The Willesden Trunk Murders

 

Amazingly, there were two murders where the bodies were hidden in trunks in Willesden. In March 1904 George Crossman left a body in a tin trunk in Kensal Rise. Then in January the following year, Arthur Devereux in a copycat murder tried the same method to dispose of a body in Harlesden. 

The George Crossman case
In 1904, 30-year old George Crossman was living at No.43 Ladysmith Road, near the corner of Dundonald Road Kensal Rise, paying rent of £3 15 shillings a month. He shared the house with his wife and a young son Bertie. Crossman was well-dressed, handsome with dark piercing eyes, a fashionable drooping moustache and thick black hair. He was seen in the neighbourhood smoking cigars and taking seven-year-old Bertie for walks. 

In Christmas 1903, to save money he moved upstairs and sublet the lower part of the house to William Delf, a shirt manufacturer, and his wife. Almost immediately they complained of a terrible smell coming from a tin trunk in a cupboard under the stairs. Crossman said it was nothing to worry about, it just contained builder’s size. (This had a nasty smell and was used for decorating). But Delf persisted that he could smell human decay and finally Crossman agreed to remove the trunk.

The Delf’s looking at the trunk in the cupboard

On 23 March a van was ordered from No.81 Willesden Lane, near the corner with Tennyson Road, close to Paddington Old Cemetery, where Ryden and Sons ran a newsagents and removal firm. Crossman got the tin trunk out of the house, but the carrier Frederick Ryden, complained about the smell and the weight, and asked Crossman to help lift it. 

Frederick Ryden complaining about the weight of the trunk

In the meantime, Delf finally decided to go to the local police station, and he returned to Ladysmith Road with two policemen just as the trunk was being loaded onto the van. Seeing the game was up, Crossman made a run for it. He was chased for nearly a mile by the policemen, and just as they closed in on him in Hanover Road, he pulled out a razor from his pocket and slit his throat from ear to ear. Death was practically instantaneous.

Crossman cutting his throat in Hanover Road

The trunk was taken to the police station and opened in the morgue. Inside was a block of cement which was so hard they had to use pickaxes to break it up. In the trunk lay the remains of a woman completely embedded in cement.

Opening the trunk in the morgue

Who was the lady in the trunk? Slowly the full story unfolded as the police discovered amazing evidence to show George Crossman had married at least eight times under different names. His first wife was Annie Smith and they had a son called Bertie. But Annie died just after childbirth in 1897 (her death certificate was found in Crossman’s pocket). Then there were seven other wives he had married. One of whom found out it was a bigamous marriage, and Crossman was sentenced to five years imprisonment at the Old Bailey on 12 December 1898. He was released on licence in September 1902. Despite this he continued to trick women into marriage. 

His last marriage was to 38-year old Ellen Sampson, the woman in the trunk. Ellen had qualified as a nurse after her first husband died. At the end of 1902, she told a relative about her forthcoming wedding to a man called ‘Charley’, and then she disappeared. Her employers told the relatives that Nurse Sampson had given her new address as No.43 Ladysmith Road and they wrote to her but got no reply. The letters had been intercepted by Crossman. The police concluded that poor Ellen was married and murdered inside 24 hours. 

At the inquest two previous wives, Edith Thompson and Annie Welch, gave evidence. In January 1903 Crossman had married Edith Thompson at Holy Trinity Church, Brondesbury Road. She told the court she had met Crossman when she responded to an advert asking for a mother’s help. He told her he was a reporter for the Morning Post with a salary of £150 a year. Five days after they had married, Crossman told Edith he had to go to Manchester for work, but in fact it was to marry nurse Ellen Sampson in Paddington. He and Ellen returned to Ladysmith Road while Edith had been sent away for the night to stay with relations in south London. George murdered Ellen as she was dressing the next morning, and then calmly went to Peckham to collect Edith. 

A bizarre element to the story was Edith’s evidence that Crossman later brought Annie Welch to Ladysmith Road and for a few days he lived with her as man and wife in Edith’s presence. William Delf who saw what was going on, told Crossman that living with two women was a dangerous game to play, and if he were not careful he would get himself hung. Crossman just replied, ‘No I won’t, I’ll take care of it’. 

Annie Welch, who had been a lady’s maid in service at Rutland Gate, married Crossman who said his name was Frank Seaton. She was a teetotaller, and one night when she refused to drink with Crossman, he tied her hands behind her back and forced whiskey down her throat. On the day he moved the trunk, she shut the door to the room to keep out the smell and stayed there playing games with Bertie. 

Crossman’s elderly mother, Mary Ann Crossman who was a dressmaker in Cricklewood, appeared in court. When asked if she was his mother, she said; ‘Yes, I am sorry to say I am’. She said George was born in Paddington in 1873. He never stuck at any job for long: he had been a baker, a barber, and a barman - but he was always short of money and had been a trouble to the family. 

Inspector Pollard in court

Detective Inspector Edwin Pollard, who was in charge of the case, said that as a teenager Crossman had two short prison sentences for theft. He had lived by marrying and robbing the women. He had obtained £105 (today worth about £15,500) from nurse Edith Sampson and robbed the other women by skilfully forging their names on cheques. George had posed as a reporter, an architect, an engineer, an electrician, and even a wig maker. He did not have a regular job and spent time buying furniture at auctions which he sold on for a small profit. He also bought furniture on hire purchase or the ‘never and never’ and defrauded the dealers. The police found about 50 letters at Ryden’s newsagents shop from women to Crossman addressed to ‘Frank Seaton’. 

Edith Sampson was buried in a grave not far from Annie Smith, Crossman’s first wife. Crossman was buried two days later in un-consecrated ground. Drawn by curiosity, a few people gathered at the cemetery gates, but they were not allowed to enter. Only Crossman’s mother and his sister, who was weeping bitterly, were allowed in. 

The mistake Crossman made was not to lay a bed of cement at the bottom of the trunk, which is why the smell leaked out.

Because of the sensational nature of the murder, locals pressured the Council to change the name of Ladysmith Road to today’s Wrentham Avenue. 

The second case occurred less than a year later.

The Arthur Devereux case
On New Year’s Day 1905, Arthur Devereux, his wife Beatrice and their children had moved into the upstairs of No.60 Milton Avenue Harlesden. They had two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. The rent was 7/6 a week.

Arthur was a 34-year old chemist’s assistant who was married to 30-year old Beatrice Gregory. They had three children: Stanley, a healthy little boy aged five, and the two year-old twin boys. Arthur was very fond of Stanley but indifferent to the twins, who both had rickets from a bad diet and sadly could not walk or feed themselves. The lack of vitamin D caused a weakening of the bones.

Beatrice with baby Stanley

Beatrice with the twins

In a very nomadic life, they moved more than a dozen times, living wherever Arthur obtained work as a chemist’s assistant. But he constantly spent beyond his means. While they lived in Malvern he was jokingly called the ‘American Millionaire’ because of his lavish lifestyle. He bitterly resented the birth of the twins and the extra expenses incurred when they lived in Stroud, Gloucestershire. 

Arthur had a good education in Beaconsfield and had passed the first level pharmacy exam. Beatrice was a talented pianist who had studied at the London School of Music and obtained a teaching qualification. She had met Arthur in 1894 through her brother who was a chemist in Hastings, and they were married in November 1898 in Paddington. 

Since May 1904, Arthur had been working as the manager of Turner’s chemist shop at No.67 Fernhead Road, near Shirland Road Kilburn, earning £2 a week. But in January 1905 he had been given a month’s notice as sales were not up to expectations, and he left on 27 January. 

He had previously worked as an assistant in several other chemist shops, often obtaining posts with forged testimonials. He was not able to keep the jobs for long and he was usually discharged for laziness. In 1903 Arthur had served a 9-month sentence for fraud in Ramsgate. He had issued bad cheques using the name of his brother-in-law. When he was arrested in Ramsgate, the police found a loaded revolver and 42 bullets. 

His erratic employment meant the family had permanent financial problems. When they lived in Tottenham, Beatrice had been forced to apply for poor relief. But Arthur had eaten all the food provided for the children. He did not look for work and stayed in bed all morning before going to the local library in the afternoon to read the newspapers.

Ellen Gregory was Beatrice’s 65-year old mother. Her husband was a rather shady solicitor who had been jailed for fraud and had left her to live with another woman. Ellen had lived with or close to Beatrice and Arthur for four years until June 1904, when she moved to nearby No.85 Minet Avenue in Harlesden. She visited daily to help Beatrice look after the boys. But Arthur resented her and had threatened to shoot Ellen when she refused to lend him money, so she only came after he had left the house. On the 28 January 1905 Ellen told Beatrice she had found some short-term work out of Town which meant she had to move away from Harlesden for a while.

William Garfath was the landlord’s agent for No.60 Milton Avenue. On the morning of 7 February 1905, he was passing by and was surprised to see boxes being loaded onto a van. He spoke to Arthur pointing out the rent was due. Arthur said he was moving some items to a new flat but would not be moving out just yet. That evening Garfath saw a second van with furniture being loaded. He was concerned that Arthur was going to abscond without paying rent. Arthur said the rooms had become available so he was moving now, and he gave Garfath 7s 6d for the final week’s rent. He said he did not want to be pestered by his mother-in-law and was leaving so she could not find him. 

When Ellen returned to London in the middle of February, she knocked on the door of No.60 Milton Ave but got no answer. Sarah Wells the next-door neighbour told her the family had gone away. She had seen Arthur and young Stanley making a bonfire in the back yard on Saturday 4 February but had not seen Beatrice and the twins. Ellen was very concerned and persuaded Garfath to let her into the house, but there was nothing to show where they had gone. 

The only clue she had was that Garfath told her the furniture van belonged to Thomas Bannister. She went to his office at No.591 Harrow Road, but he said he had no record of where the boxes went. She suspected that Arthur had told Bannister not to tell her where he had gone. Determined not to give up, she made repeated visits to Bannister and eventually he revealed he was storing a trunk for Devereux at his furniture depository. This shocked Ellen, because of the recent Crossman case, she was worried that Beatrice’s body might be in the trunk. She went to Paddington Police Station to report her suspicions. Bannister was alarmed by Ellen’s suggestion and said she was a wicked woman to think such murderous thoughts. But he went to his depository at No.2 Buller Road on the corner with Chamberlayne Road to check on the trunk but could not detect a smell. 

The Depository at No.2 Buller Road

Bannister told the police the boxes had gone to No.92 Harrow Road in Paddington Green where Arthur had rented lodgings over a butcher’s shop. The landlord, John Tebboth, told officers that Arthur had said his wife was not well and was away in the country with their twins. He had arrived with Stanley and said he wanted the room for about a fortnight. Then he gone to Coventry on 20 February, where he had obtained a job as a chemist’s assistant. Arthur asked Tebboth and his wife to look after Stanley and sent them money for his keep. Then he sent the fare and asked them to put the boy on a train to Coventry with the guard on 22 March. 

Inspector Pollard (who had also been in charge of the Crossman case), traced a second-hand dealer at No.30 Manor Park Road. He had bought Arthur’s furniture and some ladies and children’s clothes. This was enough for Pollard to get a magistrate’s warrant to open the trunk. On 13 April Inspector Pollard and Sergeant Cole went to Buller Road with Bannister. Arthur had told Bannister the trunk contained books and chemicals, but when they shook it there was no vibration. Pollard ordered it to be opened. They found a wooden lid had been fastened with screws and glue to form a hermetic seal inside the trunk. When they broke through, they were shocked to find the bodies of Beatrice and the twin boys. Later, one of the officers said he will never forget the grim moment of silence that followed the discovery of the three bodies. 

Opening the trunk

Pollard immediately sent a police telegram to Coventry, and Arthur was arrested at the chemist’s shop by the Chief Constable and his deputy. The following day Pollard and Cole travelled by train from Willesden Junction to Coventry to bring Arthur back to London. He was well-dressed in a light overcoat and a white hat. On the journey Arthur asked if there had been any smell when they opened the trunk. When Pollard replied No, Arthur laughed and boastfully said he had mixed boric acid with the glue to stop any fungi forming. He said Crossman had used cement which had cracked, and Arthur thought his was a better plan because of his chemical knowledge. Pollard had been very upset when they opened the trunk and the cheerful manner of Devereux describing how he had sealed it upset him. Pollard moved away to sit on the other side of the carriage leaving DS Cole to listen to Arthur.

Arthur being escorted to Harlesden Police Station (There is a cross over Devereux in the white hat)

Harlesden police station and court were on the corner of Craven Park Road and St Mary’s Road. Devereux was held at the police station, where he wrote a long statement on 14 April saying he had returned home after a walk with Stanley and found Beatrice and the twins dead in their beds. He believed that they had died from poison, as the chloroform and morphine he kept in his desk were missing. He and Beatrice had quarreled before he went out. Rather than face an inquest, and remembering the Crossman case, he decided to conceal their bodies in a trunk. 

The inquest was held at the Kilburn Coroner’s Court in Salusbury Road, the same room as nurse Ellen Sampson’s inquest had been held the year before.

Mrs Ellen Gregory, a little, grey-haired woman wearing black mourning clothes, said she had identified the bodies of Beatrice and the two babies. She said Devereux had bought the trunk two years ago while they lived in Stroud. He had invented a toothache cure and keep drugs such as chloroform and morphine at home. Beatrice had told her that Arthur slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow.

At first the postmortem failed to detect any poison. But further tests by Sir Thomas Stevenson, a Home Office expert at Guys, found the cause of death was morphine. He believed Arthur had administered it in stout to cover the bitter taste for Beatrice, and in milk given to the twins. Stevenson explained that boric acid was an antiseptic and would have stopped the growth of fungus. The inquest jury verdict was that all three had died from morphine poisoning.

Beatrice and the twins were buried on 18 April at Willesden New Cemeter. Despite a heavy downpour of hail and sleet, a vast crowd watched the funeral hearse with the three coffins covered in purple velvet leaving the Salisbury Road mortuary. People wept and men removed their hats in respect. About 2,000 people waited in the road outside the cemetery and along the paths inside – it was the largest crowd ever seen. Inspector Smith, mounted on horseback managed to hold the crowds back from the chapel and the grave. James Crook and Sons from Kilburn High Road carried out the funeral. 

Awaiting trial in Brixton, Devereux was cheerful and confident that he would be able to clear himself. Then five days before his trial he began to behave strangely - grimacing and mumbling during interviews, writing nonsense scrawls, saying he was Jesus Christ and had helped God create the world. The prison medical officer and Dr Henry Maudsley believed Arthur was faking and certified him as sane. But doctors for the defense, including the well-known Dr Forbes Winslow, interviewed him and concluded he was of unsound mind, and showed symptoms of insanity.

Devereux in the dock

The case at the Old Bailey began on 25 July 1905 and Arthur stuck to his story that money worries had caused Beatrice to poison the twins and take her own life. Evidence was given about insanity in both his family and Beatrice’s family. The most telling piece of evidence was a telegram that Arthur had sent on 13 January, two weeks before Beatrice and the twins’ death, applying for a job in Hull saying he was a widower with one child. When questioned Devereux said he had done this before as he thought it was more likely to obtain a position if he did not have wife. 

When the trunk was produced in court it created an audible thrill of horror. 

At the end of the trial on 31 July, it took the jury only 12 minutes to return a verdict of guilty. They did not believe Devereux was insane. The judge, Mr Justice Ridley, said he agreed with their verdict. Arthur was calm and composed when the sentence of death was given by the judge, who praised Inspector Pollard and the other officers. For solving the crime, Pollard was promoted to Chief Inspector and DS Coles was made an Inspector.

After the trial, Arthur wrote to Ellen Gregory from prison asking her to bring up Stanley in ignorance about his father’s fate and she promised to do so.  Devereux was executed on 15 August at Pentonville Prison. 

Mrs Gregory made a plea to the Willesden magistrates, saying she had spent all her money on a funeral for Beatrice and the babies, so they did not have a pauper’s funeral. She was now reduced to absolute poverty. A fund was set up for Stanley, and all of Arthur’s property was directed to be used to support the boy. It looks like Stanley was adopted and given a new name, but we have not been able to find out what happened to him. 

These were not the first trunk murders: there had been one in Brighton in 1831. But to have two in the same area a year apart is unique.