Great Train Crimes: Murder and Robbery on the Railways (24 page)

This was a nearby farmhouse. They had intended to remain there for some time while the hue and cry died down. Yet, with the robbery being national news, £;260,000 being offered in reward money and a team of crack detectives under Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler and ‘Slipper of the Yard’ after them, they decided to split and run with the money. An anonymous tip off led the police to their hideout.
Although the thieves had departed, their traces were all too easy to find.

The gang had been led by a known armed burglar, Bruce Reynolds, who had recently been released from prison. He knew when the mail train would be carrying the maximum amount of money, and gathered together a number of other known criminals. Various schemes had been discussed before the one employed with such effectiveness.

As with their predecessors in 1855, they made their own blunders. Prior to the raid, the gang had drunk bottled beer and played Monopoly. The man left behind to clean up after them had not done a good job. Fingerprints were left all over their base. Another error was that the purchase of the farmhouse was made by a known associate of Reynolds and a bona-fide law firm was used in the arrangement. Furthermore, instead of returning to their old jobs, most of them changed their lives overnight. In the next three years, thirteen of the gang were arrested and given severe sentences in prison, totalling 307 years. Although Ronnie Biggs escaped in 1965, fleeing to Australia and then to South America, he returned to England in 2001 and was promptly arrested and returned to gaol, being released in 2009. Most of their loot was never recovered, having been spent by the thieves.

There has also been a report that the operation was supported by Otto Skorzeny, a former German paratrooper officer during the Second World War, but the truth of this intriguing tale is uncertain.

A Scottish tragedy, 1968

John Connell, aged 35, was a lorry driver, who lived with his wife and son on a house boat, named
Ace
, on the mouth of Loch Leven, near Dumbarton. A neighbour of his was Neil Gallacher, aged 27, who lived on
Viola
.

Tragedy was to occur on the Friday night of 25 February 1968. The two men were involved in a scuffle near the railway line near Balloch station, when an empty three-coach Blue train was about to pass along. Connell died of multiple injuries by being killed by the train and Gallacher was injured. He and an unnamed woman were sent to the Vale of Leven hospital that night, though she was soon released.

On 4 March, Connell was brought before the Dumbarton Sheriff ’s court. There was no plea or declaration for him; merely that he be remanded pending further police enquiries. He claimed he had no recollection of the fight or what happened thereafter.

The trial took place at the High Court of Glasgow on 6 May. Gallacher pleaded not guilty to the charge of having pushed Connell onto the railway line and having held him there to be killed by the train, following a fight in which the woman tried to stop them. There were no witnesses for the defence. Gallacher’s plea was one of self-defence and after 20 minutes deliberation, the jury acquitted him. Afterwards, Gallacher was released and cleared up his belongings at Balloch prior to leaving the district.

Murder at night, 1985

Mrs Janet Mary Maddocks, aged 35, was in social work and worked in an office at Institute Road, King’s Heath, Birmingham. She was travelling home on the night mail train on Wednesday 20 March 1985. Unfortunately, she never arrived at her destination and her corpse was later found near the railway line near Northampton.

She had been stabbed in the neck with such force that her spinal cord was severed. She had then been robbed and thrown from the train. Initially the police said they were looking for a long-haired young man who was seen leaving the train at Northampton Castle station later that night. He was described as aged about 26, was five feet six tall and might be sleeping rough. On 27 March, a reconstruction of Mrs Maddocks’ last hours was undertaken.

Two days later, Jack Roy, a 15 year old from Shorebridge Road, Glasgow, was arrested in Glasgow and then charged with the murder and remanded in custody. It was not until December that he was brought to trial at Northampton Crown Court. Roy pleaded not guilty. Desmond Fennell QC said that the body may have been propped up against a window in the bloodstained carriage before being thrown out three miles later. He added that Roy found Mrs Maddocks alone in the carriage and then demanded money from her, brandishing a knife. When she refused, he killed her. According to Fennell, ‘The defendant struck the knife into her throat, on the left side just near the jugular vein, with such force that it severed her spinal cord, causing almost instant paralysis.’ She had then been stabbed twice in the groin, when she would have been unable to have even tried to defend herself. Death was due to shock and a massive loss of blood.

Roy had taken a late train from Milton Keynes to Glasgow when he ran into Miss Maddocks. High with the hallucinatory drug, LSD, he
tried to snatch her handbag and then stabbed her to death. Justice Otton called this an ‘evil and callous crime’. Roy was found guilty and sentenced on 21 January 1986.

Accident or murder? 1996

On 28 July 1996, the 26-year-old Ian Lowery was walking back to his parents’ home in Churchtown, near Gloucester. He had just enjoyed his Saturday night out in the Hare and Hounds pub before going onto a social club. It was about 11.30 and he had completed about 25 minutes of his half-hour walk home. He was eager to return to watch Linford Christie at the Atlanta Olympics on TV.

What happened next is uncertain. What we know for sure is that a 85-ton maintenance train from Cheltenham to Gloucester was travelling along the railway line which bordered part of his walk home. The driver saw a body on the line near Sugar Loaf bridge. He put on the emergency brake, but it was too late. The train hit the body. Lowery’s remains were found at midnight by police and his parents informed.

The police assumed that Lowery, who had been drinking, was drunk and on his way home he had toppled over a four foot high fence and then fallen forty feet down the slope near the bridge and onto the railway line the train had then crashed into him. Trains were allowed to run on the line shortly afterwards and the victim’s clothes were returned to his parents.

His parents thought that their son, who was frightened of heights, would never have gone near the high bridge. They thought he had been murdered and were critical of the lack of a serious police investigation. The case was reopened in 1998 and again a few years later. However, it was probably too late. The area where the body was found was not properly searched, scuff marks on the side of the railway bridge were ignored and the victim’s clothes had been returned before any forensic examination had occurred. Nor had there been a detailed examination of the corpse by a pathologist and the post mortem was minimal. Therefore, most of the forensic clues and witness evidence that might have been found by an immediate inquiry had been lost.

There were additional pointers to this being a case of murder. A man in black was seen leaning over the railway bridge on the night of the murder. His identity was never established. Lowery’s money and ring were never found, pointing to this being robbery with violence. Two men
were arrested, but were subsequently released due to lack of evidence. It seems probable that the young man was attacked on his way home that night for whatever cash he had with him, then pushed down onto the railway line. That said, it seems unlikely, unless further evidence comes to light, that his killer/s will ever be brought to justice.

The criminal and the student, 2008

It was once said, after nineteenth-century railway murders, that the introduction of open carriages, rather than ones divided into compartments, would prevent such crimes. Unfortunately, that was not to be and this instance is an example. Thomas Grant was a student in history and Arabic at St Andrew’s University. The 19 year old was popular, had everything to live for and much to offer. Having recently completed his first year exams, he was travelling home for a holiday. He took a train from St Andrews, changing at Carlisle in order to continue his trip home. Surprisingly, like Ian Lowery, he lived in Churchtown, Gloucestershire.

Thus he was standing at a platform on Carlisle station. Hearing raised voices, he briefly turned to look at a group of three people nearby, two of whom were arguing. He then turned back to his own thoughts. The trio was made up of Thomas Lee Wood, aged 22, his girlfriend Sarah Chadwick, both from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, and who had recently been residing with Sarah Dunsheath near Carlisle. She was the third person. Wood had 21 previous convictions for 40 offences and had recently been released from a six-month sentence in gaol for burglary. He had also been known to be violent towards Miss Chadwick, whom he lived with, even though she might have been pregnant. Unbeknown to the others, he had stolen a knife from Sarah Dunsheath’s kitchen and had it in his inner pocket. Wood told his girlfriend that he would steal the food she was planning to eat later that evening.

With the arrival of the southbound train, Grant, Wood and Miss Chadwick boarded the same coach. Grant sat by his bicycle and kept himself to himself. Wood and his companion continued to argue. Wood had changed the subject to railway tickets. He tore up his own and declared he would stab the ticket collector rather than be told to leave the train. His girlfriend began to cry. Then he stalked up and down the packed carriage.

During this time he saw Grant and perhaps remembered him looking
at him on the platform. He took the knife and lunged down, stabbing Grant in the chest. Panic-stricken passengers, including children, fled the carriage and the train manager had the intervening door locked. They saw Wood going berserk and feared he might break through. However, he failed and, realizing the train was stopping (at Oxenholme), he escaped through a train window. Running through the fields, he took a lift from a farmer and was taken to a bus station, where he was arrested.

Wood was tried for murder at Preston Crown Court before Mr Justice Openshaw, who said, of Grant, ‘He did nothing more than just look and it cost him his life’. Wood claimed that he was feeling intimidated and only meant to threaten Grant, not kill him. The motion of the train had caused him to accidentally lunge at Grant, killing him. However, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, and was told he would serve at least 21 years. It had been an unprovoked attack in a public place.

The crimes briefly noted above, do not, of course, constitute the remainder of railway murders in the United Kingdom; others include Margaret Eastwood throwing her illegitimate baby off a train near Barnes in 1938, the killing of Paul Carberry by John Murray on a train to Wembley in 1979, a stabbing on a train near New Cross in 1973 and the murder by Vaso Aliu of his former girlfriend, Marguerite van Campenhout, on a busy Underground platform in 2002.

We shall now turn, briefly, to the less unpleasant world of fictional vintage railway crime.

Sherlock Holmes and railways

Holmes and Watson would always take a train to any investigation of theirs which took place in the countryside. They travelled down to Dartmoor on a train from Paddington, for instance, in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. Yet for travelling around London, they usually took a hansom cab. There is only one reference in the entire canon in which the Underground is taken. This may sound surprising, in light of the fact that the Baker Street tube station was very close to their lodgings at the north end of that thoroughfare. In ‘The Adventure of the Red Headed League’, apparently set in 1890, Holmes wished to see his client’s business premises in the City. Watson states, ‘We travelled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate’. Modern readers should not confuse this Metropolitan line station with Aldgate. The station is nowhere to be
found on a modern Underground map. This is because it has since been renamed as the Barbican.

There is only one crime on the railway network which Holmes is called upon to investigate. This occurs in ‘The Bruce Partington Plans’. It is 1895 and the corpse of one Arthur Cadogan West, a young man employed at Woolwich Arsenal, is found on the line just outside Aldgate station, which is on both the Metropolitan and Circle lines. His head ‘was badly crushed’. Initially it is believed that he may have fallen or have been pushed from a train (in those days, carriage doors could be opened at any point during a journey, not just at platforms as now). Of course, he could not have been carried onto the line because the ticket collector at the gates would have seen them.

The problem is that on the young man’s body are part of some top-secret submarine plans (the Bruce Partington Plans, whose ‘importance can hardly be exaggerated’). However, the remainder of these plans is missing. The other problem is how could West have been found where he was? He did not have a ticket on his body. West had been in Woolwich earlier in the evening before his death. It is initially assumed that he left Woolwich and met a foreign agent in London.

Once Holmes has begun his investigation, he learns that there is no sign of any violence in any of the carriages. Nor is there any blood on the line. He deduces that West was on the roof of a carriage and was thrown onto the line when the train swayed on the railway points. Once he has access to the names and addresses of a number of spies in London, he finds that the house of one of them is adjacent to part of the Circle line near Gloucester Road tube station. It transpires that West followed a traitor, who had stolen the plans, to this house, was killed there and his body dropped onto a carriage roof as a train halted at the nearby station. The traitor and his confederate are arrested, the plans recovered and West’s reputation saved.

Agatha Christie and the railways

Mention the two together and most people will think of the novel which has also been filmed,
Murder on the Orient Express
. Or perhaps
The Mystery of the Blue Train
, both of which are set on the Continent. But there are two home-grown tales, a short story featuring Hercule Poirot, ‘The Plymouth Express’, and a Miss Marple novel,
4.50 from Paddington
(filmed in 1962 as
Murder she Said
, starring Margaret Rutherford).