Chapter 4: The Brighton Trunk Murders

 

Chapter 4: The Brighton Trunk Murders

The “Queen of Watering Places” The city of Bri

ghton, United Kingdom, often known colloquially as “Brighton Beach”, has been one of the prime destinations for the British for over 200 years. Brighton boasts of some of the nicest beaches in Britain, relatively warmer temperatures compared to the rest of the country, and a plethora of bars, nightclubs and concert venues. Because of these things, Brighton has earned the nickname the “Queen of Watering Places.” Besides being a top vacation destination, Brighton has also been known as a safe, peaceful city. Outside of a spate of counter-culture youth violence during the 1960s and ‘70s—which was made known to the world through the rock band The Who’s 1973 album Quadrophenia and a 1979 film of the same name, as well as the popular Stray Cat’s song “Rumble in Brighton”—and the Irish Republican Army bombing of a hotel in 1984, crime in Brighton has been historically low. Therefore, Brighton’s idyllic setting makes this next case, or series of cases, especially interesting. During the course of just over 100 years, Brighton was the scene of three bizarre, similar yet unrelated murders. Another murder that took place in London shared many of the hallmarks of the other three murders and was also determined to be unrelated. Collectively, these four murders are known as the “Brighton Trunk Murders.” Due to their mysterious and bizarre circumstances, any one of the trunk murders could probably be given its own entry in this anthology. When considered as a group, due to the coincidence factor, the Brighton Trunk Murders are probably the strangest case examined in this book. The 1831 Murder In 1831, Brighton was in the middle of one of its early boom periods. Tea, spices, and gold were flowing into England from its lucrative colonies in India and South Africa, which resulted in a trickle-down effect of wealth whereby the middle class was growing at a phenomenal rate. The result was good for Brighton, as members of the growing middle class were able to travel to the beachfront community on new rail lines and spend their disposable income in the city’s bars and shops. Life was good in Brighton, and most of its inhabitants were happy. Celia Holloway was an exceptional woman for her time; she was a painter on the chain pier who was not reliant on her husband John. She spent her days painting the ocean, beaches, and anyone who passed by. Celia was a happy, independent woman who lived in a time when it was not common for women to have those views or lifestyle. The progressive-minded Brighton seemed to be the perfect place for her to pursue her interests while she was happily married to John. But sometimes things are not as they seem. Apparently, John was not happy being married to a liberated woman, so he murdered her, placed her body in a trunk, and then buried the trunk under Lover’s Walk. John Holloway was quickly arrested for his wife’s murder, convicted, and hanged all within a year. Justice was quick in nineteenth century Britain. So began the long, bizarre saga of the Brighton Trunk Murders. Minnie Bonati Although the next murder in the series of Brighton Trunk Murders took place in London, which is about fifty miles from the sea resort city, the circumstances of the crime are eerily similar enough to the others that it warrants being included in this macabre list. On May 7, 1927, an attendant at the Charing Cross train station in London became concerned with a foul smell emanating from the luggage room. Upon investigating the odor, he soon learned that source was a luggage trunk. Correctly believing that he may have stumbled onto a crime, the local police were called to investigate. The police discovered a grisly scene—a dismembered body with each piece wrapped in paper. Also included in the trunk were several items of clothing, including a pair of underwear marked “P. Holt.” The circumstances of the discovery shocked and frightened Londoners when it became public. The average Londoner at the time was a street-smart person and no stranger to crime. Theft, prostitution, and even murder were all crimes that Londoners were used to hearing about in 1927, but this was quite different. Most of the murders that took place in London at the time were cases of criminals preying on each other, personal and/or financial grudges, or of someone ending up in the wrong part of town. Murders with this level of brutality were almost unheard—almost. It was less than fifty years earlier, in 1888, when five women were raped and murdered in London’s east end in the “Jack the Ripper” murders. In 1927, when the dismembered body was found in the train station, some of the older residents of London were reminded of the Jack the Ripper case and wondered if there might be some connection. But the London Police quickly dismissed any such outlandish claims as they quietly pieced together the identity of the victim. After a thorough investigation, police learned that the woman to whom the underwear belonged was still alive, but that one of her former employees, thirty-six-year-old Minnie Rolls/Bonati, could not be located. Fearing that the case would go cold, investigators went public with the details and soon a taxi driver came forward who said that he gave a ride to a man with a large trunk in tow to the Charing Cross station on May 6. Police eventually identified the man as thirty-six-year-old real estate agent John Robinson. Under pressure during police questioning, Robinson eventually admitted to the murder and dismemberment stating: "I met her at Victoria and took her to my office. I want to tell you all about it. I done it and cut her up." Robinson claimed self-defense to the police. He said that after he brought Bonati back to his office, for some reason she attacked him, so he defended himself with a coal shovel, hitting her in the head with a fatal blow. He then dismembered her body in the office, placed it in a trunk, and called for a taxi to take him to the train station. Perhaps he believed that since Bonati was a prostitute no one would care and he could get away with the murder, but the dismemberment was much too much for the civilized nature of early twentieth century London. The mountain of physical evidence, along with his confession, was too much for Robinson to overcome in trial. He was quickly convicted and executed on August 12, 1927, just over two months after the murder. The “Girl with the Pretty Feet” By 1934, the luster of Brighton beach had worn off a bit as the United Kingdom, along with most of the industrialized world, was in the midst of the Great Depression. The crowds that had flocked to Brighton’s beaches dwindled as the average British citizen found saving what little money he had more important than a weekend at the beach. To most people at the time, the Great Depression seemed to have made Brighton’s golden age a thing of the distant past, which was further exacerbated by a series of macabre events that began in June of that year. On June 17, an unclaimed trunk at Brighton train station was noticed by an employee. The employee, William Vinnicombe, was not alarmed so much by the trunk being left at the station, but more so by the foul odor coming from it. Perhaps aware of the 1927 murder of Minnie Bonati, Vinnicombe called local police to investigate the trunk’s contents. Chief inspector Ronald Donaldson quickly learned that like the Bonati case, he was staring at the dismembered corpse of a woman! In fact, the trunk only contained the woman’s torso, head, and arms; the legs were recovered in a suitcase the next day at another train station. Unlike the Bonati case, there were few clues to the dead woman’s identity tucked into the trunk. A piece of paper with the word, or name, “Ford” was found in the trunk, but it was never determined if it was connected to victim, if it was a “red herring”, or possibly some random paper that ended up in the trunk. A coroner’s examination determined that the woman was around twenty-five years old and pregnant. A cause of death was never determined. The manner of death could have been an accident, but the brutal dismemberment of the body clearly pointed towards homicide. The Jane Doe quickly became known as “the girl with the pretty feet” because her feet were believed to be those of a dancer’s. But someone would notice if a dancer was missing—at least that is what investigators believed. Unfortunately for the girl with the pretty feet, no one came forward on her behalf, which led many to believe that the victim was a prostitute. Going on the prostitute theory, investigators scoured brothels and red light districts and began to focus on a family doctor who often performed illegal abortions on the side, often for prostitutes. The suspect was a man named Edward Massiah, who lived in the neighboring town of Hove. Although Donaldson suspected Massiah, the medical examiner who performed Jane Doe’s autopsy was not so sure, as he noted that the dismemberment did not appear to be the work of a professional. Massiah was also apparently well connected with local police and politicians. Donaldson’s superiors forced him to back off of his investigation of Massiah, who then quietly moved to London where he continued to practice medicine, both legally and illegally. Any doubts concerning Massiah’s influential connections were put to rest when a woman whom he performed an abortion on died, but he was never charged. Massiah retired to the Caribbean in the 1950s and the case of the girl with the pretty feet was never solved. As strange as the case of the girl with the pretty feet was, it was made even stranger when it was revealed that another trunk murder case was taking place in Brighton at the same time! The Murder of Violette Kay/Saunders Forty-two-year-old Violette Kay and Minnie Bonati shared some dubious distinctions—they were both prostitutes who were both murdered, dismembered, and then shoved into a trunk. It is doubtful if either Kay or Bonati ever saw herself working as a prostitute and there is no possible way that either could have foreseen the awful circumstances in which their lives ended. Violette Kaye, also known as Violette Saunders, worked as a prostitute in the Brighton area and dated a twenty-six-year-old man known as Toni Mancini, although his legal name was Cecil England. For legitimate work, Mancini worked as a bartender and bouncer at local bars, but his true passion was in the world of crime. He was known to the local police as a low level player in the local criminal underworld—a thug who the heavier players could employ to do dirty work. Although Mancini worked as a bouncer and occasional heavy for underworld figures, the majority of his violence was reserved for those closest to him. He was known to slap his girlfriends around in front of others if they did not do as he pleased, but Violette Kaye was a bit different than his other girlfriends. Kaye was known to stand up to Mancini’s threats and violence and would even fight back. Kaye and Mancini’s relationship was volatile to say the least. The fact that Kaye was nearly twenty years older than her paramour contributed to the turbulent nature of their relationship, as she was lacking in self-esteem and jealous to the point of violence. Kaye and Mancini frequently drank copious amounts of alcohol, which then turned their drinking sessions into shouting matches and sometimes fisticuffs. It was during one of these drinking sessions that Violette Kaye was seen alive for the last time. On the night of May 10, Kaye and Mancini were drinking heavily at Mancini’s place of employment, the Skylark Café. As the drinking binge progressed, Kaye accused Mancini of having an affair with a young female employee at the bar named Elizabeth Attrell. Questions by Kaye turned into loud accusations as she began to become more intoxicated, and before she and Mancini left for the evening, the two were witnessed shoving each other. That was the last time anyone saw Violette Kaye alive. In the days after May 10, Mancini acted extremely suspicious, giving some of Kaye’s personal effects to Attrell and telling Violette’s friends and family that she had suddenly moved to Paris. Kaye’s sister then received a telegram that claimed to be from her sister in Paris, but it was later revealed that the message was in fact sent from Brighton. Mancini then took up residence in an apartment near the Brighton train station, in the days after the dismembered body of the girl with the pretty feet was discovered. As the local police searched the area around the train station for clues to murder of the Jane Doe, they eventually conducted a house to house search, which led them to the apartment of Toni Mancini. Once inside Mancini’s apartment, they were quickly overwhelmed with the smell of decay. They found the body of Violette Kaye stuffed into a trunk at the foot of Mancini’s bed! The public was surprised at the eerie turn of events. How could there be two extremely brutal, yet similar, murders committed at the same time in the quiet vacation resort town of Brighton? Certainly Toni Mancini must be the killer of both women, right? The police quickly determined that Mancini was not the perpetrator of the Jane Doe murder; it was just simply another bizarre coincidence in the series of “trunk murders” as they became known. They were confident, however, that Mancini killed Kaye in act of anger on the night of May 10. An autopsy, which was conducted by the same doctor who examined the remains of the girl with the pretty feet, concluded that Kaye died from a blow to the head. Mancini went to trial for Kaye’s murder in late 1934, which the prosecution believed would be an open and shut case. The fact that Kaye’s rotting corpse was discovered in Mancini’s apartment was thought to be damning evidence alone, but for good measure the prosecution paraded a litany of witnesses who all testified to the defendant’s seedy nature. Former and current girlfriends, one who testified that Mancini tried to get her to give him a false alibi to the police, and criminal associates all gave proof, in the prosecution’s eyes, that Mancini was the type of person who would murder his girlfriend. But the strategy backfired. The defense acknowledged that their client had a criminal background, which is why he attempted to hide Kaye’s body after he found her dead. The defense further argued that the true perpetrator was probably one of Kaye’s many “clients” who was still on the streets of Brighton. The jury agreed with the defense and acquitted Mancini of all charges. But the bizarre case of the Brighton Trunk Murders does not end there; Mancini admitted on his deathbed in 1976 that he was in fact responsible for Kaye’s death, although he claimed it was an act of self-defense. The Brighton Trunk Murders truly left an enduring psychological impression on the people of the United Kingdom. For a number of years after the Mancini trial, the British quit referring to their beloved beach getaway as the “Queen of Watering Places” and instead called it the “Queen of Slaughter Places.” Today, the memories of the bizarre string of murderous coincidences that took place in and around Brighton are fading into the distant past. Most of the younger generation does not even know about the Brighton Trunk Murders, and the popular resort town has once again claimed its spot as Britain’s prime beachfront vacation spot. That is, until the next body is found in a trunk near the train station. Chapter 5: The Abduction and Murd