The squalid crime spree of British delinquent Elizabeth Jones (AKA ‘Georgina Grayson’) and US Army deserter Karl Gustav Hulten in wartime Britain isn’t notable for many things. It lasted only a few days before a few petty thefts and attempted muggings resulted in capital murder, but it did inspire one of George Orwell’s best-known essays (‘The Decline of the English Murder’), aroused great bitterness against both defendants (especially Jones) and roused the ire of no less a figure than Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It also caused the US Army to waive their right to try Hulten themselves under the 1942 Visiting Forces Act and turn him over for trial under British civilian law to try and pacify the anger among the British people.
Elizabeth Jones AKA ‘Georgina Grayson.’
It would, in any case, have made no difference. For the shooting of cab driver George Heath, had Hulten faced a US Army court martial the sentence would have been the same (death by hanging), he would have hanged in a British prison on a British gallows (the civilian prison at Shepton Mallet in Somerset ws loaned to the US Army for the duration of the war) and hangings at Shepton Mallet were performed by British executioners. For Hulten, the only difference in the end result would have been where he was buried in an unmarked grave within prison walls, such was the British custom at the time.
Jones and Hulten met in a London café on October 3, 1944. Jones, calling herself ‘Georgina Grayson’ and a juvenile delinquent with ambitions for fame and excitement that her talent and circumstances would never fulfil, was enchanted by a young US Army officer, 2nd Lieutenant Richard ‘Ricky’ Allen of the 501st Parachute Regiment. The 501st Paras did exist, but 2nd Lieutenant Allen didn’t. He was figment in the fertile criminal imagination of one Karl Gustav Hulten who, at that time, wasn’t even a soldier because he was a deserter. In the eyes of his former US Army comrades (aside from the Military Police) he was, therefore, nothing and nobody.
Karl Gustav Hulten, gangster wannabe and army deserter.
Their six-day spree began with the assault and robbery of a nurse, continued with the robbery and attempted murder of a hitchhiker (who narrowly survived being dumped right beside a roverbank while unconscious) and culminated in the armed robbery and fatal shooting of cab driver George Heath who the pair then robbed and drove off in his cab. Not exactly master criminals to start with (Hulten claimed that he was well connected with various Chicago bigshots despite the fact that they’d never heard of him), they kept the cab and drove round in it even though police already had a description of the vehicle and its registration number. It wasn’t too smart for ‘2nd Lieutenant Allen’ to have kept various small items of Heath’s property and the .45 Remingon automatic he’d used to murder him either, come to think of it. But the British police were certainly far more pleased than Hulten that he’d been so utterly witless.
Their final crime before their arrest came on October 8, 1944, also the day they were arrested. Having a taste for life’s finer pleasures, Jones demanded Hulten provide her with a fur coat. Hulten, being a man of light fingers and a willingness for violence, tried to oblige by attacking a woman to steal her fur coat. The fact that the £8 they thought it worth murdering George Heath for had already been lost in an evening at a local dog track probably made robbery more feasible than purchase, anyway. In any event the woman fought Hulten off and Jones promptly fled and turned herself. She confessed all to the police hoping, she claimed , to ese her guilty conscience. The distinct possibility of substituting her nice clothes for a noose and a casket probably provided a cetain inspiration as well. But that’s for later…
Their victim, cab driver George Edward Heath.
The police had a simple job. Despite his bold claims and gangland pretensions Hulten had more ego than criminal skill, was an underworld bottom-feeder at best and it was simply a matter of finding the cab and waiting for him to show himself. On October 8, with Jones already telling all and safely under lock and key, that was exactly what the witless wannabe did. He was immediately arrested.
Under questioning Hulten held at first to his alias, which was as easily blown away as George Heath when British detectives and US Army investigators soon had his real name and rank (or lck thereof). Hulten didn’t confess to anything but, with his pet canary singing a grand opera about how their entire spree (and especially the small matter of a count of capital murder) was all his fault, he didn’t need to. In order to appease an angered British public the US Army waived its right to court martial him for murder, instead handing him over to British civilian authority. Not, as we’ve already discussed, that it would have made any practical difference except to where Hulten’s corpse would be buried.
The press and public interest in the ‘Cleft Chin murder’ (Heath did indeed have a cleft chin) was immense. It caught the public eye when Heath was murdered, but that was nothing compared to the trial and appeals of his murderers. Their trial began on January 16, 1945 at the world-famous ‘Old Bailey.’ Mr Justice Charles presided, the case was prosecuted by Mr L.A. Byrne, Hulten was defended by Mr. J. Maud while Jones employed Mrs Lloyd Lane and distinguished lawyer Mr. J.D. Casswell.
As expected, both defendants ran what lawyers call a ‘cut-throat defence.’ Jones placed the blame entirely on Hulten’s malign influence having ld her astray. Hulten, on the other hand, portrayed Jones as being an active, willing participant in the crime spree including the murder. Especially the murder. Perhaps he was hoping that, if both were convicted, then the British authorities would be reluctant to hang him while reprieving a woman and co-defendant. He was right about the British authorities not being fond of hanging women, generally speaking. He was fatally wrong about everything else.
On January 22 the jury delivered their verdicts. Guilty as charged with a mandatory death sentence. Mr. Justice Charles immediately placed the traditional Black Cap atop his judge’s wig and solemnly intoned the following:
“Karl Gustav Hulten and Elizabeth Jones, the sentence of this Court is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your bodies be afterwards buried within the precincts of the prisons in which you were last confined before execution. And may the Lord have mercy upon your souls…”
“Take them down.”
Hulten walked relatively steadily down the stairs to the holding cell that would keep him securely locked away until his transfer to the Condemned Cell at Pentonville Prison. Jones, however, became hysterical upon hearing the death sentence. She shrieked uncontrollably, having to be half-dragged and half-carried down to the holding cells before her transfer to the Condemned Cell at Holloway, London’s principal prison for women.
Meanwhile, Tom Pierrepoint (uncle of famous fellow-hangman Albert and also the US Army’s hangman of choice, made a brief note in his diary. Granted, he wold officiate at Pentonville instead of Shepton Mallet (Hulten was in fact the ailing, aging hangman’s last job at a London prison). He would be assisted by long-time assistant Walter Critchell.
Their appeals having failed, the game was about up for the plastic gangster and his deluded moll. At least until two days before their scheduled hangings. Despite the jury having not given a recommendation for mercy and her appeal having been denied by a three-judge panel, the Home Secretary (today the Minister of Justice) exercised his right to issue a reprieve anyway. Jones was informed only 48 hours before hand that she would in fact serve life imprisonment. She in fact served only nine years before being paroled and drifted, presumably gratefully, into total obscurity.
The decision angered many people for different reasons. In her hometown of Neath (where she had long been known and heartily loathed as an uncontrollable teenage tearaway) chalk graffiti made local feeling abundantly clear to her. It could hardly be misunderstood, seeing as it consisted of the words ‘SHE MUST HANG’ beside a scribbled sketch of a woman dangling from a gallows. Wherever she went after her parole it probably wasn’t back to the Welsh valleys.
Hulten wasn’t so lucky. His appeal was denied and the Home Secretary had no qualms about denying clemency, given public feeling about the murder itself and Jones’s reprieve. The fact that the Home Secretary was a Minister in the War Cabinet headed by Winston Churchill (himself a former Home Secretary) whose fury at Jones’s reprieve was of typically Churchillian proportions and that he had to face Winston on a daily basis might have also hinted that one of them had to hang. In the end it suited the British to make an example of Hulten and the Americans to openly support Hulten’s hanging. International relations are serious business (especially between wartime allies) and so is murder. People can easily become casualties of both.
Tom Pierrepoint, uncle of Albert Pierrepoint and the US Army’s hangman of choice.
With Jones serving a life sentence the case drew to its inevitable conclusion. Tom Pierrepoint and Water Critchell arrived at Pentonville on March 7, 1945 as per regulations. They arrived quietly and set to work testing and preparing the gallows. They worked as quietly as possible, the Condemned Cell being connected to the gallows room with only a locked door separating the two. At 9am the next day, at a silent signal from the prison Governor, Pierrepoint and Critchell entered the cell, pinioned Hulten’s arms and marched him the seven steps between the Condemned Cell and the exact center of the trapdoors. Critchell bobbed down behind Hulten, strapping his legs together with maximum speed while Pierrepoint whipped the white cotton hood over Hulten’s head and carefully positioned the noose so it would move round under his chin as he dropped, snapping his neck and instantly knocking him out when he reached the rope’s end. With a quick look to ensure Critchell had left the trapdoors, Pierrepoint darted to one side, removed the safety pin from the lever and pushed it over. With a deafening boom the trapdoors dropped and Karl Gustav Hulten was immediately dead.
Orwell (perhaps rather snobbishly) referenced the case as showing the decline in the standards of murder in general and the end of the ‘Golden Age’ of murder (if there ever was such a thing). To Orwell, the case showed how murder had become a squalid, tedious, tiresome affair. It was now mundane and dull, lacking the colour, emotion and human drama one might associate with the likes of Doctor Crippen. Murder, in short, had ceased to be the ultimate crime and, people’s senses being somewhat deadened by the endless slaughters of the 20th century, had become rather passe.
The case languished in obscurity until the movie ‘Chicago Joe and the Showgirl.’ Despite starring Hollywood heavyweight Kiefer Sutherland and English rose Emily Lloyd it was a somewhat forgettable picture, certainly not one of Sutherland’s finest. It is, in fact, somewhat dull and lacking the colour of even the case itself.
Even considering the snobbish tone of his essay on the subject, perhaps Orwell might have had a point.