Gordon Cummins
Gordon Frederick Cummins was a British serial killer known as the Blackout Killer, the Blackout Ripper and the Wartime Ripper, who murdered four women and attempted to murder two others over a five-day period in Central London in February 1942. He is also suspected of committing two earlier murders in October 1941.
Convicted of the murder of 33-year-old Evelyn Oatley, Cummins was sentenced to death on 28 April 1942; he was hanged at HMP Wandsworth on 25 June, and is the only convicted murderer in British criminal history known to have been executed during an air raid.
All the victims of the Blackout Ripper were strangled, with the bodies of three of his victims extensively mutilated at the point of or after death. The murders themselves have been described by one former detective superintendent within the Metropolitan Police as "by far the most vicious" he ever investigated during his entire career.
Cummins became known as the "Blackout Killer" and the "Blackout Ripper" because he committed his murders during the imposed wartime blackout and because of the extensive mutilations inflicted upon his victims' bodies. He is also known as the "Wartime Ripper" as his murders were committed at the height of World War II.
Early life
Gordon Frederick Cummins was born in New Earswick, North Riding of Yorkshire, on 18 February 1914, the first of four children born to John Cummins and his wife Amelia. Cummins's father was a civil servant who ran a school for delinquent youths; his mother was a housewife. As a child, Cummins received a private education in Llandovery, South Wales, although contemporary reports from his years at the Llandovery County Intermediate Secondary School describe his academic performance as unremarkable, with teachers later recollecting he was much more preoccupied with socialising than his studies. Nonetheless, Cummins did obtain a diploma in chemistry at age sixteen. After completing his schooling in 1930, Cummins attended Northampton College of Technology, where he was again a lackadaisical student. He abandoned his studies on 1 November 1932, determined to establish a career on his own terms.At the age of eighteen, Cummins moved to Newcastle, where he briefly worked as an industrial chemist. He was dismissed from this employment after five months. In August 1933, Cummins found work as a tanner in Northampton, although he was fired from this employment for poor timekeeping after thirteen months, thereafter briefly alternating between part-time work and casual labour. In October 1934, Cummins relocated to London and obtained a job as a leather dresser in a clothing factory, earning £3 a week. He later trained to become a foreman at this firm.
While residing in London, Cummins developed a desire to live the life of an aristocrat. He frequented hotels and clubs in the West End, falsely claiming to acquaintances to be the illegitimate son of a peer and to be receiving an allowance from this fabled individual. To support this contention, Cummins refined his accent to imitate that of an Oxfordian, invariably smoked expensive cigarettes, and insisted on being referred to as "the Honourable" Gordon Cummins. He frequently engaged in acts of theft or embezzlement to financially maintain this facade, and regularly bragged to colleagues of his sexual excursions with local women. To his employers, Cummins's extravagant lifestyle impacted his work performance, and he was fired from his job on 8 February 1935. Shortly thereafter, he moved into his brother's flat in Queens Mews, Bayswater, as he considered his next career move.
Royal Air Force
In November 1935, Cummins volunteered to join the Royal Air Force. He enlisted at the Air Crew Reception Centre in Regent's Park, London, where both serving members of the RAF and new recruits were assessed for training. Cummins initially trained as a rigger, tasked with undertaking pre-flight checks on aircraft. He was regarded by his superiors as an ambitious individual, although his boastful attitude and false claims of bastard nobility made him unpopular with many of his fellow servicemen, who derisively nicknamed him "the Duke." In May 1936, Cummins became acquainted with Marjorie Stevens, the secretary of a West End theatre producer, at an Empire Air Day event in the village of Henlow. Following a seven-month courtship, the couple married at the Paddington Register Office on 28 December and moved into their own flat. They had no children.Initially, Cummins was stationed with the Marine and Armament Experimental Establishment at Felixstowe, Suffolk. Between 1936 and 1939, he relocated with this military research and test organisation to Scotland. On 25 October 1939, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Cummins was transferred to Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire. He remained stationed in Dunbartonshire until April 1941, when he was posted to Colerne, Wiltshire, where he was billeted off base and resided with a local farmer. At this posting, Cummins reached the junior rank of leading aircraftman, although he held aspirations to become a Spitfire pilot.
On 10 November 1941, Cummins was posted to Cornwall. At this new posting, his braggadocio among his fellow airmen earned him the nickname "the Count." While stationed in Cornwall, Cummins joined a Falmouth social club named the Blue Peter Club and occasionally assisted the proprietress by tending the bar. However, he was relieved of his bartending duties within weeks when found to be serving free drinks to RAF personnel. Shortly thereafter, the proprietress discovered that approximately £35 worth of jewellery had been stolen from her apartment. Although both she and local police suspected Cummins of committing this theft, no evidence was found to prove his guilt.
The following January, having accrued over 1,000 hours of flight experience, Cummins appeared before the RAF selection board to take an aviation exam. His exemplary performance earned him a transfer to the Air Crew Receiving Centre in Regent's Park, where he was to be stationed with 300 other men. Cummins was ordered to report for duty at 10 a.m. on 2 February 1942.
Murders
Cummins is known to have murdered at least four women and to have attempted to murder two others over a period of five days in February 1942. He is also suspected of previously murdering two other women in October 1941. The majority of his known victims were women who he encountered in or near to West End pubs and clubs and who engaged in prostitution—typically with servicemen.All of Cummins's known murders and attempted murders were committed in London during wartime blackout conditions, imposed in September 1939. By the time of his arrest, Cummins had accrued neither a previous criminal record nor a known history of violence.
First suspected murders
Maple Churchyard
Cummins is suspected of committing his first two murders in October 1941. His first suspected victim was a 19-year-old clerk named Maple Churchyard, who was murdered at approximately 9:15 p.m. on the evening of 12 October. Churchyard resided with her parents in Tufnell Park, Islington. Although she spent many evenings volunteering as a helper in a West End services canteen, she is known to have frequently engaged in casual sexual relations with servicemen whom she typically encountered in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road. She was last seen alive at Charing Cross Station by a friend named Vera Whymark approximately thirty minutes before her murder, intending to catch a bus home.Churchard's nude body was found by workmen in a bombed house on Hampstead Road the day after her murder. She had been strangled to death with her own camiknickers by an individual described by the pathologist who examined her body as being a left-handed individual, as the bruising around Churchyard's neck indicated her murderer had more strength in his left hand than his right. In addition, her handbag had been emptied, with several of its contents missing. Churchyard had not been sexually assaulted and her body had not been mutilated.
Edith Eleanora Humphries
Five days later, on 17 October, a 48-year-old widow named Edith Eleanora Humphries was found lying on her bed at her home on Gloucester Crescent, Regent's Park—less than one mile from the site of Churchyard's murder. She had been extensively bludgeoned about the face and head before her assailant had attempted to strangle her before cutting her throat. Humphries had also suffered a single stab wound to her skull, which had penetrated her brain. She was still alive at the time of her discovery, but died shortly after her admission to hospital. The door to her property was ajar, and investigators found no signs of a forced entry to her home. Several items of jewellery had been stolen.At the time of these two murders, Cummins was stationed in Colerne, although when on leave, he is known to have frequently visited London, residing at an address in nearby St John's Wood.
File:The Second World War 1939 - 1945- the Home Front HU1129.jpg|200px|right|thumb|The air raids upon London and other British cities throughout World War II resulted in enforced nighttime blackout measures
Blackout murders
On Saturday 7 February 1942, Cummins left an RAF establishment in St John's Wood to visit his wife at the flat they rented in Southwark. The following evening, he borrowed a £1 note from his wife, explaining that he was "hard up" and that he intended to visit the West End for a "night on the town." Cummins left his home shortly after 6:30 p.m.Evelyn Margaret Hamilton
The following morning, the body of 41-year-old pharmacist Evelyn Margaret Hamilton was discovered by an electrician named Harold Batchelor in a street-level air raid shelter in Montagu Place, Marylebone. Hamilton lay on her back with her body strewn across a gutter running through the centre of the shelter, her head turned to the left, and her swollen tongue protruding from her mouth. Her clothes had been disarranged and her scarf wound about her head. Scuff marks on her shoes and broken sections of mortar scattered near her body indicated Hamilton had fiercely struggled with her attacker, who had raised her skirt above her hips, pulled her underwear below knee level, and exposed her right breast. Her handbag—containing approximately £80—had been stolen, although some of the contents were found strewn about the pavement outside the air raid shelter. Hamilton's empty handbag was later found by a police officer on nearby Wyndham Street. No fingerprints were recovered from any of her possessions. A mortuary photograph of Hamilton was identified by her landlady, Catherine Jones, on 10 February; her body was formally identified by her younger sister, Kathleen, one day later.Hamilton's post-mortem revealed she had been manually strangled by a left-handed individual with such force the cricoid cartilage on both sides of her larynx had been fractured. She had not been sexually assaulted or mutilated, although numerous small cuts and scratches had been inflicted to her right breast and a cut measuring one inch had been inflicted to her left eyebrow.
The day prior to her murder, Hamilton had resigned from her position managing a Hornchurch chemists, which had experienced financial hardships due to the onset of the war, and travelled to Central London via train. At 6:40 p.m. on 8 February, she is known to have informed a Mrs. Maud Yoxall of her plans to leave London and travel to Lincolnshire the following day, as she had been offered a managerial position at a pharmacy in Grimsby, but would be spending one final night in London. She was last seen alive by a waitress at the Maison Lyons Corner House in Marble Arch shortly before midnight, drinking a glass of white wine to celebrate her 41st birthday. The location of her body led investigators to conclude she had been either accosted or attacked as she walked back to her boarding house in the early hours of the following morning, and that her assailant had evidently dragged her body from the street into the air raid shelter.