Vera Page was ten years old, an avid swimmer who lived in the Notting Hill district of London. At around four-thirty on the afternoon of December 14th, 1931, she asked her mother if she could walk the fifty yards to her aunt Minnie’s house; she wanted to stop by and show her aunt some swimming certificates she had received at school that day. Her mother gave permission, cautioning that Vera should be home by five-thirty so she could have her tea.
After visiting with her aunt for a few minutes, Vera left at a quarter to five, and a few minutes later, she was seen standing near a drugstore by a friend of hers, looking in the window at some dominoes she had been planning to buy her parents for Christmas.
At five-thirty, Vera’s father Charles arrived home from work and noticed that Vera was not there. Concerned, he walked to the aunt’s house, where he learned that Vera had left forty-five minutes earlier. He immediately called the police and reported his daughter missing.
A search of the surrounding neighborhood yielded no clues, but two days after Vera had disappeared, a milkman found the body of a young girl lying in some shrubbery on Addison Road in Kensington, less than a mile away from the Page home. She had been obviously raped, for her underwear was torn open in the front, and it appeared as though she had been strangled.
Because the killer had not attempted to conceal the body and because the corpse was not wet even though it had rained on the previous day, it was determined that Vera had been killed somewhere else and the body later dumped in the bushes. A ligature found around her neck was thought to have been used to drag the body to its final location.
When Vera’s body was moved, a finger bandage fell out of the crook of her arm. This bandage was assumed to belong to the killer, for it was too large to fit Vera’s hand. It was saturated with the distinct odor of ammonia. Also present on Vera’s coat was a layer of coal dust and drips of dried candle wax, leading police to suspect that Vera had been raped and murdered immediately after being abducted, and that her killer had kept the body in a coal cellar for a day or two before dumping it on Addison Road. Indeed, just such a coal cellar was found nearby with its door ajar, and a red beret just like the one Vera had been wearing when she disappeared was found not far away.
Over a thousand people were questioned regarding the horrific crime, but one person in particular caught the police’s interest. Forty-year-old Percy Orlando Rush lived quite near the Page family with this wife, and his parents occupied the same building as the Pages. Rush denied personally knowing Vera Page, though he said he had seen her around the neighborhood. He worked at a nearby laundry, where he often dealt with chemicals, including ammonia.
Most suspiciously of all, however, Rush had two septic cuts on the pinky finger of his left hand that he said he had sustained at work less than a week before Vera disappeared. He openly admitted that he had been wearing a bandage around it until a day or two prior, when it had been burned off while he was on the job. He stated that he hadn‘t replaced it since then because he wanted to leave the wound uncovered to dry out so it would heal faster. He further stated that his wife had sewn bandages onto his finger on two separate occasions.
There was some other circumstantial evidence linking Rush to the crime as well. A witness stated that she had seen a man fitting his description walking down Addison Road on December 15th pushing a wheelbarrow covered with a red tablecloth, similar to one that was later found in Rush‘s home. Further, when police searched him, they found a length of cord in his pocket, which seemed a bit strange, though Rush told them he used it as a belt. He even admitted that he had gone to the shops alone in Kensington on the night Vera was abducted. Though none of these activities was particularly sinister when taken one by one, when interpreted in the light of Vera’s murder, Percy Rush looked quite obviously guilty. All during the questioning, however, Rush remained calm, and always had an answer (or some might say an excuse) for every suspicious-looking circumstance.
Though an inquest was undertaken in February of 1932, Percy Rush was never formally charged with Vera Page’s rape and murder. While it certainly appeared as though he was the most likely culprit, police were never able to collect enough solid evidence to build a case against him. The witness who had allegedly seen him with the wheelbarrow, for example, twice failed to pick him out of a lineup. In addition, no one came forward claiming to have ever seen Rush and Page together around the time of the abduction, or even having seen them ever speaking to one another. The local pharmacist could not identify either Rush or his wife as ever purchasing any bandages there, and at any rate, the bandage material found in the Rush home did not match the bandage found on Vera’s body.
Tragically, no arrests were ever made in the killing of ten-year-old Vera Page, and her murder has gone down in history as being committed by person or persons unknown. Many years later, it came to light that Percy Rush had actually been imprisoned twice prior to Vera’s murder, both times for exposing himself to little girls; this fact had evidently not been known at the time of the inquest. Whether this would have made it more likely that he would have been arrested for the crime is debatable, but at any rate, if he was guilty, he was never punished. He died a free man in the autumn of 1961.
Crime Immemorial 