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shyscyberchamber.com
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UNSOLVED CRIMES |
Date
Added |
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The Green Bicycle Murder |
January 2003 |
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The tragic death of pretty Bella Wright
would have been written off as a fatal road accident if it had not
been for the shrewd curiosity of a young country constable.
For when 21 year old Bella was found dead on a quiet road near the
village of Stretton in Leicestershire with her bicycle lying on the
grass verge, it added a terrible weight to the complaints of the
locals who cursed the reckless and speeding drivers in their peaceful
little communities.
The dead girls face was deeply gouged and matted with blood.
Gravel from the roadway was embedded in her face where she had pitched
forward from her bicycle and struck the ground. She had
obviously been run off the road by some ruthless motorist, the
villagers insisted. It was July 1919 and clattering motor cars
were not yet a commonplace sight in the quiet countryside. Their
drivers, according to popular rural opinion, terrified the farm
animals and were a mortal danger to peaceful cyclists and rambling
pedestrians.
A cursory examination of Bella's body by a local doctor seemed to
confirm that opinion. He concluded that something had caused
Bella to lose control of her bicycle, throwing her into the road where
she died of loss of blood and head injuries.
The local constable however, had some nagging doubts. He went to
search the scene of the road accident for any further clues to show
exactly how Bella had met her death.
As he poked around the grass verge on either side of the narrow road,
the constable found the blood-spattered body of a dead carrion crow.
But there were no tyre marks near the bird. He turned its body
over with the tip of his boot and continued his search. A few
feet away, where Bella's bicycle had lain, he found another object
that caught his attention. It was a spent bullet, pushed down
into the soft earth by the imprint of a horses hoof.
A fresh examination of Bella's body showed the grim truth about her
death. In the swollen blood-stained tissue below her left eye
was a bullet hole. Hidden in the tangled mass of hair was the
exit wound. Bella had been shot clean through the head.
The police switched from the pursuit of a hit and run driver to the
hunt for a cold-blooded murderer.
The night before Bella died she had been on one of her frequent
cycling jaunts, riding to the village postbox to send a letter to her
sweetheart, a young sailor aboard a warship which was stationed 240km
(150miles) away in Portsmouth. The pretty brunette who lived
with her parents had made male admirers,, but she only flirted with
them. her deepest affections were reserved for the sailor she
hoped would soon ask her to marry him.
Bella had finished a long tiring shift as a mill hand in a factory in
nearby Leicester when she returned home on Saturday 5th July and slept
until late afternoon.
After a quick meal when she woke she cycled off briskly to post her
letter, telling her parents she might pay a visit to her uncle, a
road worker, who lived not very far away.
When Bella arrived at her uncle's cottage two hours later, she was not
alone. As she went inside the cottage a sallow-faced man waited
outside for her, seated astride his green bicycle.
Bella's uncle, George Measures, teased her about her strange
companion. She smiled: "Oh him, I don't really know him at all.
He has been riding alongside me for a few miles but he isn't bothering
me at all. He's just chatting about the weather."
When Bella was ready to leave for home an hour later, her uncle
glanced out the window and saw the man with the green bicycle still
waiting. 'Oh I do hope he doesn't get boring', Bella laughed
coyly. 'I'll soon cycle fast to give him the slip.'
The man with the green bicycle grinned happily at Bella when she left
the cottage and pedaled his bicycle to join her as they rode off
together in the warm summer evening's air.
An hour later a farmer driving his cattle along the peaceful Burton-Overy
road, found Bella's body. An inquest on the dead girl returned a
verdict of 'murder by person or persons unknown'. The vital
witness, the man with the green bicycle could not be traced.
But his bicycle was found, seven months later, when a barge skipper on
a canal outside Leicester found that a line trailing from his boat had
snagged on a piece of junk on the canal bed. The junk brought to
the surface was the frame of a green bicycle. Policemen who
probed the muddy canal bottom soon uncovered a gun holster and a dozen
revolver cartridges.
One of the serial numbers on the bicycle frame had been hastily filed
off. But another identifying number inside the saddle support
led police to the local dealer for the bicycle maker and then to the
identity of the man who brought it ten years before.
The owner of the bicycle was railway draughtsman Ronald Light, a moody
shell-shocked veteran of World War I with a fascination for guns.
He had been invalided out of the Army and had lived in Leicester until
six months after Bella's murder.
When police traced 34 year old Light he had left his home in Leicester
he shared with his widowed mother and taken a job about 100km
(60miles) away as a school teacher in Cheltenham. He was
arrested and brought back to Leicester to be charged with the murder
of Bella Wright.
His trial began at Leicester Assizes in June 1920 and from the opening
speech of the prosecution the circumstantial evidence stacked
mercilessly against Ronald Light. Witness after witness
identified him as the man with the green bicycle and a young
maidservant from Light's own home told how he kept firearms and
ammunition in the attic.
The prosecution amply proved that Ronald Light had been the mystery
man who cycled off with Bella just before her death. Light
himself admitted filing the serial number off his bicycle and throwing
it, with the holster and cartridges, into the canal a few weeks after
the murder.
The only arguably week point in the prosecution's case was the lack of
motive. Bella had not been sexually assaulted or robbed.
Even though Light denied killing her, claiming that they had parted
company at the village crossroads, the irrefutable testimony seemed
certain to lead him to the gallows.
One other piece of evidence seemed to cloud the case, almost
irrelevantly. The bullet found by the village constable had
several marks on it. The marks were caused by it passing through
the dead girl's skull and the crushing effect of the steel-shod
horse's hood which had ground it into the earth. There was even
one mark which might have been caused by a ricochet.
When Ronald Light gave evidence in his own defence, he seemed at first
to be damning himself. He admitted trailing around after Bella
on his bicycle on the night of her death, pestering her for the use of
a spanner and pump because his own cycle had developed a loose wheel
and flat tyre.
He told the jury of his own sad and tortured mental history, how he
cracked up after three years of savage war in the frontline trenches,
and how he was classified as a shell shock victim and sent back to
England in the closing stages of the war for psychiatric treatment.
But the effect of his testimony on the jury was electric. In a
firm clear voice, without a trace of hesitation or emotion.
Light told the court: 'I was an artillery gunner in the trenches from
1915 to 1918 when I was sent home a broken man. I kept my
holster and ammunition because they were wrapped in a bag attached to
my stretcher when they took me from the front. The Army kept my
service revolver.
'When Bella Wright was murdered I knew from newspaper reports the next
day that she was the girl I had been with just before she died.
I knew the police wanted to question me.'
Staring blankly and coldly into space, Light admitted: 'I became a
coward again. I never told a living soul what I knew. I
got rid of everything which could have connected me with her. I
was afraid.'
The jury looked at the gaunt face of the anguished war veteran before
they retired to consider their verdict. They returned three
hours later and pronounced him 'not guilty'.
As light walked from the court a free man, the sharp-eyed constable
who had turned the death into a murder investigation, blamed himself
for one flaw in his inspired detective work.
The body of the dead carrion crow in the field. He had kicked it
aside with hardly a second glance.
Had the bloodied crow also been blasted by a bullet from the same gun
which killed Bella Wright? Had the same bullet ripped through
the crow in flight and found a second, innocent human target?
Could the bullet have ricocheted from a tree and ended Bella's young
life?
Without the evidence of the crow and perhaps of further bullets and
footprints at the scene, no one would ever know. But it was not
beyond the bounds of possibility that an amateur marksman had been
taking potshots at the sinister black shapes of the carrion crows in
the field beside the country road.
Was there somewhere a thoughtless gunman who knew his wild shooting
had killed an unsuspecting girl and who had fled the scene to keep his
terrified secret? A gunman infinitely more cowardly than
the shell-shocked, broken ex-soldier Ronald Light. |
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