On July 20th, 1932, in East Sussex, England, twenty-three-year-old Arthur Edward Harman rose at five-twenty a.m., fixed himself and his wife Queenie a cup of cocoa, fed the couple’s one-year-old child, then caught the bus to the hauling company in Baldslow where he worked as a truck driver. As soon as he got to work, however, he realized that he had forgotten his lunch, and drove his truck back to the family home at 43 Eversfield Place, St. Leonards-on-Sea. What he found when he entered the bedroom sent him straight to the police station, where he arrived at a quarter to seven.
Arthur told police that he had returned to the house to find his seventeen-year-old wife Queenie Winifred Harman dead in the couple’s bed, with the covers completely pulled up over her. Her head had been smashed in, presumably by one of the two Indian clubs—weighted, bowling-pin-shaped clubs used in aerobic exercise routines—that were still at the scene. Nothing else in the house was disturbed, and the doors were all still locked. In addition, there was no evidence that Queenie had prepared a lunch for her husband.
Investigators immediately suspected that Arthur had murdered his wife before heading off to work. It seemed suspicious, of course, that there had been no forced entry and no apparent robbery, and Arthur even admitted to police that he thought Queenie had been seeing several other men, though he did not know their names. Further, he claimed that the clubs, one of which had been used as the murder weapon, did not belong to him, but rather had been left behind by a previous tenant, and had been stores in the garden shed. This mysterious tenant had also left a gun in the flat, according to Arthur’s statement.
Although the circumstances pointed to Arthur’s possible involvement, he was ultimately acquitted of the crime due to lack of evidence, and police followed no further leads. The aftermath of the case was not a happy one for Arthur, though: in February of 1934, less than two years after the murder of his wife, he was decapitated by a train after he wandered onto the tracks near Polegate, the victim of an apparent suicide. He was twenty-five years old.
The killing of Queenie Harman remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 