Crime Immemorial

Sixty-one-year-old Albert Keen was a hardworking man of the land, serving as farm foreman at Rodsall Manor in Surrey, England under Sir Laurence and Lady Guillemard. He and his fifty-four-year-old wife Annie lived a modest, contented life in a remote cottage tucked away near the crossroads at Cutt Mill, a spot midway between their home and Albert’s workplace. The couple had no children and few enemies; neighbors described them as cheerful and unassuming. For over thirty years, Albert had eschewed banks, reportedly hoarding a considerable sum of cash hidden within their home—a habit that would later fuel theories of robbery as the motive. On October 7th, 1932, both appeared in high spirits: Albert attended a sale in Guildford, while Annie hosted a cousin for tea, laughing and chatting as if nothing could disrupt their serene routine.

The exact sequence of events on the evening of October 7th remains shrouded in uncertainty, but forensic evidence and witness accounts paint a grim picture. It is believed the attacks occurred around six p.m., just before dinner. Annie was in the scullery preparing a simple meal of fish when she was ambushed. She was clubbed three times over the head with a sharpening stone, a heavy tool likely grabbed from the kitchen, before her throat was savagely cut with a carving knife. The blade, found eighteen inches from her right hand under the linoleum floor covering, was still clutched in line with her knee, suggesting a desperate but futile struggle.

Minutes later, as Albert made his customary walk home from Rodsall Manor along a well-trodden track beside Cutt Mill Pond, he too was set upon. Struck repeatedly on the head with a thick hickory or hazel cudgel— a stick later dredged from the pond—he was rendered semi-conscious and thrown into the shallow water. His body was found upright, with his mouth just below the surface, his lunch basket nearby and his hat resting on a mackintosh draped over him. Post-mortem examinations by Chief Police Surgeon Dr. J. K. Milligan confirmed the causes of death: Annie from severe hemorrhage due to her throat and head wounds, and Albert from drowning, exacerbated by the blows that left him unable to save himself.

The cottage bore signs of a frenzied search: locks on two wooden chests in the bedroom had been forced with a chisel, two purses in the living room lay empty, and drawers were rifled through. Yet, curiously, two small locked money boxes on a chest of drawers still held a modest sum—eight threepenny pieces and three £1 notes—indicating the killer may have been interrupted or simply careless. No fingerprints marred the scene, and there were no blood splatters beyond the immediate areas, hinting at a perpetrator practiced in swift, clean kills—perhaps someone accustomed to slaughtering animals on a farm.

The nightmare unfolded the next morning, October 8th. Shortly before eight a.m., an odd-job boy—or in some accounts, PC Herbert Smeed—entered the cottage and stumbled upon Annie’s body in a pool of blood on the scullery floor. The living room blinds were drawn, and on the table sat an untouched meal laid for two. Albert’s absence from work at Rodsall Manor raised immediate alarm; the Guillemards dispatched their chauffeur to investigate. A hasty search led to the pond, just thirty yards from the now-vacant Cutt Mill Farmhouse, where Albert’s submerged form was pulled from the water.

Word spread quickly through the rural lanes of Shackleford and nearby Puttenham. The inquest, opened that day by West Surrey coroner G. Wills Taylor at Godalming Police Station, confirmed the violent ends, adjourning for further inquiries. Chief Constable Major A. Nicholson arrived swiftly, his team launching what would become one of Surrey Constabulary’s most exhaustive investigations.

In an era when forensic science was in its infancy—no blood grouping, no dedicated scenes-of-crime officers—the investigation relied on dogged detective work. Detective Sergeant Curry and PC Tom Roberts scoured the cottage, pioneering early forensic photography with Roberts’ personal camera, developed in makeshift conditions. They recovered the bloodied sharpening stone fragments from the living room, the pond-retrieved cudgel on October 9th, and a nearby brick potentially used as a weapon. A man’s coat, trousers, and trilby hat—none belonging to Albert—were sent to the Home Office for analysis, along with two blood-stained garments from the scene.

Initial theories oscillated wildly: Had Albert slain Annie in a domestic frenzy before taking his own life by drowning? Or was this a double murder by a stranger who waylaid him en route home? By October 10th, Nicholson leaned toward the latter, citing the deliberate nature of the attacks and the robbery signs. Witnesses recalled two strangers near the pond on October 7th, one getting into a car, but they vanished without trace.

The breakthrough came with Godfrey Nobes, a thirty-one-year-old former farm overseer at Cutt Mill, where he had once worked alongside Albert. Living as a lodger at the Princess Royal pub in Runfold, Nobes was drowning in debt: £2 15s 6d owed in rent to landlady Annie Louisa Hook, with rumors of blackmail swirling. On October 7th, he had been refused loans and caught a bus to the area, alighting near Cutt Mill shortly before six p.m. Gamekeeper Norman Vessey spotted him lingering near the Puttenham road, inquiring about a bus to Guildford. Nobes returned to the pub late, claiming overtime at a Farnborough butcher’s.

But most damning were the ninety-six spots of human blood on his blue suit, pullover, trilby, and even a brown suit washed by his landlady the next day. Nobes shrugged them off as nosebleeds or from hanging his hat near a rabbit carcass in the pub. He had visited the Keens’ cottage once with his fiancée, Gladys Hook, and knew their routines intimately. On October 21st, after nine days in custody on a false pretenses charge, he was formally arrested for the murders.

The case against Nobes reached Guildford County Bench on November 10th, committing him for trial at the Surrey Assizes in Kingston. The three-and-a-half-day proceedings before Mr. Justice Hawke, beginning December 2nd, gripped the nation. Prosecution barrister G. R. Paling painted Nobes as a desperate robber, familiar with the isolated cottage and the Keens’ cash-stashing ways. Witnesses, including bus driver Ernest Glew and loan-refusers like pub licensee Albert Sharp, corroborated his movements and finances. Home Office analyst Dr. Roche Lynch testified to the bloodstains, though 1932 technology couldn’t confirm their human origin or link them definitively to Annie.

Defense counsel W. R. Manley derided the case as “rotten, weak, and knock-kneed,” floating an alternative: a marital spat where Annie struck Albert, he killed her in rage, then stumbled fatally into the pond. Nobes, declining to testify, addressed the jury from the dock: “I am not guilty of these murders, but when I was pressed by the police I told them everything I knew. What I said was true.”

After just forty-five minutes of deliberation on December 5th, the jury returned not guilty verdicts on both counts. Nobes was discharged amid whispers of Freemason influence on the panel—a rumor later debunked. He slipped away from court, reportedly jilting Gladys on the steps and vanishing—some say to Australia, others to a hidden life in Kent under an alias. He resurfaced briefly in 1946 to bury his brother Bertram in Puttenham cemetery, mere yards from the Keens’ plot.

The acquittal closed the book for police, who never reopened the file. Yet, the Cutt Mill murders lingered as a sixty-five-year enigma, emblematic of forensic blind spots. In 2002, barrister Anthony Scrivener QC revisited the case for a Discovery Channel program, enlisting modern experts. Blood-spatter analysis revealed the stains on Nobes’ hat matched arterial spray from Annie’s throat wound—not a nosebleed or rabbit drip—while suit patterns defied his explanations. DNA testing, unavailable then, could now prove the blood was hers, not animal. Scrivener concluded Nobes would have hanged had such science existed, advocating for exceptions to double jeopardy in DNA-proven cases.

Despite these developments, the case still stands as officially unsolved, and is almost certain to remain so, since the prime suspect is long dead.