The year of 1967 would be less than a week old before a seemingly random murder in England would shock the public with its grisly and scandalous details.
Seventeen-year-old Bernard Oliver hailed from North London, and worked in a warehouse near his home in Muswell Hill. By all accounts, he was a friendly, soft-spoken young man who had always had difficulties with reading and writing and was something of a loner, but was much adored by his five siblings, especially his younger brother Chris.
On the evening of Friday, January 6th, 1967, Bernard went out with friends, and headed for home sometime late that night. However, by the following morning, he had failed to arrive back at the family home, and his worried father George called the police to report his son missing.
Ten days later, a farmer named Fred Burggy in the village of Tattingstone in Suffolk was crossing a field when he spotted two suitcases that had apparently been abandoned beneath a row of hedges. Upon opening the suitcases, Burggy was faced with the frightful sight of a human body, cut into eight pieces.
Authorities were quickly able to determine that the victim of the monstrous crime had been raped and strangled, probably about two days before the remains were discovered. At first they had no luck in identifying the body, and so made the unusual decision to photograph the severed head and publish the picture in the papers.
Horrifically, fifteen-year-old Chris Oliver saw the photo on the front page of a newspaper in a bus station, and immediately recognized the face of his brother Bernard. The devastated Oliver family contacted investigators and definitively identified the murdered young man.
Clues as to the killer’s identity, though, were rather harder to come by. One of the suitcases in which the dismembered body had been found did contain a set of engraved initials reading P.V.A., and a small towel left inside the other suitcase bore a laundry mark, QL 42.
Additionally, a witness in the Suffolk area claimed she had seen a middle-aged man clad in a trench coat and hat, walking toward Tattingstone and carrying a suitcase, sometime around the night of January 14th.
Suspects in the gruesome murder of Bernard Oliver included not only two medical doctors and a prominent record producer, but also one of Britain’s most notorious gangsters.
Perhaps one of the most compelling possible culprits was a Kensington physician by the name of Dr. John Byles. The former ship’s surgeon had been placed on trial, along with an accomplice, back in November of 1963 for sexually assaulting a sixteen-year-old boy, though both men were eventually acquitted.
Among the allegations levied against the doctor at the trial were that he was in the habit of luring teenaged boys to his medical practice, plying them with alcohol, and then raping and photographing them, later allegedly selling the pictures to European pornography distributors.
Though there was little forensic evidence tying Byles directly to the murder of Bernard Oliver, it seemed significant that the doctor later fled to Australia after being investigated for a series of rapes of young boys in the early 1970s. And in 1974, Byles was actually arrested in Sydney for the suspected sexual assault of another boy, though after making bail, he disappeared, and was found dead of an apparent suicide in a Queensland hotel in early 1975. He left a suicide note apologizing for some of his crimes, but made no specific mention of the Bernard Oliver slaying.
Byles was also suspected of being a participant in the so-called Holy Trinity pedophile ring based around a church in Huddersfield, though he died before he could be brought to trial on those particular charges.
Interestingly, Byles had also been a person of interest in the murder of a London boy in 1973, who he had allegedly had an ongoing relationship with. A reported accomplice in this crime was yet another physician, Dr. Martin Reddington, who was also a strong suspect in the murder of Bernard Oliver.
Dr. Reddington operated an office in Muswell Hill not far from where Bernard Oliver lived, and one witness claimed that he had seen Bernard walking in the general direction of Reddington’s office on the night he disappeared. A private investigator also later testified that she recognized the suitcase with the P.V.A. initials as one that belonged to Dr. Reddington or to one of two other men he was often seen with at a local laundromat.
Like Byles, Reddington fled the U.K. after a 1965 arrest for a series of sexual assaults on teenaged boys, though he first went to South Africa before later heading for Australia. He did return to the U.K. from time to time, however. Also like Byles, he was eventually arrested in Sydney for sexual assault in 1977, in a crime not believed to be related to the assault for which Dr. Byles had been apprehended.
Despite circumstantial evidence, authorities were never able to build a case against Dr. Reddington solid enough to warrant his extradition from Australia. As far as is known, Reddington ultimately returned to England at some point, and died a free man in Surrey in 1995.
Another rather high-profile suspect was record producer and songwriter Joe Meek, one of the most influential sound engineers of all time, who was not only a pioneer in the use of reverb, overdubbing, and sampling, but in 2009 actually had a music production award named after him.
Joe Meek ran a recording studio in Islington, and it has been reported that Bernard Oliver might have worked there at some stage. Though there was little other evidence linking Meek directly to the killing, it was alleged that he became very nervous when the Metropolitan Police vowed to interview every gay man in London over the course of the Bernard Oliver investigation.
Whether Meek’s nervousness was due to his actual involvement in the crime, or simply because he feared being outed as gay during a time when homosexuality was still illegal, is not certain. At any rate, it is speculated that his fears surrounding the entire situation escalated to such a point that on February 3rd, 1967, Joe Meek murdered his landlady Violet Shenton before killing himself with a shotgun blast to the head.
Infamous British gangster Reggie Kray was also later considered a suspect, particularly after he confessed to the murder of an unnamed young gay man on a documentary filmed in 2000, shortly before his death from bladder cancer. Reggie and his twin brother Ronnie Kray had been convicted of the murder of two men, Jack McVitie and George Cornell, in 1969, and were suspected in several more murders.
Though some researchers believe that Reggie Kray was confessing to the unsolved murder of Bernard Oliver during the interview, the more common assumption is that the confession was actually related to the 1967 disappearance and presumed murder of Edward Smith.
The Bernard Oliver investigation was reopened in 1977 and again in 2017, and Suffolk authorities are still hoping they will someday be able to crack the case of the so-called Tattingstone Suitcase Murder.
Crime Immemorial 