The meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials: part three of three

Last month’s blog post was about how my personal experiences have influenced my handling of sources in my research, including photographs. Though photographs of crime scenes are the main source around which my research pivots, I am also interested in the meanings of photographs as material and emotive objects in the files. This blog post in three parts uses four different case studies to explore some of the multiple meanings of photographs in the case files.

In part one of this post I described how the crime scene photographs in cases of domestic murder that I use in my research served as a surrogate for the space of the crime in the space of the courtroom. I used the example of the 1957 trial of Brian for the murder of his wife Moira to illustrate how the photographs were used at the Old Bailey to support the prosecution’s narrative of what happened on the day Moira died. Part two of this post used the 1930s cases of Eric’s murder of Juliette, and George’s murder of Tom the boarding house keeper, to illustrate another meaning of photographs to police and court: as signifiers of intimate relationships, with important consequences for witnesses, defendants and victims in cases of domestic murder.

Part three of this post explores a further meaning of photographs: as provoking emotional responses, as alleged motivators for murder.

Blackmail is a slippery issue in cases of murder. If person A attempts to blackmail person B by threatening to reveal some secret about them to another party, to the public, or to the authorities, and person B kills person A (either on purpose or accidentally), person B is unlikely to reveal to the police all of the information about the events that led to the death. You can say what you like about the dead. In many of the cases of murder I've looked at in my research I've wondered if there is some hidden piece of information that the defendant was looking to protect by killing. The likelihood is, we’ll never know. In one case, however, blackmail was given as the reason for being provoked into killing. And I am equally suspicious of the narrative given by that defendant, particularly as there was no evidence of the blackmail having taken place. The secret the defendant didn't want to get out, he said, was a photograph. But the photograph was never found.

This case tells us, not what really happened, in this as in many other cases we can never know what the perspective of the victim might have been because they are deceased. But what we can know is what the defendant believed was a credible narrative of events, a powerful enough story, a good enough reason to provoke him to kill. If his story was believed he could get away with a charge of manslaughter rather than murder, and manslaughter could in some circumstances mean a suspended sentence: he might even walk free.

In January 1960, Cleveland, a 32-year-old Jamaican man working in the East End as a decorator, was asked to give a statement to police when his girlfriend, 35-year-old beauty and alleged ‘Dope Queen’, Frances, was found dead at their partially burned flat in Brick Lane. In the first statement he gave to police, Cleveland described how he had met Frances in 1958 when she was living in rooms in Stepney. They had only known each other a few weeks when they decided to live together, and Frances knew of a place:

‘She told me that she knew where some rooms were going at Brick Lane [Stepney], E.1. and the landlord wanted £15 key money and £3 rent in advance. At that time I did not have such money. She said that she could borrow it from her place of work if I would pay it back. I agreed and she got the money. I paid her back in two sums of £8 and £7. She said that other three pounds was out of her wages. We agreed to put our money together and be the joint owners [sic: tenants]. I earned £12 per week and I gave her £10 a week for rent, food and towards buying furniture.’

Though Frances was working full-time she still needed Cleveland’s income to help her set up a new home and afford the rent. Their Brick Lane flat had comfortable furnishings: a settee, lamps, photos and ornaments on the mantelpiece, and, in December 1959, a decorated Christmas tree. When Cleveland had gone to prison for just over a year, Frances needed to pawn some of his suits to make ends meet.

Cleveland’s first statement continues, he was away from the flat when Frances died in it, he said, he didn’t know anything about it. After the statement had been read back to him and signed, an officer handed him a copy of that day’s Daily Mirror. A copy of the front page also exists in the file as an exhibit of evidence. The main headline read ‘IT WAS MURDER… QUEEN OF DOPE DIES IN FIRE’ and included a photo of the rescue of Frances’ upstairs neighbours from the building, as well as a snapshot of her when she was alive.

Daily Mirror, 12^th January 1960, p. 1, via ukpressonline

Cleveland read the page carefully a couple of times and then said he wanted to make another statement.

The second statement gives a dramatic and emotional account of a narrative that Cleveland hoped would make police officers sympathetic. It was ‘shocking’ and ‘terrible’, he said, what this woman had tried to do to him.

‘[One day] …she and I were sitting up in the flat opposite each other. All of a sudden she say to me ‘You can never leave me because all the men have lived with her before have left her but you will not leave me because I have something holding on me that would make me stay with her.’ She took out a small photograph… This photograph showed me stripped naked lying on the bed and she stripped naked too with her private part near my mouth with a dirty diaper [sanitary towel] in my mouth and I had all sh*t on my face and she was leaning sideways with her private part on my face…’

It seems that police doubted the story. They looked for syringes in the partially fire-damaged flat to corroborate Cleveland’s story that Frances had ‘doped’ him before she took the photograph. The post-mortem report was compared with Cleveland's description of how he had lost his temper over the threat of the photograph, knocking Frances to the floor where she lost consciousness before he set a fire to cover up what he had done. Pencil notes in the margins of the statement suggest that the Metropolitan Police and/or the Director of Public Prosecutions believed that it was possible that the photograph had existed, and that Frances might've taken it while Cleveland was asleep. But they never found any trace of the photograph.

'? Provocation' : pencil notes written in the margins of Cleveland's statement.

Cleveland hoped that police would believe that an image like the one he described, and the threat of its use against him, was sufficient provocation as to reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter. The fact that he only described the photo after he found out that police suspected murder, shows that he realised how much trouble he could be in. Provocation had very recently been codified in law and featured in many high-profile murder cases and newspaper reports on them. With this in mind, Cleveland's story represents what he thought was a believable act by a woman desperate to make a man stay living with her. She was blackmailing him, using the photograph, to make him stay. And it wasn't just the existence of the photo and copies of it that would keep Cleveland living with Frances, he claimed she thought, but also the threat of what she would do with it.

‘She said she would show it to my sister who is a good woman and my friends who would laugh at me and it would hurt my sister terribly. It so shocked me I went to grab it from her but she put it in her mouth and chewed it and swallowed it. But she said she had plenty more like that to show… my sister and friends… I hunted the flat and pulled it to pieces but I could never find those other dirty pictures of me. I begged and begged of her to give them to me but she only laughed at me.’

He describes his desperation, real, imagined, or totally made-up, to get the pictures from her. And if she wouldn't give them up, Cleveland pleaded with Frances to let him get away, to go where nobody knew him to escape the shame.

‘I begged of her to let me go out of the country or to Glasgow or somewhere I was not known but she laughed and said I would not get rid of her so easy. And she said she would show the bad photographs to my sister. I begged of her not to do this thing for my sister’s sake, but she only laughed.’

‘I can always make you come back [home] any time I want to’ Cleveland said Frances told him. He painted an image of himself as fearful of this clever ‘terrible’ scheming woman who was blackmailing him. Police were less than sympathetic, especially when he described the struggle that took place when he tried to get the photos from her. Whether police agreed that the shame threatened by this photograph was serious enough to understand Frances’ murder as provocation, and therefore manslaughter, is unclear, although he was indicted for the more serious crime of murder, which strongly suggests that police believed they had enough evidence that he was not reasonably provoked. For his part Cleveland seemed more worried about the photograph being found and seen by his sister than the punishment that might be in store for him for killing Frances.

‘I pray God nothing will be done to bring shame to my sister about the photographs. I pray God you will find them and destroy them to save my family shame. That is the whole truth. Everything I have told you before [prior to arrest] was true except that I did not tell you what happened at the flat last night between me and Francis [sic] when Francis died… I have read this statement and is Gods trouth. [pencil note points to this last sentence: ‘In own hand writing’] (Sgd.)’ 

The methods I've used to interpret the file documents are significant here. I consider the impact of evidence on the indictment, the influence of the recent Homicide Act (1957) on gathering documentary evidence and conducting police interviews, the recent codification in law of provocation and how newspaper reporting on cases where provocation had reduced sentences might've meant that such notions seeped into public understanding, I also take into account the pencil notes annotating the documents, and all this contributes to a deeper understanding of each type of document and its role and significance in the courtroom. It particularly helps to explain the importance of narratives like the one given by Cleveland to explain why he had ended up killing his partner.

We have to ask, where did Frances get the idea to blackmail Cleveland with a photograph like this? OR, where did Cleveland get the idea to tell police this story that Frances had blackmailed him with a photograph like this? Whichever is the right question to ask, the result is the same: Cleveland thought that this was a believable story – that a reasonable man could be moved enough by a photograph to snap and kill.