Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell Pepys 0.1 Blogware © Steve Dix
For farmworker Fred Burggy it wouldn't have been the best start to a working week. On a bone-cold Monday morning in mid-January of 1967, Fred was harrowing a field adjoining Bentley Lane, in the village of Tattingstone. Passing up and down with his tractor, he'd dismissed as dumped rubbish the two discarded suitcases which he'd noticed earlier, at the field's edge. Eventually, however, his curiosity got the better of him. He stopped the tractor and went over to investigate. At first, he thought it was a pile of clothes. Closer inspection, however, revealed something far more sinister. There, in the suitcases, expertly chopped up into eight pieces, its severed head contained in one of them, was the body of a youth. A pathologist's examination of the body revealed that the young man had been homosexually assaulted before being killed and that the dissection of his corpse had been carried out by someone with either surgical or butchery skills.
Tattered press clippings and photographs of the events are in black and white. In the shots, poker-faced policemen, including a bowler-hatted Scotland Yard detective, cluster around the findings in a muddy Suffolk field. The shocked farmworker unfortunate enough to have discovered the suitecases' grim contents, apart from witness statements to detectives has declined to speak of the matter since. The Suitcase Murder, as it came to be known, shocked the nation and dominated national newspaper headlines during the weeks following its discovery.
Looked back upon now by those old enough to possess even the grainiest memories of the time, the events seem even more grisly for the era in which they took place For it was the very height of the Swinging Sixties on the surface an optimistic time of dazzling youth fashions and shimmering new pop music. From the cheery summer of Sunny Afternoon to the paisley-dappled days of All You Need Is Love, in terms of popular culture, Britain led the world.
And yet, while this sunny soundtrack jangled from boutique doorways and building site radios, there was an altogether darker undertow to the time. In the early summer of 1966, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers had been imprisoned for life. In the London underworld, the gangland bosses, the Kray twins remained at the peak of their powers. One morning in the autumn of 1966, a colliery slag heap in Aberfan, South Wales, collapsed over the local primary school, killing 144 people, most of them children. The folowing spring, in March of 1967, the supertanker Torrey Canyon was shipwrecked off the coast of Cornwall. Its cargo of 120,000 tons of crude oil, spilled into the sea, causing a major environmental disaster.
In western Europe, the time for many youngsters was the eve of the Summer of Love bells, beads and the Beatles. In the Middle East, however, the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt exploded abruptly, causing international jitters and altering the course of history From farther off, in south-east Asia the ceaseless rumble of the Vietnam War grew ever louder as America settled into a long conflict which it was destined never to win. Somewhere in the middle of these events, while sleepy rural Suffolk was getting itself back into harness after the Christmas period, the Suitcase Murder story broke. As the Beatles' Penny Lane jangled cheerily from kitchen radios, the chopped-up body of Bernard Oliver, a seventeen year old Muswell Hill boy, was discovered in two suitcases at the edge of a muddy field.
Less than three weeks later, in the Holloway Road in North London a couple of miles or so from where the boy had gone missing a famous record producer, his career now in tatters, blasted his landlady to death with a shotgun before turning the gun on himself. Joe Meek, who'd produced numerous hit records including Telstar and Johnny Remember Me, was now facing financial ruin. He was also reported to be suffering from mental health problems. In 1963, he'd been prosecuted for 'importuning for immoral purposes' homosexual acts still being illegal at this time. As news of the murder investigation spread along with its connection to what the London Evening News called, 'the twilight world of homosexuals' Joe Meek became increasingly worried that he would be questioned, blackmailed or visited by hoodlums.
Despite minor speculation that Bernard Oliver the missing boy, may have done some work at Joe Meek's recording studio, there was actually no connection, so far as anybody knew at the time, between the unfortunate record producer and the murdered teenager. The speculation and tittle-tattle however, could only have exacerbated Meek's anxiety. The period was, as we can now observe, a time of contrast, coincidence, and great complexity.
As the murder investigation got underway, an official photo was circulated of its victim With no clue as to the identity of the young man, the police had taken the unusual step of 'dressing' the severed head. To do this, they stuck its eyes open, set it upright with a scarf at the base of the skull, then tidied it up as best they could before photographing it. It was a macabre sort of thing to do. The move, however, soon paid its sad dividend when the boy's father recognised the face in a newspaper picture and came forward to formally identify his son.
Described as quiet and gentle, if somewhat 'backward' with a mental age of eleven, Bernard Oliver had been missing from home for a fortnight. Up until his disappearance, the young man had been working for some weeks as a factory hand in north London. The police now stepped up their investigation, working exhaustively on the case. Alas, despite their best efforts, apart from the identity of the victim, not much more transpired and as the weeks turned into months, the months into years, the case remained unsolved. As one exasperated detective later remarked, the police had only been able to work with clues from the scene where the body had been dumped none from the scene of the murder itself. After his retirement, Tom Tarling, head of East Suffolk CID, who'd led the murder inquiry in 1967, said of the case, It was the most gruesome thing I investigated, in 37 years with the police. The village of Tattingstone itself remained in shock long after the investigation petered out. A yellowed newspaper cutting, dated January 1968 reveals that a full year after the event, in the village once described as, A place where nothing ever happened,. few of the villagers would now walk down the road now dubbed Suitcase Lane.
It wasn't until the eve of the 2005 Freedom of Information Act almost 38 years after the murder had occurred that any further significant information came to light. Two doctors, one wanted for questioning about the murder and homosexual assault of another boy, had been prime suspects in the murder case, it was revealed. Dr Martin Reddington and Dr John Byles, both of them now dead, had resurfaced as even stronger suspects, when the case was reopened in 1977. Byles though,
a former ship's surgeon, had committed suicide in Australia in 1975 after being arrested and charged with an indecent assault in London. He left letters to Scotland Yard and to Dr Reddington apologising for what he'd done and yet, frustratingly for the investigators, not confessing to the murder of Bernard Oliver.
In 1965, a warrant for Martin Reddington's arrest had been issued, 'for buggery and the indecent assault of males'. The Colchester-born Reddington, however, fled the country for South Africa and the warrant was never executed. His guilt was neither proved nor disproved. Even though he returned to the UK from time to time, he was never apprehended. In a further astonishing piece of information, a private investigator claimed to have recognised one of the suitcases, pairing it firmly with a man she'd spoken to in a launderette upon numerous occasions. She picked out Reddington's likeness from three pictures of suspects and even identified one of the suitcases as the one in which the the doctor had often carried his laundry. Dr Reddington, who was never questioned, died in 1993, aged 63. It was only over long years that such fragments gradually emerged. However much they seem to point to a general assumption of the two doctors' culpability, however, the Suitcase Murder remains, to this day, officially unsolved.
Almost half a century after its occurrence, the murder begins slowly to pass out of living memory and into folklore. Tattingstone, for many years known, unfairly perhaps, as the scene of the infamous discovery, recently won the Suffolk Village of The Year award. The black and white photographs of the evidence, the old-style suitcases in which the victim was discovered, along with archaic nature of the murder itself, all conspire to endow the crime with an almost black museum status. The case remains, nonetheless, a bleak and nasty tale. The snuffing out of a young man's life, occurred during an era now seen as being synonymous with colour, music and youth itself a time of hope when it seemed that almost anything was possible. That the murder came to light, not in a dirty Soho alley, or under a new town motorway bridge, but in a quiet village in rural Suffolk, makes it seem all the darker, viewed now through the filter of the decades.