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Practically every day of the year is a landmark of some sort in the annals of crime. Here’s where you can find out what happened this week in years gone by... Stories from the week beginning February 8th. WAS FATHER OR SON THE KILLER?Because of his violent drunkenness, the home of William Knighton, a 22-year-old miner, was not a happy one. He lived with his parents and 16-year-old sister Doris, his invalid father sleeping on the ground floor, Knighton on the first floor and his mother and sister sharing a double bed in the attic. In 1924 Knighton had been discharged with ignominy from the army after he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for indecently assaulting a German woman. So the police were not surprised when his sister Doris later told them that on the night of February 5th, 1927, he came home drunk, got into her bed and attempted to rape her. She screamed, waking her mother beside her, and Knighton left the room. Doris Knighton’s account of what happened two nights later began on February 7th when she went to bed at 10 p.m. At 1 .a.m.on FEBRUARY 8th, she awoke to hear her mother moaning. She asked what was the matter, and on receiving no reply assumed that her mother had had a coughing fit and had got over it. Later Doris woke again, and saw her brother at the foot of their mother’s side of the bed. He asked what was the matter with their mother, and Doris told him she didn’t know. He left the room without another word. At 6 a.m. Doris was woken by shouts from her father downstairs. Seeing blood on her mother’s face and on the floor, she went down and sent her brother up to their mother. “There seems to be something the matter with her,” he said when he came back, and his father told him to take up some brandy. He did so, returning to say, “It seems hopeless.” His father sent him to fetch a married sister, and after doing so Knighton went to the police saying he had “done the old woman in.” Officers found that Mrs. Knighton’s throat had been cut, and she had been held partly out of bed to bleed into a bucket. At his trial at Derbyshire Assizes, Knighton claimed he had no recollection of what happened that night. Woken by his father at about 5.45 a.m., he had felt in his pocket for matches and found a bloodstained razor. Concluding that he must have killed his mother, he had gone to the police. The defence claimed that he had been in a state of “epileptic automatism” at the time of the killing, but this suggestion was rejected, and Knighton was convicted of his mother’s murder and sentenced to death. Leave to appeal was refused, but the defence lawyers then submitted further statements made by Doris and her married sister. They said that it was their father, not their brother, who had sexually assaulted Doris on the night of February 5th. Their father had sexually abused Doris on several occasions during the past four years, and she had been mistaken in thinking that it was her brother who had tried to rape her. Doris and her sister also claimed that their father’s shirt and underpants had been found wet and wrung-out in the kitchen on the morning of the murder, and the defence suggested that Mr. Knighton had murdered his wife and had then placed the razor in his son’s pocket. The case was consequently referred back to the Court of Criminal Appeal, but the judges found no grounds for interfering with the jury’s verdict and William Knighton was duly executed. TRAPPED BY HIS BLOOD GROUPOn the morning of FEBRUARY 10th, 1955, the near-naked body of Rose Elizabeth Fairhurst, aged about 45, was found on a bombed site at the junction of London’s Loman and Great Suffolk Streets. Her clothes had been ripped off, she had been beaten and strangled, and semen was found on her right thigh. A woman with whom she had been drinking at a pub the previous night told detectives that they had been approached by Sydney Joseph Clarke, who had offered Rose 10 shillings for a “quickie.” Rose had left the pub with him at 9.30, and an hour later Clarke was seen by another woman as she left a pub in Blackfriars Road. He was alone, and he tried to proposition her, saying, “Come on girl, I’ve got a few bob.” Traced to a hostel, he claimed he was in Bristol on the night of the murder, and the hostel’s night porter confirmed that Clarke had booked in just before midnight on February 9th, saying he had just arrived from Bristol. But further inquiries established that the 33-year-old suspect had been staying at another London lodging-house until the night of the murder. He denied having any knowledge of the killing, but blood tests showed he was an AB secretor, with the same blood group as that of the semen found on Rose’s body. And AB secretors constituted only two per cent of the population. Confronted with this evidence, Clarke changed his story. He confirmed that he had offered Rose 10 shillings for sex, and said they had gone to the bombed site where he found an old mattress. When she refused to lie on it, they quarrelled and she hit him. He said he finally persuaded her to use the mattress, but on lying down with her he “went mad” and attacked her. He claimed he could remember nothing else until he found himself at a café under Waterloo Bridge. But he knew he had done something wrong, so he went to his lodgings, packed his suitcase and went to another hostel. At his Old Bailey trial on March 23rd the defence sought a verdict of guilty but insane, his paternal grandfather having died in a mental hospital. But the court heard medical evidence that Sydney Clarke was sane, and he was convicted of Rose Fairhurst’s murder. Sentenced to death, he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on April 14th, 1955. WHEN THE FAMILY LEFT HOMELiving in Rochdale, Charles James Caldwell, 49, was an unemployed labourer whose family had a lot to put up with. The NSPCC had investigated allegations against him of cruelty and neglect; he lived on his wife’s wages as a seamstress, spending most of the money on drink; and the quarrel that erupted between them on FEBRUARY 4th, 1938, was the last straw for Mrs. Caldwell. Her husband complained that she wasn’t giving him enough beer money, and said she was too easy-going with their son who was forever changing jobs. The boy must leave home, Caldwell insisted. So his wife and daughter decided to leave too. The next day Caldwell smashed all his furniture in a fit of rage, and on February 7th his wife took our a summons for a separation order which was served two days later. On February 13th he waited for her to leave work, and when she refused to return to him he stabbed her in the chest. At his Manchester Assizes trial for her murder his defence was insanity, but this was not supported by medical evidence. Convicted and sentenced to death, he was hanged at the city’s Strangeways Prison. |
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