Crime Immemorial

The first few years of the twentieth century in Britain had already seen at least one unsolved murder involving a train—that of Mary Sophia Money, from 1905—but 1914 would see yet another.

It was a little past eleven a.m. on the morning of January 8th. Agnes Starchfield was planning to go out that day to look for some tailoring work, as money had been exceptionally scarce since she had parted from her reportedly “rough” husband John, a drunk who occasionally beat her.

Before she left her one-room flat, Agnes fed her five-year-old son Willie some bread pudding for breakfast, then left him in the care of her landlady, Mrs. Longstaff.

Later that afternoon, at about a quarter to one, Mrs. Longstaff sent Willie down the street to a shop to pick up a “For Rent” card to advertise one of the other flats in the building. Willie walked to the shop, couldn’t decide between two different cards, and purchased them both to bring back to the landlady. Mrs. Longstaff chose the one she wanted, and then sent Willie back to the newsagent to return the other card.

An hour later, the child hadn’t come back, and a worried Mrs. Longstaff proceeded to the shop herself, where she was informed by the proprietor that the boy had not been in the shop a second time.

Meanwhile, Willie’s mother Agnes was having no luck in her job search, and was thinking about heading back to her flat. On the way there, she stopped by a particular corner of Oxford Street where her estranged husband John worked selling newspapers. He wasn’t there, so Agnes boarded a bus and made her way back home.

She arrived at around three o’clock in the afternoon to find a distraught Mrs. Longstaff. The landlady told Agnes that her son Willie was missing, which at first Agnes took to be a strange joke. After Mrs. Longstaff assured her it wasn’t, the two women hurried out into the streets to try to find the boy. An hour and a half later, they checked John’s post at Oxford Street again. John was now there, but said he had not seen the child that day at all.

Only minutes later, at the train station at Mildmay Park, a sixteen-year-old laborer named George Tillman boarded a train and found himself an empty compartment near the front, where he settled in for the short journey.

Not long after the train had departed the platform, George bent down to tie his shoe and noticed something odd under one of the seats. Looking closer, he was horrified to realize that he was staring at a small, dirty knee covered by two child’s hands.

After getting over his initial shock, he was finally able to raise the alarm among the guards, and by the time the train arrived at its stop in Shoreditch, authorities were on hand to investigate the matter.

The station porter Edward Cook peered under the seat of the third class coach and found a dead little boy stuffed into the space. He appeared about five or six years old, had long, curly brown hair flowing out from beneath a felt cap, and wore a dark blue sweater and gray short trousers. Cook noted the absence of any blood or anything else that might have suggested violence. He also noticed that the boy had no train ticket anywhere on his person.

The child’s body was removed from the train and transferred to Shoreditch Mortuary. As Agnes Starchfield had spent the afternoon inquiring at nearby hospitals and police stations, it was immediately assumed by the authorities that the body was that of her missing son, and she tearfully confirmed this upon seeing his body at the mortuary at around nine-thirty that evening.

According to the forensic examination, Willie Starchfield had died between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, which suggested that the boy had been killed before being placed on the train where his body was found, which left the station at fourteen minutes past four. This seemed strange, since the child’s body had not been found by the cleaning crews, who were supposed to clear out the carriages in between each rotation of the route.

The cause of death was found to be strangulation, by a length of cord that was later found near the scene. There were various scratches around the groove left by the cord on the boy’s neck, and other small wounds around his stomach suggested that he had been kneeling in between his killer’s knees when he died.

Ironically, Willie had been quite a sickly child since birth, and an autopsy of the body uncovered a heart condition that would have made it much easier to kill him than it would have a child without that particular malady.

An inquest into the child’s death was convened on January 15th, and the first suspect to draw the attention of the police was the boy’s father, John Starchfield. John claimed that on the day of the murder, he had felt ill, and so had stayed in bed in his room at the lodging house where he lived until about three-thirty in the afternoon, after which he had stopped by a local coffee shop before proceeding on to his regular spot on Oxford Street to sell newspapers. He told police that he had not seen his son for the previous three weeks, and that the child had always had a tendency to wander from home and get lost.

John Starchfield’s alibi wasn’t nearly watertight, however. While the proprietor of the lodging house, Jules Labarbe, did confirm that John had been sick that morning and had stayed in his room, he himself had gone to the pub and hadn’t returned until around two o’clock that afternoon. He stated that he could not be certain that John Starchfield was still in his room at that time, though he admitted it was possible.

But a much more damning statement emerged from a woman named Clara Wood, who stated that she had been out running errands at around one-fifteen on the day in question when she saw a curly-haired boy who she later recognized as Willie Starchfield after seeing the boy‘s picture in the paper. The child, she said, was eating a piece of coconut cake and was in the company of a heavyset man with a moustache, who she definitively identified at the inquest as John Starchfield. Immediately after she made this proclamation, John Starchfield leaped to his feet and called her a liar.

Another witness named John White also claimed to have seen Willie Starchfield and a man he identified as the boy’s father at Camden Town Station. John Starchfield also angrily accused this individual of lying.

The testimony of the other witnesses was a little less clear-cut. Two employees of the railway, an engine driver and a signalman, both claimed to have seen a figure bending over a seat in the third-class carriage as it passed by on the tracks. The engine driver had not seen the man’s face, but said he was large and broad-shouldered. The signalman admitted that at first he had thought the figure was a woman, and later could not be sure if the person he saw was male or female.

Indeed, at least one other witness had told police that they had seen Willie being forcibly pulled along by a woman in the street. Then again, yet another individual claimed to have seen Willie being pulled along by an older boy in a dark suit. Alleged sightings really began to pick up after the desperate police lowered themselves to consulting a psychic, who stated that the killer was a foreigner, after which accusations against every conceivable European nationality began to pour into police headquarters.

John Starchfield was eventually arrested for the murder of his son, but the case against him began to fall apart rather quickly. Star witness Clara Wood mostly recanted her story, admitting that she wasn’t sure if the boy she had seen that day was actually Willie at all, and another resident of the lodging house where John Starchfield lived backed up his story of having been in his room until three-thirty that afternoon.

In the end, the judge determined that there was insufficient evidence to convict John Starchfield of the crime, and he was subsequently acquitted. He denied murdering his son until the day of his death, which was only two years later. Chief Inspector on the case William Gough privately suspected that John Starchfield was likely guilty, but apparently believed that the man had not murdered his son intentionally.
No other suspects were ever seriously considered, and over the next few years, the murder of five-year-old Willie Starchfield was largely and sadly forgotten.

In a disturbing twist, though, in 1916, a bottle was found floating in the Thames. Inside was a note reading, “I J.S. hereby confess that I murdered my son William in 1914. God forgive me.” It was never determined whether the note had actually been written by John Starchfield himself or was some kind of sick prank.