Casebook Classic Crime Symposium
December 2015
By Ed Stow
Whitechapel Society stalwart Frogg Moody put on a special event on Saturday 5th December – the second Casebook Classic Crime Symposium. Frogg charged just £5 a head for this and not surprisingly the tickets sold out almost immediately.
The first speaker was Jon Rees. His talk,‘In a Nutshell’was about the work of Frances Glessner Lee, a creator of miniature crime scene dioramas and a ground breaking criminal investigator. Jon was inspired by Season 7 of the TV series CSI, in which a serial killer left miniature models of the crime scenes as part of their signature. This CSI season was in turn inspired by the work of Frances Glessner Lee.
Glessner Lee created 18 miniature dolls house style dioramas based on genuine murder crime scenes – or sometimes a composite of several murder scenes – in incredible detail at the scale of one inch to one foot. She called them ‘Nutshell Guides’ as they were a training tool used by various US criminal investigation departments – to ‘find the truth in a nutshell’. They are currently kept in the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore and are still used today to assist in the training of criminal investigators.
Jon went through several of the miniature crime scenes with close up photographs on his PowerPoint presentation and invited the audience to suggest solutions.
The next speaker was Trevor Bond whose talk, ‘A Terrible Tale of 1888’ was about another murder in 1888 – that of Bensley Lawrence by two youngsters, Charles Dobell and William Gower. This crime was notable for several reasons; one being that Dobell was the last person under 18 years of age to be hanged in Britain.
This was a slightly perplexing and disconcerting case. Bensley Lawrence was shot to death at his workplace in Tunbridge Wells in July 1888. The perpetrators were only caught six months later after one of them confessed. It is difficult to understand the motive. Perhaps it is an early example of impressionable and immature youngsters getting caught up in the tawdry glamour of crime. and outlawry. The police certainly blamed the Penny Dreadfuls in the same way that some crimes today are attributed to the baleful influence of violent computer games,violent DVDs or videos.
There followed an interval in which we were served up a massive and tasty buffet (an extra cost per head).
After lunch came Neil ‘Monty’ Bell’s talk, entitled ‘Bluebottles and Tecs – Life as a Policeman in H Division’. He started off to the tune of the memorable 1970s TV series ‘The Sweeney’ and ended with the sad, slow, contemplative version of the same tune – the theme that was played whenever Jack Reagan and Carter had failed to get their man. Instead of black and white stills of a villain lumping Reagan on the chin or Carter sprawling on the deck, Monty put up images of various H Division coppers; a nice touch. In between, amongst other things Neil took us inside Commercial Street Police Station, and showed us examples of a beat and described how the local force was organised.
The last speaker was Adam Wood with ‘Donald Swanson and the Seaside Home’, in which Adam added some fascinating background information on Swanson and made the case for the ‘Seaside Home‘ (where the suspect Kosminski was supposedly identified) being near Dover, at St Margaret’s Bay. This was the location of the Morley House Convalescent Home which was sometimes used by the City of London Police and Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, who was the City Police surgeon who performed the post-mortem on Catherine Eddowes, was also connected to this home.
This one-day event was a great success and was ably conducted by the MC for the day – Phil Hutchinson.
Casebook: Classic Crime 