The meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials: part two 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. I see this approach to what the science of photography was used to do as contributing to recent work in Photographic History that explores beyond photos as another historical source. Recent articles by Beatriz Pichel and Elizabeth Edwards, for examples, have examined what photographs were intended to do when they were made as part of ‘scientific’ endeavours, and what was done with them (B. Pichel, ‘From facial expressions to bodily gestures: Passions, photography and movement in French 19^th-century sciences’ History of the Human Sciences, 29:1 [2016], 27-48. DOI: 10.1177/0952695115618592 ; E. Edwards, ‘Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance’, History and Anthropology, 25.2 [2014], 171–88. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2014.882834). They have followed work that explores what photographs do as emotional and emotive objects with a variety of meanings, some of which was commented on in the last paper I attended at the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia in April (see Tweets about it Storified here). Annebella Pollen’s recent book Mass Photography (I.B. Tauris, 2015) really beautifully and helpfully summarises much of the scholarship on what photographs do, especially in the Introduction, I highly recommend it. 

Drawing on this work, part two of this post on the meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials uses two cases from the 1930s to explore how photographs were interpreted by police and judicial system as signifiers of intimate relationships. This meaning could have important consequences for witnesses, defendants and victims in cases of domestic murder.

Photographs as signifiers of intimate relationships: Eric and Juliette, and Margaret who ‘wore no ring’

At about 11am on Thursday the 5^th of April 1934, PC Ron Rushmore was on duty in Great Portland Street, Soho, when he was approached by a man whose hands were covered in blood. Eric, a 29-year-old stoker in the Navy, told the officer “I have killed a woman” and led him to a flat in a neighbouring street. He showed PC Rushmore the body of his lover, Juliette, on the floor of her bedroom. Rushmore telephoned his Divisional Detective Inspector to come to the flat straight away, and when DDI William Collins arrived he found Eric in the sitting room and arrested him. Eric told the police that Juliette was married to a civil servant who lived in the suburbs, but they had been separated for three years and Juliette went by her maiden name. After Eric had been taken to the police station, Detective Constable Percy Law of Scotland Yard was called to the flat to take photographs of the crime scene.

The photographer Percy Law’s name features in many of the mid-century murder case files I have read in my research. I would really like to learn more about him and his career, especially the training or instruction he may have undertaken to qualify him to take so many photos of domestic murder scenes. Please get in touch via Twitter if you have any information that might help me.

In cases where he took photographs Percy was asked to state at the police court hearing that he had taken them and when. These statements are really useful because, though they do not record the questions deponents were asked, (the responses written in prose rather than in the form of question and answer,) they draw attention to the details present in, or missing from, the photographs that would be most relevant in the prosecution’s and defence’s narratives of events and explanations for the crime.

The man in Naval uniform was Eric. This photograph was important in the case because Juliette’s owning a framed portrait of Eric, and specifically keeping it on display in her bedroom, was understood to mean that she was in an intimate relationship with him.

Detail from one of Percy Law’s photographs of the crime scene.

As Divisional Detective Inspector William Collins said “I found a photograph of him [Eric] in the bedroom. This was the only photograph of a man in the flat.”

The married Juliette did not have a photograph of her husband in her bedroom, but one of Eric, which, to police, showed that she was having a sexual relationship with him.

In this, as in other cases I have seen, an apparently single, separated or divorced woman with a photograph of a man in her bedroom could have all sorts of implications for her reputation. The defence counsel could argue that the defendant had been motivated by sexual jealousy, which, if argued successfully, could reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter or add a recommendation for mercy. If she was the deceased victim she would not be able to challenge such an interpretation. If she was a witness she might be able to attempt to do so, but even the suggestion that she had pre-marital or extra-marital sexual relationships could be enough to have her disbelieved, whatever her testimony.

A good illustration of this is Margaret, a witness at the trial of her former fiance for the murder of her employer. Margaret was arguably as much on trial for her alleged sexual relationships as George, the defendant, for the murder. Two significant pieces of evidence pointed to Margaret as sexually active and therefore as an unreliable witness, one was a novelette with notes in the margins between Margaret and a man, the other was a photograph of Margaret and her employer.

Margaret was 21 when she moved to London from Scotland in 1933. One day, walking in the West End with her roommate, Margaret met George, a Coppersmith from Cyprus, 9 years her senior. Within a few weeks George gave Margaret a wedding ring, told his landlady that he had married, and moved Margaret into his room at his lodgings. George opened a Post Office savings account and started putting away a little of his wages each week toward their real wedding, which the couple thought might take them two years to be able to afford. George later told the court that he ‘kept’ Margaret, giving her most of his wages to feed them both so she didn’t have to work as a waitress anymore. Margaret’s version of events was different. They argued about money, she said, and she tried to leave him, but ‘he threatened to do all sorts of things, and he cost me my job [in a tearoom] and [so] I had to go back to him.’

Tom and his family were also experiencing financial difficulties in the early 1930s. His correspondence school business failed and his wife went to work in a hotel where she ‘lived in’. So Tom sub-let a building in Bloomsbury near the building site of Senate House at the University of London, to rent out rooms and live there himself. He advertised for a housekeeper to help him, and Margaret responded to the ad.

George was unhappy about the job, especially when Margaret announced that she would be going to live at the house. She’d been offered more money by Tom to be the live-in Housekeeper and Manager, and there was a room becoming available that George could rent. They could live in the same house and carry on their relationship in secret. But Margaret wasn’t wearing the wedding ring. She didn’t want Tom to know that she was having a relationship with George, they would have to be discreet. When they stopped sleeping together, George became angry, suspicious and jealous. He accused Tom of sleeping with Margaret in her room in the basement. Margaret denied the accusations, Tom was like a father to her, she said, ‘nothing improper ever took place’ between them. However, George felt his suspicions were confirmed when Tom took Margaret (in her deposition)

‘down to Brighton for the day… we had our photograph taken together while we were there. I wrote on the back of one of the photos ‘with fondest love, Margaret’ and gave it to him. I knew he was a married man and did this for fun. We both treated it as a joke and laughed about it.’

The court did not see the photograph as a joke however. Despite the photo being nothing to do with the actual murder (in fact, George didn’t refer to it in his statement or testimony, so it’s not clear whether he ever saw it before the trial), it was submitted as Exhibit 8 by the defence counsel:

Exhibit 8

Whether the photograph was a joke between a woman and her employer or a picture of a courting couple, it was considered evidence of Margaret’s sexual misconduct and therefore of her unreliability as a witness. During the trial Justice Goddard became impatient with Mr Paterson for the defence when he was questioning Margaret about the photograph and her relationship with Tom. Paterson replied 

'I am only dealing with the credibility of this witness with regard to what happened on the night and I want to see if she is telling us the truth in every respect. I want to find out how far her evidence can be trusted according to the answers which she gives to my questions. I am very sorry that I have had to do it in this way, but I see no other way of doing it...'

Later Goddard reminded him:

'we are not trying Margaret, we are trying the prisoner for murder, and you must please use your discretion as Counsel and obey the ruling which the Court has given and call witnesses whose evidence is directed to something which is material and not to matters which are not material to the issues which we are trying. Cross-examination is one thing, but calling evidence in chief is quite another.'

Margaret was probed about ‘Going to Brighton’ which was implied to mean having an affair. That this meaning was widely understood is clear from George’s response to Margaret going there with Tom, and supported by Claire Langhamer’s article on 'Adultery in Post-war England' (History Workshop Journal, 62:1 [2006], 86-115. DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbl004), in which she argues that going to Brighton was one way to procure a divorce, given that it meant sex.

The other damning article of evidence against Margaret was the handwritten notes in the novelette found in her room, particularly ‘I will show you my bedroom’. The notes were not between Margaret and George, however, but between her and another ‘foreigner’ who lived in the lodging house where George had installed Margaret. Ironically, the little book was called She Wore No Ring and was about a young woman duped into marrying a criminal. She then falls in love with her boss who didn’t know she was married because ‘she wore no ring’.

Exhibit 12

"I will show you my bedroom" "I am much obliged"

The photograph and little book were evidence enough for the jury to add a strong recommendation for mercy to the guilty verdict they returned, citing the provocation of Tom’s remarks. ‘The Cypriot Murderer’ as press called him, was sentenced to death but commuted to life imprisonment. The police report suggests that there was little sympathy for George because of his being so ‘foreign’ and his having been ‘known to have habitually associated with undesirable characters who frequent low class cafes in the Tottenham Court Road District.’ The police report isn't in the same file as the crime scene photographs and the one of Margaret and Tom at Brighton, but it is important because it shows how George was treated differently by police because of his nationality. Police interpretation of events shaped the evidence that was gathered at the scene. Class, nationality, gender and sexuality were significant factors used by police and counsel to depict the greater or lesser culpability and truthfulness of individuals, and photographs were a key source for their portrayal.

Thinking about what photographs do is useful here because not all the photographs in a case file were meant to do the same thing. My method of using trial transcripts and other supplementary files helps to show what different exhibits of evidence, including photographs, were meant to do in court. Even if the photo of Margaret and Tom wasn't the catalyst that caused George to attack them, injuring Margaret and killing Tom, it was powerful enough to help save him from the gallows.

The issue of photographs as motivators for murder will be explored in part three of this blog post, coming soon.