Alfred Rouse
Alfred Arthur Rouse was a British murderer, known as the Blazing Car Murderer, who was convicted and subsequently hanged at Bedford Gaol for the November 1930 murder of an unknown man in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire. Rouse's crime became known as the "Blazing Car Murder" due to the fact Rouse, seeking to fabricate his own death, burned to death an unknown hitchhiker whom he had rendered unconscious inside his car.
The murder was notable because the identity of the victim has never been established, resulting in Rouse being tried, convicted and executed for the murder of an unknown man. Despite recent DNA testing, the identity of the victim still remains unknown.
Early life
Alfred Arthur Rouse was born in Milkwood Road, Herne Hill, London, on 6 April 1894, one of three children born to an English father and an Irish mother. His father, Walter, was a hosier, whereas his mother was reportedly an actress who deserted her husband and children in 1900. Following his wife's leaving the household, Rouse's father had little time for his children; consequently, Rouse and his two siblings were largely raised by an aunt on his father's side. Rouse was known as a well-behaved child; he and his siblings attended a local council school where he was regarded as a bright and athletic student. A member of the Church of England, Rouse would later become a sacristan at St Saviour's Church in Stoke Newington.Upon leaving school at age 14, Rouse worked briefly as an office boy for an estate agent, then found more secure employment at a textile manufacturing firm. He worked at this firm for five years before training as a carpenter, all the while furthering his education by attending numerous evening classes. In addition, Rouse had a substantial musical gift, sang well, and learned how to play various musical instruments, becoming a proficient pianist, violinist, and mandolinist. Rouse's exceptional baritone voice ensured that he regularly sang at his evening classes. In 1909, Rouse obtained employment at a West End furniture manufacturer. Shortly afterwards, he became acquainted with a young clerk named Lily May Watkins, whom he first met at a local dance and with whom he began a relationship.
Wartime service
Just four days after the outbreak of World War I, Rouse enlisted in the British Army and was assigned to the 24th Queen's Regiment as a Private. While training in England before his departure for France, Rouse married his fiancée. This ceremony was conducted at St Saviour's Church, St Albans, on 29 November.Rouse arrived in France on 15 March 1915, and was stationed in Paris for some weeks before his unit was sent into battle. He would serve with distinction, although he is known to have fathered an illegitimate child during this time. Rouse's unit was then committed to the Battle of Festubert in Artois, which began on 15 May. In a bayonet attack, Rouse came face to face with a German soldier and lunged at him but missed; the memory of waiting just for an instant for the enemy riposte would remain with him for the rest of his life, and his sleep would be plagued by nightmares.
On the last day of the Battle of Festubert, Rouse sustained wounds to his head, knee and thigh from a high-explosive shell which exploded close to his head, sending numerous fragments of shrapnel into his head and leg and rendering him unconscious. Rouse did not regain consciousness until his hospital train passed through the town of Bedford en route to a UK Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit. As a result of his injuries, Rouse remained hospitalised for almost a year; undergoing several operations upon both his left temporal region—some of which were performed to remove embedded shrapnel—and his leg. Rouse's leg injuries left him unable to bend his knee and caused him to develop œdema, severely affecting his ability to walk. Rouse was sent to recuperate at military hospitals in Leeds and, later, Clacton-on-Sea. He was formally discharged from the Army on 11 February 1916, and awarded a military pension of twenty shillings per week.
Recuperation
Following his recuperation, Rouse returned to live with his wife in Stoke Newington. Contemporary medical records reveal that, at this stage in his life, he was still severely disabled. In July 1916, Rouse's doctor noted that his memory was defective and that he was unable to wear a hat of any kind because the scar around his temporal lobe was irritable. Furthermore, although Rouse's speech and writing abilities were unaffected from this injury, one note in Rouse's medical records reads: "He sleeps well unless excited in any way". Consequently, Rouse's military pension was raised to twenty-five shillings per week in August 1916.In late January 1917, Rouse's doctor discovered he had made a degree of progress in his recuperation from his leg injury and believed this injury could, by Rouse's own endeavour, be overcome. A year later, Rouse informed his doctor he was suffering from bouts of dizziness, although the doctor noted how talkative he was; even " immoderately at times". In September 1918, Rouse again complained that he was suffering from a defective memory. Moreover, he complained on this occasion to be suffering from insomnia.
Return to work
On 30 July 1919, a doctor examining Rouse observed that, while he would not allow his knee to be flexed by more than 30 percent, he now suffered no long-term disability from the head wound he had suffered in battle. This doctor could find no physical reason for Rouse's limitation of his knee movement. As such, this was ascribed to neurosis and his pension, which since September 1918 had been twenty-seven shillings and sixpence per week, was decreased to twelve shillings per week with effect from 17 September 1919. In August 1920, a final examination revealed his head injury had completely healed and the limitations of his knee movement had decreased dramatically. Rouse's pension was terminated the following month, with his receiving a final lump payment of £41.5s.0d. in settlement of all his injury claims.In an effort to regain his health and mobility, Rouse became an active member of a local tennis club. Beginning in 1920, he also undertook a number of jobs which required a degree of physical exertion. Many of these jobs involved the use of vehicles, resulting in Rouse's becoming a moderately skilled mechanic. The same year, he also began to conduct illicit affairs in which he—invariably posing as a single man—seduced any woman or girl he found attractive. The first known woman he seduced was a 14-year-old Edinburgh girl whom he impregnated at age 15, then abandoned, leaving the girl to give birth to their child in a home for unwed mothers. Four years later, in 1925, Rouse began an affair with a Hendon-based domestic servant named Nellie Tucker. In 1928, Tucker gave birth to a baby girl; shortly thereafter, Tucker obtained a child support order against Rouse.
In June 1929, Rouse found employment as a commercial traveller for a Leicester-based firm which primarily sold braces and garters, typically at locations around the South Coast and the Midlands. This employment earned Rouse £4 a week, with expenses paid each Friday, and a sales commission paid every month. Through this employment, Rouse managed to earn sufficient money for him and his wife to obtain a mortgage on a house on Buxted Road in the London borough of Friern Barnet. Furthermore, in the summer of 1930, he also purchased a 1928 Morris Minor.
Promiscuity
Because of both Rouse's high sex drive and his general promiscuity, plus the fact his job required him to travel extensively across the entire country, throughout 1929 and 1930 he is known to have conducted a number of affairs with women—both married and single—whom he typically encountered through his employment. As with the Edinburgh 14-year-old and Tucker, many of these women came from poor backgrounds and would be deceived by Rouse's charismatic personality, his fabrications of being a wealthy London entrepreneur, and his promises of marriage. Furthermore, despite already being married and the father of a child, he is also known to have bigamously married at least three of these women. As a result of these affairs, Rouse fathered a number of illegitimate children.By the summer of 1930, Rouse had already had one child support order imposed on him by Tucker, with whom he had been conducting an affair for several years; Tucker was now heavily pregnant with their second child and fully expecting him to marry her. A young Welsh woman named Ivy Jenkins had also been impregnated and was also fully expecting marriage in the near future. In addition, Rouse faced several other impending child support order cases from women across the country and one woman in Paris.
Financial strain
At just what point Rouse decided on his scheme is not settled, nor how he arrived at it, as following his arrest, he gave several contradictory accounts as to just how and when he devised his plan. However, Rouse did mention that initially, he had begun to think about committing a murder in which he could fake his own death after he had read reports of the murder of a young Scottish barmaid named Agnes Kesson, who had been found murdered in a rural lane in the market town of Epsom in June 1930, and whose murder would ultimately remain unsolved. Furthermore, Rouse would claim the decision for him to ultimately decide to fake his own death had been Tucker's announcement to him in the summer of 1930 that she was expecting her second child by him.According to Rouse, he had simply "wanted to start afresh", yet to ensure the financial stability of his legal wife and his six-year-old son, he had drawn a life insurance policy for £1,000 in his name months before he executed his plan, to be paid in the event of the accidental death of the owner-driver of his vehicle. This life insurance policy named his legal wife as the beneficiary, and on either 2 or 3 November, he had sought out a man of roughly the same build as himself with whom he had become casually acquainted at a pub named the Swan and Pyramid whom Rouse claimed had previously told him "the usual hard-luck story", and had informed him: "Guv'nor, I've got nobody in the world that cares whether I live or die." In response, Rouse informed the man that, through his employment as a commercial traveller, he would be able to secure a job for him in the Midlands, and that he would be travelling to this location on 5 November.
In his later confession, Rouse specifically stated he had opted to time the fire in his car to be on Guy Fawkes Night, as "a fire would not be noticed so much" on this date due to the typical celebration rituals, and that his victim had readily agreed to accompany him to Leicester on 5 November, upon the promise of his possibly finding work in this city. To minimise any resistance from his victim, Rouse also bought the man a bottle of whisky to consume as he drove north.