Case files for murder trials: The case of Cyril Johnson /
Auntie Maggie
While I’ve been wrapping up on my PhD I’ve been working one
afternoon a week as a Freelance Research Consultant for Leicester’s Story of Parks project. Project Officer (Parks Heritage) Jess Boydon was looking for
someone to help coordinate the project’s volunteer researchers and keep them
active and interested over the summer holidays while the regular intern was
taking a break. I was happy to help, especially as it offered me an opportunity
to expand my research interests. For a few weeks I took murder cases out of
homes and into parks, and out of London and into Leicester.
The Green Bicycle Case is arguably the most famous
Leicestershire murder. Only it was in the county of Leicester and not the
city, and on a country lane not a municipal park. So not really useful for my
purposes. I found two cases of murder from the period before 1970 that occurred
in Leicester parks that I started to research, with some really interesting
results. I’ll be giving a talk on those in Leicester this Autumn. (You'll find the event, when it is organised, on the Leicester Parks Facebook page.) These cases,
like the ones I used in my thesis, told me less about ‘whodunnit’ and more
about contemporary uses of the spaces by witnesses deposing. Who was using
these spaces, with whom and what for? They also told me a lot about
contemporary attitudes to acceptable behaviour in parks, just as the domestic
murder cases I’ve looked at tell me a lot about what was considered acceptable
behaviour at home, with all the class, age, ‘race’ and gender biases that go
along with these social and cultural mores.
But my experience with Story of Parks and case files for
murder trials didn’t end there, and it took on an unexpected dimension. While I
was sharing the products and methods of my research in a workshop with the
volunteer researchers one day, one of them told me ‘my Aunt was murdered’, and
showed me a newspaper article of a case from 1942. My interest was piqued. I
promised to have a look at the case files when I was next at The National Archives.
I expected to find a case like others I explored for my PhD thesis, and that
this one would fit in with others I had analysed for a chapter on wartime
murders. In the chapter I identified the common trope of the returning soldier
(either on leave or demobbed) who murdered his wife when he suspected (or said
he suspected) her of betraying him or ‘breaking up the home’. I found that in
numerous cases men were able to play on the sympathy of the public for serving
men, and the expectation that their wives would be waiting when they came home.
Many were able to literally ‘get away with murder’ and receive sentences for
manslaughter instead, because the narrative of their wife’s death fitted a
certain idea of what had happened. She had provoked him, she was culpable, any
other man in the same position would have acted in the same way. To us, now,
this seems preposterous. Even a judge at the time said that the remedy for this
situation was the divorce courts, not that men should take the law into their
own hands. The judge realised the gravity and the pervasiveness of this kind of
trope – that many men believed they could ‘kill their wives with impunity’
because of the messages they were receiving about other cases.
In cases like the above, one thing that really interests me
is that belief, and those messages.
Exactly how did people get their information about murder, about murder trials,
about possible punishments, and about what would make a case more likely to be
manslaughter than murder? This is important because the statements of
defendants undoubtedly speak to this common contemporary narrative, this trope
that a returning soldier could kill his wife and be treated sympathetically if
he had reason to believe she had been unfaithful. It’s like a circuit of
culture: a man murders his wife and is treated sympathetically by the courts,
the case is reported in newspapers, everyone reads it and understands it, the
next man who murders his wife consciously or unconsciously frames his actions
in the same way, justifies them similarly, and so the circuit continues. But
were there other ways people were getting their information about manslaughter
and murder?
YES. So says the case of Cyril Johnson, who was convicted of
the murder of Maggie Smail in 1942. Maggie was the Aunt of one of our volunteer
researchers, his late mother’s sister. He knew very little about the case, I
knew I’d find the files at the National Archives, and so I had a look. What was
interesting about this case, for me, is that knowing someone related to the
victim changed my view on the murder slightly. I was looking out for details
that might give more information about Maggie’s life, and about her sister
Daisy, our researcher’s mother. (Usually, I’d be focussing more on the space
where the crime occurred – in this case a flat above a shop in Ashford, Kent.) I
was excited when I found material in the Home Office file that wasn’t included
in the Central Criminal Court case file, because it did just that.
My research for my PhD thesis has shown that the
CRIM deposition files at The National Archives give only the statements and depositions
that were used in a final trial of a defendant. Other files, such as those of
the Metropolitan Police and Department for Public Prosecutions, often give much
more information because they reflect the statements and evidence collected and
later filtered out as either irrelevant or potentially prejudicial to the court
case. But these statements are richly detailed and useful for historians. I’ve
mostly used them to look at homes – people’s emotional relationships with their
homes and in their homes, their daily routines and material deprivations,
home-making practices, safety, security, and the ways they have used their
domestic spaces. Here, however, I’m focusing more on the people than the place,
in part because I’ve so much information for our researcher about the murder of
his Aunt, and in part because I wanted to see if I got something different from
the sources if I was less neutral or impartial to the victim and defendant and
allowed myself to have more of an empathetic, emotional response to the case.
Maggie
Maggie Smail was born in 1911 in Ashford, Kent. Her father
George was also born there, and had brothers and sisters who lived in the same
town. Maggie’s mother gave birth to another daughter in 1913 but died later
that year. The girls, Maggie and Daisy, then lost their father as well before
they were out of their teens. Orphaned, they had a very close relationship, and
by their mid-twenties they had set up home together in a flat above a shop on
Beaver Road, Ashford, just down the street from an Uncle and Aunt.
Maggie, also known as Mitsy according to one newspaper
article, worked in an Ashford branch of Lloyds Bank as a clerk, and Daisy was
the Manageress of a Newsagents. The two young women often went out together,
though Daisy was fonder of dancing than her sister, and went to dances where
they met locally billeted soldiers during WW2. Neither girl was particularly
serious with anyone in early 1942, though Daisy had a regular dance partner
with whom she had been friends for a few months. Cyril, a soldier from
Lancashire billeted just outside Ashford, had met both the sisters at a dance
but particularly befriended Daisy. She felt sorry for him, she said; he had
told her he was heartbroken because his fiancée had called off their engagement
a few months earlier.
One afternoon in February 1942 Cyril turned up
unannounced at the girls’ flat. He had brought his dancing shoes, and asked
Daisy if she’d go out with him that night. She agreed, but she had to go back
to work for a couple of hours first and left Cyril in the flat alone. When she
returned from the Newsagents she found him napping with a book by his side. It
was one of hers, A Question of Proof (1935) by Nicholas Blake (crime-writing pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis). The detective novel
was about the murder of an unpopular pupil who had been strangled in a boarding
school. The pair had a drink and got ready to go out, meanwhile Maggie came
home from work and declined the invitation to go out with them.
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| A Question of Proof dust jacket |
At the dance, Cyril seemed to be enjoying himself but Daisy
sensed he was a bit down about going back to camp that night. He missed the
last train and asked if he could spend the night at Daisy and Maggie’s flat,
and she agreed, on the condition that he sleep on the sofa in the sitting room
and ‘take things as he found them’. She had work early in the morning. On the
way home from the dance Daisy persuaded Cyril to go to the train station and
find out when his train was in the morning. A porter told them the first train
back to camp was at 8am, and Daisy explained to Cyril that she’d be gone to
work by then so he would have to wake himself up, but he could help himself to
some breakfast and some tea.
Back at the flat Maggie was getting ready for bed and was
surprised to see Cyril. Wasn’t he supposed to be back at camp? Had he gone AWOL?
Daisy reassured her that Cyril was getting the train in the morning, and Maggie
took her hot water bottle to bed and got into her pyjamas. Daisy and Cyril had
some cocoa, Cyril settled down on the sofa, and Daisy went to bed with her
sister. The two shared a bed and a bedroom. In the morning, Daisy got up to go
to work before 5am. Her sister stirred but went back to sleep, and Daisy
prepared some breakfast and left it in the kitchen. She crept out so as not to
wake Cyril.
When Daisy came home from work after 9am she
went straight to the kitchen. She could see by the washing up that only one
person had had breakfast. Something was wrong. Had Cyril slept in instead of
going back to camp? She went to the sitting room but Cyril was not there, the
book he had been reading was left open, half-read, upside down on the fireside
kerb. Daisy wondered if perhaps Maggie was still in bed, unwell. In the bedroom
the covers were pulled right up over her sister’s face. As Daisy approached she
saw blood. The poker from the living room was next to the bed. She ran out of
the flat, terrified, and got the Chemist from next door. Mr Brotherton, the
Chemist, found Maggie dead but still warm. He telephoned for a doctor and the
police. Maggie had been hit on the head with the poker, sexually assaulted when
she was unconscious, and finally strangled with a scarf.
Daisy must have been devastated at the loss of her sister.
She went to live down the road with her Uncle and Aunt, Albert and Beatrice,
and was the primary witness at Cyril Johnson’s trial at the Old Bailey. Police
reconstructed events following the brutal murder and found that Cyril had made
himself a cup of tea and helped himself to Daisy’s writing pad after he had
killed her sister. He wrote a letter to his ex-fiancee, blaming her for his
hatred of women, and another letter to a female friend, asking her to remember
him when he was ‘gone’. He posted the letters on his way to catch his train
back to camp, where he was later arrested.
Police evidence made strong links between the book Cyril had
been reading and the manner in which he’d killed Maggie. But Cyril’s statement
hinted at manslaughter rather than murder:
‘At
7.15am I went into Miss Margaret SMAIL’S bedroom to ask her the time. I asked
her would she like me to get in bed with her. She said, ‘No’. I then lost my
temper. I knocked her down on the bed. She started to struggle, and I put my
hands round her neck with the intention of frightening her. I must have
squeezed her too hard and held on too long, because she lost consciousness
then. I think I lost my head altogether then, and I tied a scarf round her neck
that was hanging on the bedrail.’
The prosecution, on the other hand, submitted the following
passages from the book A Question of
Proof as evidence, arguing that Cyril had been inspired by the text to
commit murder in the same way as he had read:
‘Exhibit 15: EXTRACTS FROM “A QUESTION OF PROOF”
“Dear me, dear me!” he exclaimed. “Most extraordinary and,
er, tragic. No question about it, I’m afraid. Murder or manslaughter. He seems
to have been throttled first by his assailant’s hands. These bruises, you see.
Than a thin cord tied round his neck. You will observe the red line: it has
sunk in rather deeply.”
( the above is from Page 43 )
“[…]the medical evidence suggests that he was first
strangled with hands and then the cord tied round to make certain.”
( the above is from Page 92 )’
By
writing to his former fiancée afterwards, Cyril might’ve hoped it would look
like he had killed Maggie in a rage rather than with ‘malice aforethought’.
‘Exhibit 1: Copy of a letter to Muriel Golding
Dear Muriel, By the time you get this letter you
will see in the papers an account of me doing a murder. All I want to say is
this. I’m in love with you, and for the last 4 months since you jilted me I’ve
lived in hell, you made me hate females. The girl I’ve killed was teasing me,
just like you did. That’s why I did it, and because I hate women.’
But
Maggie barely had any contact with Cyril, Daisy said. He was friends with her, not
with her sister, and he hadn’t showed the slightest interest or attention to
Maggie. And according to Muriel, Cyril hadn’t seemed that upset when she broke
off their engagement, he even said he had been expecting it:
‘Muriel Golding in response to question ‘why was the
engagement broken off’
I found Cyril Johnson out in various needless lies and he
was very spiteful, also he would not tell me anything about his home or
parents. He tried to domineer my ways and he was very jealous so that I took a
dislike for him and thought it best that we should part, in fact I got so I
used to dread him coming to the house. There was no other reason; he behaved
himself all the time he was with me.’
The
prosecution’s case, supported by all the police evidence, was strong. Defence
argued that Johnson had been temporarily insane at the time of the murder, but
they could give no evidence for this. The prison medical officer found Johnson
to be sane, with no history of mental illness, and able to answer the charge. Police
had intimated that he might have low intelligence but doctors found him above
average for his age. Citing his young age, the jury recommended Cyril Johnson
be given mercy. He was only 20 years old and a soldier, they said. The judge
disagreed with the recommendation. It was a brutal murder, and he sentenced
Cyril to death. An appeal was filed but abandoned, Johnson instead acknowledging
his guilt and petitioning the Home Office for his death sentence to be commuted
to life in prison. Various letters in the Home Office file show that there were
hopeful petitions for Cyril’s death sentence to be commuted to life
imprisonment giving various reasons including the respectability of his family,
the youth of the prisoner, the ‘madness’ of the act, the fact that his mother
was suffering from terminal illness, and the jury’s recommendation for mercy.
Each letter is filed with a copy of a personally addressed reply that the Home Secretary
had considered the case and found no reason why the law should not run its
course. The Judge’s decision was upheld and the sentence carried out.
‘Statutory documents relating to execution
I beg to inform you that the sentence of death
passed on this Convict at the Central Criminal Court on the 20th
March last was duly and efficiently carried out by Mr Thomas W. Pierrepoint at
Wandsworth Prison at 9 o’clock on Wednesday morning last, the 15th
instant. [April 1942.]’
The case is obviously a distressing one, and this blog post
must have been difficult for our researcher and his family to read, despite
never having met Maggie. It was important to me to share the text with them before
I published it, and to point out that the files also contain some potentially
distressing images that they might not want to see. They were happy for me to publish the above online, and I'm grateful to them for allowing me to share it. Personally,
I felt moved by the senseless loss of Maggie’s life, sympathy for her sister,
and for the family of Cyril Johnson who, in his capital punishment, also lost
their son. But I also felt that by writing the above I was using my experience and knowledge of these types of files to mediate between
the different versions of the narrative of the crime. On reading the letters
Cyril left behind, for example, the crime has a different reading than the one
described by Daisy's statement. Cyril and his defence counsel frame Maggie’s death as a ‘crime
of passion’, that he was driven to murderous ‘insane’ rage because she rejected
him. Whereas Daisy’s statement helps support the prosecution’s ultimately successful argument –
that Cyril had never been interested in Maggie, that he intended to kill her
when he entered her bedroom with the poker, and that he planned her murder with
‘malice aforethought,’ inspired by a book. This is important, because it
demonstrates how different documents archived after a trial support different
interpretations of events, and how each interpretation fits a legal framework
or ‘script’ with particular outcomes.
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| Daisy and Maggie's living room |
