‘Well, I’m sugared! This is very awkward’

In the era of Jack the Ripper, there were many other murders of gruesome proportions. Author Jan Bondeson sets out, in detail, the extraordinary linked cases the newspapers of the time called The Chelsea Mystery and The Croydon Poison Mystery. Part two in next week’s South London Press

On the evening of Saturday, April 20 1907, the Fulham carpenter Richard Brinkley visited his friend, the Croydon accountant Reginald Parker.

Since Brinkley had recently come into some money, he wanted to buy a large and sturdy bulldog to guard his property.

Parker, who had previously helped his friend to draft letters and other documents, had agreed to help him procure one of those animals.

When Brinkley came to see the bulldog, at 32 Churchill Road, Croydon, he found Parker and his landlord Richard Beck in the living-room, sharing a bottle of ale.

Beck, an insurance agent working from home, was joined by his wife and daughter.

The jolly Mr Brinkley produced a large bottle of oatmeal stout from his pocket, offering Parker to have a swig or two.

This surprised Parker, who knew that his friend was a strict teetotaller, but the Fulham carpenter said that his doctor had recently advised him to take stout regularly, for his constitution.

Brinkley poured Parker a glass, before asking for some water for himself.

Later, the two friends departed to see the bulldog, which Brinkley purchased for £5 and arranged to have transported back to Fulham.

Later that night, Reginald Parker, who had arranged to sleep in the house of a friend, was woken up by the police.

They gruffly asked him what he knew about the mysterious deaths of his landlord Richard Beck and his wife Elizabeth, and the serious illness of their daughter Daisy.

There was suspicion that these three had all been poisoned.

Parker, a somewhat shady character, sobered up very quickly in this dire situation. He explained about the visit by his friend Brinkley, his interest in the bulldog, and the mysterious bottle of stout, from which Parker himself had drunk very little.

But what interest would the Fulham carpenter have in murdering the inoffensive Becks, who he did not know at all?

And indeed, the police found traces of prussic acid both in the bottle of stout and in the glasses the Becks had drunk from.

A boy told them that Brinkley had purchased a bottle of stout from the shop where he worked, the evening of the murders.

Clearly, this strange Mr Brinkley had deliberately brought with him a bottle of poisoned stout to 32 Churchill Road.

When arrested by the police, the Fulham carpenter exclaimed “Well, I’m sugared! This is very awkward, isn’t it!”

He reminded them that he was a strict teetotaller, and a hard-working man of good character, and asked permission to send word to his Masonic lodge.

But the police made good headway in solving the Churchill Road mystery.

Although Brinkley denied being near that part of Croydon the evening of the murders, an acquaintance had seen him at the railway station.

And then there was the pharmacist, from whom Brinkley had purchased prussic acid to poison a dog, returning a few days later for a second dose since he had spilt the first one.

But the most spicy revelations regarded the will of a 76-year-old Fulham widow of German ancestry, named Johanna Maria Blume.

She had owned a house at 4 Maxwell Road, located just south of where the Chelsea Football Club is today, and lived there with her granddaughter Augusta.

Mrs Blume had a daughter named Caroline, but they were on bad terms since Caroline was living in sin with a man, with whom she had several children.

The cunning Richard Brinkley had insinuated himself into the gullible old woman’s affections, calling her ‘granny’ and giving her a hand with various daily chores.

In late 1906, Mrs Blume made a will in favour of Brinkley, leaving him her entire estate, valued at £725 in total.

Strangely enough, Caroline Blume told the police, her mother had died two days after this will had been drawn up!

The police tracked down old Mrs Blume’s will, which looked fully legitimate. It was duly signed by the old lady, although the daughter said that Mrs Blume had only signed a paper regarding some Masonic outing.

Augusta, the granddaughter, remembered that Brinkley had seemed much affected by Mrs Blume’s death, asking the doctor to make sure the dear old lady was not ‘cut up’ to determine the cause of her death.

A benevolent doctor had made out a diagnosis of apoplexy for her death certificate, but Mr Ingleby Oddie, the Coroner for London, insisted on an autopsy.

No obvious cause of death was forthcoming, but the pathologist suspected a cerebral haemorrhage and death through natural causes.

The talented Mr Brinkley was very pleased to receive this good news, and he went out partying with the pretty 21-year-old Augusta Blume, who worked as a pantomime actress.

When he told young ‘Gussie’ that he had been ‘granny’s’ wish that they should get married, she wanted nothing of that, however.

One of the witnesses to Mrs Blume’s bogus will turned out to be none other than Reginald Parker.

But when questioned, this individual denied all knowledge of this will, or Mrs Blume, although he could remember signing what was purportedly a document concerning some Masonic outing!

After Brinkley had claimed all Mrs Blume’s property, Caroline Blume had stated her intention to challenge the will.

At first, the Fulham carpenter had tried to appease her by offering her his hand in marriage, saying that this had been old Mrs Blume’s wish, but she had wanted nothing of that.

Clearly, the audacious Mr Brinkley had then decided to eliminate Parker who had been tricked into signing the bogus will.

And this plan might well have succeeded, had not the thirsty Becks come in the way, and drunk the poisoned stout themselves.

There was considerable newspaper interest in the sensational ‘Croydon Poisoning Case’.

The Illustrated Police News published a drawing of the exhumation of Mrs Blume, and its fellow sensation newspaper the Illustrated Police Budget also took a great interest in this extraordinary murder mystery, publishing drawings of Brinkley in the dock, Mrs Blume being exhumed, and Reginald Parker lounging in a chair with the sturdy bulldog sitting on his lap.

In the end, the exhumation of Mrs Blume’s remains yielded nothing interesting, but she had been dead a long time, and traces of certain volatile poisons may well have disappeared.

The police strongly suspected that the talented Mr Brinkley had been up to further mischief in the past.

He had been born in 1855, probably in Eye, Lincolnshire.

In 1875, he married Miss Clara Emily Sorrell in Chelsea.

The 1881 Census found him at 6 Tullet Place, Kensington [it no longer stands], living with his wife and three children – Richard Langtry Brinkley born in 1875, Annie Louisa Brinkley born in 1877 and Clara Maria Brinkley born in 1878.

He described himself as a cabinet maker, and two lodgers, a French polisher and a young plumber, lived in his house.

Mrs Clara Emily Brinkley died in 1883, aged 28. Her death certificate gives the cause of death as complications to deep venous thrombosis, a less than common ailment in one so young, then as well as now.

The mention in the 1881 Census is the last we hear of the two little girls.

In 1893, a 17-year-old young woman named Laura Jane Glenn had died mysteriously at No. 21 Marlborough Square, Chelsea.

She was a penniless prostitute, and had more than once been evicted from her lodgings, due to her rowdy and immoral life.

It was suspected that she had committed suicide from drinking arsenic tincture from a medicine chest belonging to her much older boyfriend William Ridgeley.

Although a carpenter by trade, he took an interest in veterinary medicine and practiced as a ‘dog doctor’, dosing the hapless Chelsea canines with various chemicals from his large medicine chest.

When inspected by the police, this chest was full of dangerous poisons of every description.

As cool as a cucumber, Mr Ridgeley told the constables that as a dog-fancier, he needed some medicines to make use of when his valuable animals were taken ill.

The police suspected that after Ridgeley had tired of the young floozie Laura Jane Glenn, he had given her some poison to drink, and then forged a suicide note.

There was a good deal of newspaper publicity about the ‘Chelsea Mystery’, as the case was called, and the proceedings from the coroner’s court were reported in full.

At the coroner’s inquest on Laura Jane Glenn, William Ridgeley’s son, the 17-year-old Richard William Ridgeley, gave evidence in his father’s behalf.

Importantly, he admitted that although Ridgeley was his proper name, he sometimes used the name Brinkley!

His father’s intentions towards the deceased had been fully honourable, and he had in fact employed her to keep house for him.

NEXT WEEK: – the police net closes in on Mr Brinkley…