Authors: Steven Fielding
Nottinghamshire colliery worker Syd Dernley was engaged as assistant executioner, and Albert, spying Evans as he
exercised at Pentonville, decided that a long drop of 8 feet was required. Dernley wrote later that on the morning of the execution, Albert appeared a little on edge and snapped at his new assistant as he struggled to secure the noose with the pack-thread as they completed their preparations. He also told a tale that as the prison officer came to notify the hangmen that the official party had set off towards the condemned cell, Albert picked up a cigar, which he lit and smoked for a few seconds before placing it carefully on the edge of an ashtray. Entering the death cell, Evans was terrified as they pinioned his arms and led him to the drop. Dernley also noted that he clearly heard the sound of Evans’s neck breaking as the drop fell. Returning to their quarters, Albert picked up the cigar and carried on with the smoke, the cigar staying lit: a trick the hangman often used to impress new assistants, showing a cool, calm air of confidence.
Three weeks later Albert again carried out two executions in two days. On Tuesday, 28 March, he was at Liverpool to hang George Kelly, convicted of the murder of the manager and assistant manager of the Cameo Cinema at Wavertree, Liverpool. In the spring of 1949, Leonard Thomas and John Bernard Catterall had been shot dead during a bungled robbery. A tip-off led police to two local small-time criminals, George Kelly and Charles Connolly. Kelly was said to have been the man who had robbed the cinema and shot the two men, while Connolly supposedly kept watch outside. They were tried together at Liverpool Assizes in January, with Kelly being defended by Miss Rose Heilbron, the first time a woman led for the defence in a murder case. The trial ended with the jury failing to reach a verdict and a retrial was ordered. This time Kelly and Connolly were tried separately. Kelly maintained, as he had throughout the first trial, that he did not know the co-accused. This was not believed, and
when Connolly was persuaded to plead guilty to robbery, the fact that kelly was deemed in league with him convinced the jury of his guilt and he was sentenced accordingly.
Kelly’s hard-man reputation was shattered when he lost control as he was led to the gallows and soiled himself. Albert told an assistant that they didn’t realise what Kelly had done until they took the body down, adding that the prison officers would make sure the news reached his friends outside the prison. (George Kelly received a posthumous pardon in 2003 when the Court of Criminal Appeal deemed the original verdict was unsafe. It was found that the police had withheld a witness statement at the original trial that could have helped Kelly’s defence.)
Piotr Maksimowski was a Polish refugee from Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. He had been courting Dilys Campbell of Slough and she had led him to believe she was a war widow. Later she confessed that her husband was alive, and that they were still living together. On 31 December 1949, Maksimowski called at his local police station and, showing them his cut and bleeding wrists, confessed that he had killed a woman in the woods. Police discovered Campbell’s body covered in a blanket with both wrists cut. Maksimowski told them they had agreed on a suicide pact: she could not face living a lie, and he could not stand to know she still lived with her husband. He claimed that he had lost his nerve after cutting her wrists, however, and had called the police in the hope that Campbell could get medical attention. He pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity at his trial. After the sentence of death had been passed on him, Maksimowski spoke through an interpreter and asked if he could be shot instead of hanged. The judge, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson, told him he had no power to deal with the matter as it had now passed out of his hands.
Maksimowski chose not to appeal, and appeared to have resigned himself to his fate. But just two days before he was due to make the nine o’clock walk to the gallows he made a failed attempt to commit suicide. During a game of cards with his warders he suddenly got to his feet as if to stretch his legs. Jumping up onto the bed he managed to break the narrow window in his cell by punching the glass and making a vain attempt to cut his wrists on the broken glass.
Albert travelled down to Birmingham following the execution of Kelly at Liverpool, where he met up with assistant Syd Dernley in a police officers’ social club close to Winson Green Prison. After a few drinks they travelled across the city to the gaol, where they spied their man in his cell, his arm heavily strapped with a crepe bandage. Fearing possible trouble on the following morning, the death-watch officers were taking no chances and as the hangmen entered the cell they closed in on the condemned man; in less than eight seconds he was on the drop. The whole procedure had moved so quickly that assistant executioner Syd Dernley later said he didn’t even get chance to look at the prisoner in the face until he helped remove the white cap an hour after the execution had taken place.
Albert made a trip to Swansea in April to hang a farmer who had murdered his landlord after falling into debt, and in early July he travelled to Winchester for the double execution of two young Poles, Zbigniew Gower and Roman Redel, who shot a man dead after he had tried to make a citizen’s arrest following their botched attempt to rob a bank. According to Dernley, while they were at Winchester, Albert threw a tantrum when the warder brought their evening tea. As it was a hot summer’s day the chef had prepared a ham and cress meal, but seeing the plate filled mostly with cress and lettuce, Albert became enraged and demanded that the chef cook
them a proper meal, threatening a hangman’s strike if he refused! Dernley said that he believed Albert thought he and his assistants were being treated shabbily, and without respect, and that that was the reason for the outburst.
In the following week Albert travelled up to Durham, to carry out the execution of George Finlay Brown – the only time in his career he officiated at Durham – and two days later he was at Bristol where he hanged Ronald Atwell for the murder of a young woman. July ended with a flight to Africa, where the British military authorities who had sanctioned an execution to take place at Cairo, Egypt, had engaged his services.
On the morning of 7 April, three British soldiers – 29-year-old Gunner John Golby, Gunner Robert Smith, 23, and 22-year-old Driver Edward Hensman of the Royal Army Service Corps, stole a jeep from their base at Fayid in the British Canal Zone. Loading it with a variety of stolen army property, including clothes and munitions, the men headed off to Cairo, about a hundred miles away. Knowing that the military police would be on the lookout for them, they had dumped the army jeep and uniforms, and changed into civilian clothes on arriving in Cairo, where they quickly disposed of the stolen property.
Two days later, after drinking the profits, they were broke and desperate to return to their base, and preparing to face the consequences. They decided they would steal a car and soon came across a garage with a solitary night watchman. The plan was that Hensman would look after the guard, while the other two selected a car and got it started. Approaching the guard, Hensman pulled out a revolver and pointed the gun at him, indicating he wanted him to go into the garage office and telling him to keep quiet. The man refused to move and during a struggle the gun went off.
Fearing for his life, the watchman made his escape, shrieking and running out into the compound, where Hensman’s colleagues were already choosing a suitable car. Hensman followed the guard outside, where he coldly shot him through the head, killing him instantly.
All three were arrested a week later and three months later they appeared at a general court martial, held in a canteen at Fayid Barracks. The case for the prosecution was that although Hensman had shot dead the victim, all were equally guilty of murder, because all were party to the attempted robbery of the car. The court martial ended in sentence of death being passed on all three men.
The final decision to hang the soldiers was communicated to the provost marshal in the Suez Canal Zone; he fixed the triple execution for Thursday, 31 August 1950. There was only one prison in the Canal Zone able to carry out hangings: Military Prison No. 3, Fanara, just outside Fayid, and keen that the execution was carried out to the standards expected in England, the authorities appointed Albert as executioner. However, they decided to appoint their own assistants and James Riley and George Jellico Train, both staff sergeants in the Royal Military Police, were given the roles.
A gallows was built from a Home Office blueprint and having tested it and worked out the drops, Albert decided to hang Golby and Smith side by side in a double execution at 6 a.m., with Edward Hensman to follow them to the gallows at 6.45 a.m. All were given long drops and the executions passed off without incident of note. Although the press were informed that the executions had taken place at dawn, they incorrectly reported that the men were hanged one by one.
Back home, Albert carried out an execution at Wandsworth in August, and another in Glasgow at the end of October. The engagement at Barlinnie had originally been to
carry out a double execution of two brothers, Paul and Claude Harris, convicted of a gangland murder in Glasgow. On the evening of 7 July, Paul Harris was drinking in a Glasgow public house with his brother Claude and two friends when a fight broke out. They left the pub and later called at the house in the Tradeston district, where a further fight broke out. During the brawl one of the Harris gang smashed a bottle against a wall, then thrust it into the face of Martin Dunleavy.
His wounds were so serious that a police officer was detailed to stay by his bedside and get whatever information he could out of Dunleavy. ‘I know the bastards,’ Dunleavy told the constable, ‘but I’m not telling you. I’ll get them myself!’ He died from his wounds in the early hours of the following morning.
Paul and Claude Harris, and a third member of the gang, subsequently found themselves before Lord Thomson at Glasgow High Court in September. Each pleaded self-defence but the four-day trial ended with sentence of death being passed upon the brothers. The third man was found not guilty and discharged. Known throughout the Govan district as ‘the inseparable Harrises’, the brothers were allowed to share the same condemned cell, and as Albert and assistant Steve Wade prepared to make their journey north, lawyers visited the brothers, telling them that if one or the other was to confess he had struck the fatal blow, then the other might come under consideration for clemency. With less than 48 hours before the execution was scheduled, Paul spoke to the governor. He confessed that it was his hand that had wielded the broken bottle. Claude Harris was given a respite of one week while further investigations were made into the death-cell confession. At Claude’s request he was allowed to remain with his brother until midnight on Sunday, 29 October.
Paul Harris walked bravely to the drop on the following morning, and a week later it was announced that Claude Harris had been granted a reprieve and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
On 28 November, Albert travelled across Manchester to Strangeways Prison, where he had an appointment to hang a man named James Henry Corbitt, a 38-year-old engineer. One Sunday morning in August, the body of Eliza Wood was found in a hotel room at Ashton-under-Lyne; she had been strangled. Written on her forehead was the word ‘whore’. Corbitt, her sometime boyfriend, was soon charged with the murder and at his trial at Liverpool Assizes in November he pleaded guilty but insane. The prosecution pointed to a diary in which Corbitt had made a number of entries, detailing how he had planned at various times to kill Eliza and how fate had intervened on more than one occasion. This, they alleged, showed clear premeditation.
Although Albert had read a little about the case in the local papers, he recognised neither the name nor the description of the convicted man. Arriving at the gaol, he was informed by the governor that the condemned man had claimed he was a friend of the hangman’s. The Governor seemed convinced the prisoner was more concerned that Albert Pierrepoint would acknowledge their friendship than the fear of the drop. Viewing the prisoner in the death cell, Albert recognised him straight away as a man he had often duetted with at his pub; the two even had nicknames for each other – Tish and Tosh. On the following morning, when Albert entered the cell, he greeted his erstwhile friend with the usual friendly nickname. Corbitt responded to the greeting, seeming to take heart from the exchange, and it gave him the courage to make the final walk unaided.
At the end of the year, Albert and Steve Wade were again
in action at Barlinnie, where they hanged James Ronald Robertson, a Glasgow policeman who had killed a woman he was having an affair with. Catherine McCluskey, an unmarried mother of two, was found lying in the road and, at first glance, it appeared she had been the victim of a hit-and-run. On closer examination, it was found she had been deliberately run over and that the driver, after knocking her down, had then reversed the car over her before speeding off.
Investigations into her background revealed that she had been having an affair with Robertson, who was married with two young children. He was also alleged to have been the father of her children. When interviewed by CID officers at work, Robertson denied any knowledge of the murder. At his six-day trial it was alleged he had gone absent from duty earlier on the night of the murder, telling a colleague that he had a date. He had returned looking dishevelled, claiming the exhaust had fallen off his car. The car was found to be stolen, as were a number of log books found in his room. Robertson admitted he had accidentally knocked Catherine down, after she had jumped out of the car following a quarrel and that as he reversed back up the road to speak to her, she slipped under the wheels. Realising his predicament he had panicked and left the body in the road hoping that it would appear like an accident. He was the only serving policeman in modern times to be hanged for murder.
Three days after returning from Glasgow, Albert hanged Nicholas Crosby at Manchester. The body of Ruth Massey had been found on waste ground in Leeds. She was half-naked and her throat had been cut. Medical investigations indicated that she had recently had sex, a used condom found nearby suggesting that it had taken place with her consent, before being violently assaulted and having her throat cut. Her sister had seen her in the company of Crosby, a gypsy, as
they left a Leeds public house on the previous evening and he was charged with her murder on the following day.