The Curtis Sisters Murder in Finchley Road

This the story of a 1916 murder, but it is a very sad case.

Mathilde Curtis was a nursery governess aged 35, and her sister Ellen was a music teacher aged 32. They were staying with their aunt Ade Curtis, who was also a music teacher at 5 Finchley Road, a large house close to St John’s Wood station. 

On Saturday afternoon 8 January, they had gone shopping and returned to the house just before 1.00. At lunch Ellen whispered to her aunt, ‘Auntie, I’m going to be murdered’. She left the dining room to go to the bathroom followed by Mathilde. The servants heard a thud, and Mathilde ran out of the house holding a table knife dripping with blood. She shouted, ‘Its done, she is dead’. Ellen was found lying in the bathroom with her throat cut.

Inspector John Elliot of S Division arrived at the house and arrested Mathilde who was taken to Portland Town police station. She said, ‘I hope I shall be hanged. I have prayed for it for weeks. We both have. She asked me to do it. It is for the best’.

At the Old Bailey on 17 February, the prosecution barrister told the jury it was not their duty to find if Mathilde had committed the crime because she had confessed, but they had to decide if she was fit to stand trial.

Dr Francis Forward, the medical officer at Holloway Prison, said that Mathilde was suffering from insane delusions of the most profound kind he had ever seen. On 21 January she had tried to commit suicide in Holloway. The sisters were terrified they would be abducted by a gang of white slavers and Mathilde had killed Ellen to save her honour. 

The judge said. ‘To try the prisoner for murder would be not only useless and farcical, but cruel. She would be properly taken care of as an insane person’. The jury agreed and she was detained at Broadmoor. 

What lay behind this strange case?
Their father William Curtis, worked as a clerk in a City bank. In 1897 he married Marie Odell and they had six children, but three had died in infancy. Marie had been ill for some time, and she died in December 1907 when the family was living at ‘Braemore’ 12 Atney Road, in Putney.

The sisters moved to a rented cottage called Walcote on Grayshott Road in the village of Stonehill, Hampshire, where they looked after their younger sister Frances who had serious mental issues and was shown on the 1911 census as an ‘imbecile and dumb since birth’. 

To be closer to his office, William stayed with relatives in Canfield Gardens in South Hampstead and visited his daughters on the weekends. On 3 January 1916 Frances got worse and was sent to an asylum where she died. 

Mathilde and Ellen also had mental difficulties. This was the height of WWI ‘spy fever’ due to the stories of people like the journalist and novelist William Le Queux. The Curtis sisters had delusions that the Government believed they were German spies and had installed a Marconi listening post on the roof of the cottage. 

They were particularly affected by the murder of Sergeant Henry Ozanne by Lieutenant Georges Codere on 8 December 1915 at Arundel House Grayshott. The men were in the Canadian Army at Bramshott Camp and Codere had tried to steal the canteen funds. The murder took place very close to the sisters’ cottage and they went to the local police and said they had committed the murder. 

William Curtis was extremely worried about the mental health of his daughters when he received a letter from Mathilde on 18 December 1915. She said they had a terrible sleeplessness night and had screamed for help, but no one came. They thought they could hear a man on the roof and that poison gas was coming through the floorboards. As a result of the letter, he asked his sisters Ade and Emma to look after them in Finchley Road. On the day of the murder, Mathilde and Ellen were due to see a specialist, although they did not know this. 

Obviously, William was badly affected by the murder, and he did not remarry. He died in 1936 at his home in Putney leaving £23,517 (today worth about £1.7M) to his sister Ade Celia Curtis.

Tragically, Mathilde spent the rest of her life in Broadmoor where she died on 2 January1953.

Today, this very sad story would be seen as a clear case of delusional paranoia, perhaps with an inherited link, although there is not agreement about a genetic cause. It may be that a number of genetic and environmental factors working in combination cause paranoia.