|
shyscyberchamber.com
|
|
UNSOLVED CRIMES |
Date
Added |
 |
Mystery at Wolf's Neck |
October 2003 |
|
|
It was a bitterly cold evening in
January 1931 when bus driver Cecil Johnson saw a fire on a desolate
moor at Wolf's Neck between Newcastle upon Tyne and Otterburn in
Northumberland. He stopped to investigate. What he saw was
almost unbelievable. On fire was the car owned by his boss's
daughter, Evelyn Foster. Beside it lay Evelyn, badly burned but
still alive.
Johnson drive her to her home at Otterburn, where she told her parents
and the police that she had been attacked by a man who had set fire to
her car. She died the following day and left behind her one of
the strangest crime stories of the decade. If indeed it was a
crime at all...
Evelyn Foster was 28 years old and the daughter of Mr J. J Foster, who
owned a garage at Otterburn. She had her own car, which she ran
as a one-cab taxi business.
At 19.00 on 6th January 1931, she arrived home and told her mother
that a man who got out of a car at nearby Elishaw wanted her to drive
him to Ponteland, near Newcastle, to catch the bus home. She
said the man looked respectable and gentlemanly when she picked him at
at the Percy Arms Hotel.
The next time her mother saw her was when she was brought home dying
of burns later that night by her father's bus driver, Johnson.
And this is the story she told her mother and a doctor, nurse and
policeman who had been called to the house...
After she had driven through the village Belsay, about 8km (5 miles)
from Ponteland, her passenger suddenly asked her to turn back.
She had turned round and was driving back when the man hit her in the
eye and took over the wheel. He stopped the car at the top of
the hill at Wolf's Neck and started 'knocking her about'. He
then put her into the back of the car and raped her.
The man then took a bottle or tin out of his pocket and threw
something over her. She just 'went up in a blaze'. She
then felt a bump as the car was going over rough ground. Evelyn
told her mother: 'I was alight. I do not know how I got out of
the car. I lay on the ground and sucked the grass. I was
thirsty.'
Her last words were said to have been: 'I have been murdered.'
And it really looked as though she had been murdered - until doubts
began to surface at the inquest.
To begin with, nobody other than Evelyn saw a stranger in the village
that evening. Her father admitted that he had not seen the man.
And the owners of the Percy Arms pub, where Evelyn was said to have
picked him up, said that no stranger had been in the bar and they had
heard no talk about a taxi to Ponteland.
The pathologist who conducted the post mortem on Evelyn, Professor
Stuart McDonald, said there were no external injuries on her body
apart from the burns. There was no trace or evidence of bruising
of the face to suggest that she had been knocked about and there was
'no sign at all' that she had been raped.
Doubts were also cast on Evelyn's suggestion that she and the car had
been set on fire before it was driven off the road on to the moor.
There were signs of burned heather were the car was found just off the
road - but no sign of burned heather by the side of the road itself.
In his summing up the coroner, Mr P.M. Dobbs, told the jury they could
rule out suicide. The only two points they had to consider were.
Was Evelyn Foster murdered? Or did she set fire to the car to
obtain insurance money and set light to herself accidentally?
It took two hours for the jury to reach a verdict. It was:
willful murder on the part of some person or persons unknown.
Later, the police took the unprecedented step of declaring that, in
their view, the 'murderer' did not exist. The Chief Constable of
Northumberland, Captain Fullarton James, declared in a newspaper
interview that the verdict of the inquest was against the weight of
evidence and Evelyn Foster had not been murdered.
Gradually, the mystery of Wolf's Neck dropped out of the news - until
just over three years later. At the beginning of 1934, a
Yorkshire groom, Ernest Brown, was sentenced to death at Leeds Assizes
for the murder of his lover's husband. In a 'confession' on the
scaffold he is reported to have said either 'ought to burn' or
'Otterburn'. But he died seconds later.
Did Brown murder Evelyn Foster. Or did he know something about
her death. The answer is unlikely ever to be known. |
|
|
BACK TO TOP |
|
Check out
the
latest
Crypt Polls!
|