The Killing of Lord George by Karl Shaw

“Our great period in murder”’ wrote George Orwell, in an essay published in 1946, “our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.” 

It was midway during the latter third of this period in 1911 that an alleged murder tookplace that I have spent the best part of three years researching and writing about.

My project didn’t at all start out that way. I thought I was doing what I usually do, writing about social history. My subject was a gentleman who was once a showbiz celebrity. He was known to the world as Lord George Sanger but he didn’t have a drop of blue blood in his veins. Chances are you’ve never heard of him but for more than half a century he was Britain’s most popular and most successful entertainer and at the time of his death he was venerated as a national institution. He was the seventh child of a penny peep-showman. At the age of five he was a fairground spieler and by his early teens he was running a one-man travelling show. During his life on the road he endured great hardship and was at the receiving end of some of the worst prejudices Victorian society could muster, lumped together with vagabonds, gypsies and Jews. He became a magician, married a lion tamer, reinvented himself as a circus proprietor and his name was soon known in every corner of the British Isles. Just as PT Barnum ruled the world of popular entertainment in America, for more than half a century, Sanger was the biggest brand in British show business.

In 1911, a few weeks short of his 86th birthday, George Sanger died violently in his home in North London. It was considered one of the most callous murders in the English criminal calendar and was one of the news sensations of the Edwardian age. Within a week Sanger’s brutal slaying was making headlines from New York to New Zealand. It read like a popular crime thriller: a crazed, merciless killer, a famous victim, a desperate manhunt and a sensational ending. 

When I set out to research George Sanger it was to write a book about his extraordinary life and career and I hadn’t thought much at all about his death other than that it seemed like a very strange and tragic post-script. I didn’t anticipate anything revelatory. It was only when I tracked down the old police case files and transcripts of the inquest into his death that I realised I had a genuine historical murder mystery on my hands.

Is it ever really possible to investigate something that took place more than 110 years ago? Certainly it presents many challenges and it depends how good the source material is. My starting point was George Sanger’s memoir, a hugely entertaining work and an important piece of social history in its own right. Unfortunately George was a born story-teller, overly fond of self-mythologising and it threw up quite few red herrings, but at least some of what he wrote tallies with the historical record. The details of his death were also very widely reported in the press but were never properly tested in a criminal court. By comparing accounts in national and local newspapers it is possible to construct an accurate record of the police investigation as it was seen through the eyes of the Edwardian public. The coroner’s records are also preserved in the National Archives in Kew and the London Metropolitan Archive in Farringdon and these also give us a very decent chance of unlocking the mystery. Most fortunately of all, the Metropolitan police were sticklers at preserving anything that came across their desk connected to potential murder enquiries and these too are kept at Kew. It was my first time at the Archives and I’ve been back there many times since. It truly is a fantastic resource and we’re very lucky to have it. Thanks to the NA, using original evidence, witness statements and police documents, I believe I have been able to reconstruct the events leading to George Sanger’s death, and like so much of his life, nothing was quite what it seemed.

The Killing of Lord George by Karl Shaw (Icon Books) Out Now

The Life and Death of a 19^th Century Circus Legend. On 28 November 1911 a retired showman died violently at his home in North London. Known to the world as Lord George Sanger, he was once the biggest name in show business, and was venerated as a national institution.

The death of Britain's wealthiest showman read like a popular crime thriller: a merciless killer; a famous victim; sensational media headlines; a desperate manhunt laced with police incompetencies and a dramatic denouement few could have anticipated. But for over a century, questions have persisted about the murder.

Weaving in the story of George's rise to fame and the history of Britain's entertainment industry, The Killing of Lord George uses previously unpublished archive material to reconstruct the events leading up to the death and reveal the true story behind the brutal crime that shocked Edwardian England.

Who really did kill Katherine Armstrong??

 

When Katharine Armstrong, a 48 year-old mother of three, died in her bed one morning in February 1921 no one thought other than that she had died of natural causes. Yet, within 15 months, her husband Herbert, would be arrested, tried for murdering her and attempting to poison a rival, at a sensational trial. The proceedings were reported all over the western world as he was found guilty and executed exactly one hundred years ago – the only British solicitor ever to be hanged for murder.

The case was extraordinary because it was on the surface so ordinary: a tale arising out of small town professional rivalries in remote Hay-on-Wye on the English-Welsh border. But the twists and turns of the story could have been written by any of the then fashionable crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers or Anthony Berkeley who were just starting their careers and who would all reference the Armstrong case in one way or another in their stories over the coming years.

The tale, so famous at the time, has long fascinated me, not just because of the social milieu, ripe in period detail, in which it took place just after the First World War, but because its outcome remains contested. Much remains to be unravelled. Only two full length books have been published in the last fifty years: one convinced that Armstrong was guilty and the other that he was innocent and should never have been hanged. On the centenary of his trial I took up the very cold case and discovered not only poignant details about what happened, but also a previously overlooked witness whose evidence casts a new light on the story.

Katharine was more highly strung and nervous. She became delusional and depressive, worried that she was letting the family down, to such an extent that in 1920 she was committed to an asylum for six months. After she came home in January 1921 she was clearly not cured and went rapidly down hill, dying a month later. Within months Herbert was getting entangled with the town’s rival solicitor Oswald Martin over a land sale which was proving difficult to resolve and becoming acrimonious. One afternoon that October they met for tea at Herbert’s house, during the course of which he handed Oswald a scone, apparently with the words: “’scuse fingers”. After he got home later that evening Oswald fell violently ill, though he soon recovered.

His father-in-law, the local chemist Fred Davies, remembered selling Herbert Armstrong arsenic over the counter (as you could in those days) to make weedkiller to tackle the dandelions in his lawn. It was Davies who suggested his son-in-law might have been poisoned. They remembered that the Martins had received an anonymous box of chocolates shortly before, one of which had made Oswald’s sister-in-law ill.

The local doctor, Tom Hincks, who had treated Katharine and Oswald without any suspicions of foul play, was convinced now that they might both have been poisoned. The Home Office and Scotland Yard were surreptitiously called in and on New Year’s Eve, Herbert Armstrong was arrested in his office. A small, lethal dose of arsenic was found in one of his pockets. Charged with the attempted poisoning of Oswald, Armstrong was in custody when his wife’s body was exhumed from the local churchyard. It was found to contain a large amount of arsenic.

Herbert was tried at Hereford Assizes before Mr Justice Darling, a hanging judge who seems to have set out to find him guilty from the start. In summing up he ignored most of the evidence in Armstrong’s favour – which was quite substantial – and pressed for his conviction. The jury of local famers duly obliged, taking just 48 minutes to reach a verdict. Herbert was hanged at Gloucester prison five months to the day after his arrest. The hangman claimed to have heard him mutter: “I’m coming Kate!” as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet.

Was he guilty? As one reviewer has said of my book: “It’s for you to decide.” And there’s a twist on the very last page.

The Poisoner Solicitor: The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery by Stephen Bates.(Icon Books) Out Now

A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England. Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers. With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer? One hundred years after the execution, Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.

More information about Stephen Bates can be found on his website. You can find him on Facebook and you can also follow him on Twitter @StephenBatesEsq

Kate Winkler Dawson on Who Is the American Sherlock?

 For most authors, settling on the next book can be challenging. After my first book, Death in the Air, was published in 2017 I struggled to find the right story, the perfect follow-up to a book about a serial killer trapped in a deadly fog in London.  

 I was thumbing through my favorite encyclopedia of American crime (I actually have several) and read about the DeAutremont brothers, the most famous train robbers in the U.S. who never actually robbed a train. They murdered several people during a failed heist in Oregon in the 1920s and disappeared without a trace (at least that’s what police believed). Oscar Heinrich was put on the case and he gleaned dozens of clues from one pair of overalls left behind at the scene. I’m not easily impressed by investigators but…he really impressed me. And Edward Oscar Heinrich became the subject of book #2.

Initially, Heinrich was a professionally trained chemist and sanitation engineer who took an interest in criminal cases. He quickly learned that he was brighter and savvier than virtually all of the investigators he would encounter—he solved cases that they couldn’t solve. Heinrich became a detective, and a forensic scientist—a crime science investigator who could work in the field and in the lab.

My research took me deep into the unexplored archives at UC Berkeley. The amount of material in his collection was overwhelming. Oscar Heinrich was what I call a productive hoarder, which means he collected every single piece of evidence, every letter, and every diary he had over forty years. If I had any question about one of his major cases, he offered me answers in that archive. He has spoiled me for all other biography subjects. He stored loaded guns, bullets, locks of hair, handwriting samples, daggers, even lockets from murder victims.

Oscar Heinrich grew up in Tacoma, Washington but never completed high school because, when his father died, he became the family’s main provider. He was a pharmacist in his teens, then talked admissions officers at UC Berkeley to allow him to register as an undergrad without a high school degree. He eventually received a BS in chemical engineering and became a sanitation engineer in Tacoma (those skills became useful in some of his cases). He was a city manager in Colorado and then began using his skills in chemistry on local criminal cases. He became a police chief in Alameda County and eventually became an expert in forensics, bringing together all of his skills.

When he became a forensic scientist, initially law enforcement agencies were skeptical of his new methods, but Heinrich was an excellent talker—he was compelling, convincing and confident. And his track record was impressive. Forensic experts rely on recommendations and reputation to gain clients within law enforcement and one of Oscar’s closest friend was August Vollmer (his Inspector Lestrade, if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan). Oscar became very well-respected, very quickly because he got results—people would confess or juries would convict based on his evidence.

The stories in American Sherlock highlight some of his most complicating cases. Heinrich’s skills in the case of Bessie Ferguson were incredible. Without giving too much away, he used a very unusual technique to locate a body that would have likely never been discovered. I’ve always been impressed with his work on latent (hidden) evidence in the Siskiyou train robbery. The amount of concentration he must have had was astounding. He was so patient—at least with evidence…not people.

Heinrich enjoyed the spotlight, but he never chased it, so you’ll find him in contemporary newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, but rarely in mainstream media. He never had a case that really put him on the map, like Paul Kirk who helped free convicted killer Sam Sheppard. And I think that Heinrich’s archive was so large that no one had really bothered to dig through it. His legacy remained hidden to most.

Edward Oscar Heinrich’s fingerprints cover the history of forensic science; he is a particularly dramatic symbol of the great advances in his field and it’s such a shame that he spent more than 60 years buried in history books, but I’m quite proud to be the one to shine a deserving light on his career.

Kate Winkler Dawson is the author of American Sherlock published by Icon Books, price £9.99 paperback original

Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities – beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners and hundreds of books – sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career.  Known as the ‘American Sherlock Holmes’, Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of the greatest – and first – forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural.  Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock tells the story of the man whose work spearheaded a myriad of new forensic tools, including blood-spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence.

More information about Kate Winkler Dawson can be found on her website. You can follow her on Twitter @ kwinklerdawson