The Best New True Crime Stories. Mitzi Szereto

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СКАЧАТЬ dramatic improvements.

      Ecuadorians, though, distrust scholarly studies and statistics as much as they do the justice system. Edison Segreda, over the clatter of his 125cc motorcycle-taxi engine, tells a story of a similar occurrence in a small town on the peninsula just recently. He claims that a young man attempted to steal a pickup truck and was caught, taken to a dirt road outside of town, and brutally murdered.

      Details of this particular crime have not been verified; in fact, it may not have happened at all. Still, Edison believes it and sees nothing wrong about it.

      “The police are lazy, stupid, and corrupt,” he says. “Until that changes…” He shrugs and extends his hands, palms up, out in front of him.

      At a memorial service for the three victims, pastor Fausto Gonzaléz used his pulpit to read aloud an account of the number of unsolved cases in the area involving child abduction.

      “In this country,” said Gonzaléz, “there is no confidence that the authorities will achieve justice, and the people, with troubled hearts, take justice into their own hands.”

About a Boy

C L Raven

      In 1921, when most fifteen-year-old boys were either in school, working to support their families, or hanging out with their friends, Harold Jones was on his way to becoming famous. For murdering two little girls.

      The eldest of four children, Harold was born in January 1906 in Abertillery, a poor Welsh mining town fourteen miles north of Cardiff. In 1843, major industry came to the town with the sinking of the area’s first deep coal mine at Tir Nicholas Farm, Cwmtillery. Abertillery developed rapidly from a farming town to a center of the South Wales Coalfield. In the 1901 census, the population stood at nearly twenty-two thousand, and reached almost forty thousand by the 1930s. Like many of the men in the area, Harold’s father, Phillip, was a coal miner, and his mother a housewife.

      In school, Harold was popular and very good at sports, with aspirations to become a professional boxer. He spent much of his spare time reading or playing the organ at church services. He didn’t fit the classic profile usually found in the childhoods of those who grow up to kill: he didn’t torture animals, start fires, or wet the bed, and he wasn’t abused by his parents or bullied by his peers. He was an ordinary boy with friends, a job, and a girlfriend. At fourteen, he left school and went to work for Mortimer’s Stores, an oil-and-seed merchant close to where he lived. He did this to help support his family financially. This was common in small Welsh mining towns, where life was hard and money was scarce. (Our grandfather was removed from school by his parents when he was fourteen and sent to work in the sawmill.) Harold was punctual, worked hard, could manage the shop by himself, and was well-liked by customers. Despite his young age, he was the ideal employee.

      But he had a darker side.

      On February 5, 1921, eight-year-old Freda Burnell was sent by her father, Frederick (Fred) George Burnell, to Mortimer’s Stores to buy bags of grit and poultry spice for her family’s livestock. Their house at 9 Earl Street was 375 yards from Mortimer’s Stores, located at 90 Cwm Street (now Somerset Street). She left at 9:05 a.m. and should have returned shortly. When she hadn’t returned after an hour, her worried parents went looking for her, first heading for Mortimer’s Stores, where she was last seen. Harold Jones told them she had visited the store at 9:05 a.m. and he had sold her a bag of poultry spice, but since they only had loose grit, not bags, Freda left to ask her father if loose grit would suffice.

      She wasn’t seen again.

      Fred Burnell went to the town crier, who announced the girl’s disappearance. Police were informed at one o’clock that afternoon. The station was forty yards from the store. By three o’clock, the police had launched a missing persons search. Harold told the police the same thing he’d told Freda’s parents.

      In the evening, the police asked the cinema to put Freda’s description on their screen. It read: “She was last seen wearing a red serge cap with blue velvet underneath, a brown coat, a blue turnover with white stripes, a brown jersey, new combinations [Victorian undergarment consisting of a camisole bodice attached to long drawers], black stockings and black buttoned boots. Her hair was tied up in rags and she was carrying a small chocolate-colored bag of American leather ten to fifteen inches wide and rather deeper. She had a fresh complexion, blue eyes and light brown hair, was somewhat small for her age and weighed about three and a half stone.”

      Volunteers got lamps from the collieries to help with the search.

      Several witnesses came forward to say they had seen Freda on the morning of her disappearance. Mrs. Mary Ann Wiltshire, who lived at 141 Somerset Street, was repairing the brassware on her doorstep when she saw a young girl whose clothing matched Freda’s passing her house. The girl smiled and walked on.

      Twenty-four-year-old Charles Edward Betts, a baker from 20 Duke Street, was leading his horse and cart from his stable at the Cwm Hotel, Alexandra Road, up Cwm Cottage Road, between 9:05 and 9:10 a.m. As he turned up Cwm Cottage Road, he saw Freda on the pavement opposite the Drill Hall, heading toward Somerset Street. He knew Freda and greeted her with “Hello, Jenny Maud,” which was his nickname for her.

      The Mortimers’ maid, Doris Hathaway, told police that at 9:15 a.m. she shouted downstairs to Harold that a customer had entered the shop. It was Freda. There were no more definite sightings of her after she left the store.

      Freda’s body was found the next day.

      On Sunday, February 6, Edward Thomas Lewis, a colliery ostler, left his home at 7 Duke Street at 7:20 a.m. He walked through the lane between Duke Street and Pantypwdyn Road and found Freda’s body in a sack in an alleyway at the rear of 19 Duke Street, three hundred yards from Mortimer’s Stores. There was clearly no attempt to hide the body. Edward knocked on the door of number 17 and asked Samuel Harding to guard the body while he went to the police. Harding followed him to the station. The lane was a wide dirt track separated from Duke Street by a low drystone wall. Wire fencing formed a barrier on the other side, with a sloped field behind it, leading up to Pantypwdyn Road.

      Police Superintendent Henry Lewis, Sergeant Arnold, Sergeant Jones, and Police Constables Cox and Tucker reached the scene in minutes. Freda was carried the one hundred yards to her home, where she was examined by Dr. Thomas Edward Lloyd of Abergavenny, Dr. Simon Simons of Abertillery, and Dr. Thomas Baillie Smith, the chief medical officer of Abertillery.

      This wasn’t an accidental death. A cord was tied around her neck, and she had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. Her ankles were tied together, her elbows were bound behind her back, and she was gagged. She had been “sexually outraged,” meaning her killer had also attempted to rape her. Whoever had killed her must have wanted her to suffer for his enjoyment. Her estimated time of death was between 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. the day she went missing. Traces of corn chaff were found on her body and inside the sack.

      Police searched the area, including a nearby shed belonging to Mortimer’s Stores. Inside they found a chicken coop with corn chaff scattered over the ground, Freda’s handkerchief, and sacking concealing the ax handle used to bludgeon her. As with Freda’s body, there had been no attempt to conceal the evidence. The handkerchief was later identified as belonging to Freda’s younger sister, Doris Ivy. Freda had borrowed it the morning she went missing. The shed was obviously the scene of the murder. The town was in shock. A brutal murder of a young child wasn’t something that happened in Abertillery.

      The only people with a key to the storage shed were СКАЧАТЬ