Crime Immemorial

On the cold Monday night of February 4th, 1929, the quiet clifftop bungalow colony of Limeslade, above the Mumbles on Swansea Bay in Wales, was shattered by a scream. Minutes later, forty-three-year-old Kate Jackson lay outside her back door with devastating head injuries. Within six days she would be dead, and a century later her case—nicknamed the Limeslade Mystery or Madame X Mystery—remains one of Wales’s most intriguing unsolved murders.

Born Kate Atkinson in Lancashire in 1885, she reinvented herself repeatedly. In London she styled herself “Mollie le Grys” and lived with a man named Leopold le Grys; later she claimed exotic origins and even told her husband she was the popular novelist Ethel M. Dell. In 1919 she married Thomas (Tom) Jackson, a war veteran and fishmonger. The couple eventually adopted a daughter and, around 1927, moved to a small, isolated bungalow on Plunch Lane in Limeslade. Neighbors knew her as “Kate,” but intimates still called her “Mollie.”

Behind the new name was a secret income. Since 1914, after a minor collision on Charing Cross Road blossomed into an affair, Kate had extracted money from George Harrison, a union official who embezzled funds to pay her. When Harrison was prosecuted in 1927 for stealing £19,000, the press and police shielded Kate’s identity as “Madame X”—the mystery woman at the heart of the scandal. The payments explained the couple’s relatively comfortable lifestyle and, perhaps, Kate’s growing fear of being exposed.

On February 4th, 1929, Kate returned from the Tivoli Cinema with her neighbor Olive Dimick. After saying goodnight, Olive heard a cry and rushed back to find Kate crumpled near the back door, bleeding heavily, while Tom bent over her. Neighbors gathered, a doctor was called, and Kate—drifting in and out of consciousness—murmured a single puzzling word several times: “gorse.” X-rays would show a fractured skull and at least nine separate head wounds. Police noted broken glass in a pool of blood by the door.

Kate was taken to Swansea General Hospital under police guard in the hope she might identify her attacker. She briefly rallied on February 9th, but her answers yielded nothing useful. She died the next day of heart failure brought on by the trauma. The killing site—an exposed lane of scattered bungalows above Limeslade Bay—fed a sense that a stranger might have been lying in wait, but firm evidence was thin.

Suspicion quickly focused on the victim’s husband, Tom Jackson. A tire iron was found concealed in the kitchen, and some of Tom’s behavior on the night of the attack—initially declining help, slow to contact police—seemed strangely casual given the severity of his wife’s injuries. Yet investigators struggled to connect him to the assault or to establish a motive that benefited him. In July 1929, at the Swansea (Glamorgan) Assizes, Tom was acquitted of murder, prompting a noisy reaction in court and general public outrage.

Theories still abound about who killed Kate Jackson. The prosecution failed to show how Tom profited from Kate’s death; if anything, her secret allowance propped up their lifestyle. The tire iron, though suspicious, never definitively tied him to the attack.

On the other hand, some have speculated that someone connected to the 1927 embezzlement—angry unionists, an accomplice, or another target—sought revenge or silence. Harrison himself was in prison, but Kate’s role as “Madame X” was widely reported during the murder coverage, and she had spoken of threatening letters. No reliable suspect along these lines emerged, however.

In another scenario, neighbors mentioned an unfamiliar car near the bungalow that evening. Limeslade’s geography—unlit lanes, scattered holiday chalets—made the idea of an opportunistic or planned ambush plausible, but investigators found nothing conclusive.

One intriguing enigma was Kate’s dying word, “gorse,” variously interpreted as the spiky Welsh hillside shrub or perhaps misheard as “Grys,” pointing back to le Grys. The clue has obsessed writers ever since, and still has no clear explanation.

The Limeslade Mystery endures because it fuses the victim’s dramatic double life with a classic cottage-lane whodunnit. And nearly a century later, it still remains unsolved.