatibility. Her husband agreed to a divorce and consented to be the guilty party. They divorced in 1961 and she changed her surname by deed poll to her mother’s maiden name. She returned to live with her parents at South Road, Whitstable, Kent.

>From 1961 to 1963, she worked as a clerk and an educational assistant. In 1963 she began as a pupil teacher for Kent County Council. She started a residential teacher training course at Bognor, specializing in divinity, art and craft. She was a talented potter and made a number of figures, some of which were displayed by the college in exhibitions. She had completed her teacher training course in July 1965. Her interest in pottery, inadvertently, was a factor in her eventual death. She had left some of her work at the college. These were a series of figurines representing characters from
The Canterbury Tales
. With an eye to selling
these to a boutique in Canterbury, on 3 September, she went down to the college to see Mary Gale, assistant librarian at the college library, who had been keeping her work for her. She took the 8.40 train from Whitstable to Victoria, and then changed for Bognor, arriving at 12.20. Her father later said, ‘Patricia was not afraid of travelling alone, and I would think on the train journey she would try to avoid conversation by reading. She very rarely went out and so far as I know did not have any male friends.’ She had lunch alone. Then she met Mrs Gale, and Charles Woollaston, an art and crafts lecturer, when she collected her pottery figures, putting them into a raffia bag, and paid off a few debts. Then Patricia caught the 3.30 bus for the railway station.

Although she had hoped to take the 4 pm fast train to Gatwick, she just missed it. Instead, she took the stopping service to Victoria. This left at 4.06 pm. It was a three-unit electric car, with two carriages to each unit. Frederick Horton, a ticket collector, recalled her boarding it and sitting in a compartment in the first carriage behind the engine. Once ensconced in the compartment she sat with her back to the engine and began to read. At 4.30, the train stopped at Littlehampton and Albert Isaac, the new driver, saw her there. The next stop was Horsham and Mary Bishop recalled seeing her alone there at 5.07 pm. The train left at 5.12.