Insane son battered his mother’s head in

The middle-aged Mrs Eva Wilkinson lived at 51 Cliveden Road, Wimbledon, with her son Reginald.

From an early age, Reginald had been a very difficult boy.

Born in Brentford in 1910, he had been educated at the Friends’ School in Saffron Walden.

He had done reasonably well academically but was a gloomy and morose boy who often complained of ill health, although doctors found nothing wrong with him.

He had worked as an optician’s assistant for a while, but suffered a nervous breakdown in 1929, and largely led a vegetating existence after that time.

He blamed all his misfortunes on excessive masturbation leading to degeneration of his nervous system.

His father had died when he was just two years old, and his mother and uncle had found masturbation such a painful subject to discuss that they had not warned him against its “lethal effects”.

For not providing him with appropriate advice about this delicate subject, Reginald much resented his mother and uncle, and the family doctor as well.

In the summer of 1933, after Reginald had kicked and struck his mother, the doctor certified him insane.

But after he had spent three weeks at Netherne Mental Hospital in Coulsdon, he was discharged, since a supposedly more competent doctor at the asylum did not agree to certify him.

Reginald seemed far from sane to the people who knew him, and he still had occasional violent outbursts.

On May 29, 1934, Dr Joseph Harvey, who had once declared Reginald Wilkinson insane, received a letter with some very insulting and libellous remarks added on the back of the envelope.

He thought he could recognize Reginald’s handwriting.

The doctor went to see Reginald’s uncle, and together they went to 51 Cliveden Road to confront the lunatic.

But Reginald was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, they found Mrs Wilkinson lying dead in a pool of blood, with her head in a basin full of water.

Her head was battered with a blunt instrument, she had a stab wound in the throat, and by her side was a letter suggesting she had committed suicide.

The doctor told the police all about the weirdo Reginald sharing the house with his mother, and regularly threatening her with violence.

Since Reginald could not be found locally, his description was sent to all police forces in the Home Counties.

It did not take long for a message to come from Saffron Walden that Reginald had been apprehended there.

He had visited his old headmaster Mr Charles Brightwen Rowntree at the Friends’ School there, carrying with him a suitcase full of knives, hammers and other implements.

When the headmaster asked what he wanted with these, Reginald told him that he had used the hammer to stun his mother, before murdering her with one of the knives.

Reginald Wilkinson was taken back to Wimbledon to attend the inquest on his mother.

At the Wimbledon Police Court, Dr Harvey and others gave evidence against him, and he was committed for trial at the Surrey Assizes.

A photograph of him in the Daily Mirror shows a very rum-looking cove with an over-large, misshapen head.

But at the Assizes, the only witness called was Dr Grierson, the Brixton prison doctor, who had examined Reginald and who found him unfit to plead.

For murdering his mother, the only person who cared about him, he was committed to Broadmoor for an indefinite period of time.

It is likely that he was eventually released, or perhaps transferred to another asylum, since he died in Newark, Lincolnshire, as late as 1986.

This is an edited extract from Jan Bondeson’s Murder Houses of South London (Troubador Publishing, Leicester 2015).