By Tim Lambert
John Robinson – Hanged by a Matchstick
On Friday, 6 May 1927, a man deposited a trunk at Charing Cross Railway Station. By Monday, 10 May, the trunk was beginning to stink. Staff alerted the police and when the trunk was opened, it was found to contain several paper parcels. They contained parts of a body. The murderer had cut off a woman’s head, arms and legs and then wrapped them and the torso in parcels and placed them in the trunk. The woman had suffered blows to her head and chest but she died of asphyxiation.
However, the murderer was inept. Some items of clothing were also found in the trunk. They were traced to a Mrs Holt, who suggested they had been stolen some time before by a Mrs Rolls, who she had once employed as a cook.
It turned out that Mrs Rolls was actually Minnie Bonati, aged 36. She was separated from her Italian husband and she was a sex worker.
The police appealed for information. A taxi driver remembered collecting a man with a heavy trunk from outside a block of offices in Rochester Road in London. He drove the man to Charing Cross Railway Station.
Two vital clues were found in the trunk. A tea towel had a label with the name ‘Greyhound’ stitched onto it. It was traced to the Greyhound Hotel in Hammersmith, London. A woman named Mrs Robinson worked there and police found her husband, John, had an office in Rochester Road.
Unfortunately, neither the taxi driver nor the railway employee could identify John Robinson. However, the police found a tiny but vital clue.
In a wastepaper basket in Robinson’s office, they found a bloodstained match. It was found to be the same blood type as Minnie Bonati. At first, Robinson denied all knowledge of the murder but he could not explain how the bloody match got there.
Eventually, Robinson admitted to killing Bonati but he claimed it was an accident.
According to him, she visited his office and she became abusive and demanded money. He pushed her over, and she banged her head and died. He said he panicked and he dismembered the body. Not surprisingly, the police did not believe him.
Nor did the jury. His trial began on 11 July 1927. A pathologist said the injuries to her head were not sufficient to kill her. Bruises on the victim’s chest suggested that Robinson had kneelt on her and he may have suffocated her. On 13 July, Robinson was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. He was hanged on 12 August 1927.
An Unsolved Trunk Murder in Brighton 1934
An unsolved murder took place in Brighton, England in 1934. A body was found in a trunk but the victim was never identified and the case was never solved.
On 17th June 1934, a railway employee named William Vinnicombe noticed a horrid odour coming from a trunk in a left luggage room in Brighton Railway Station. The trunk was locked, but Detective Bishop of the Railway Police was called to deal with it. Inside, they found the torso and arms of a woman. The head and legs were missing.
The following day, 18 June 1934, a stinking suitcase was found at Kings Cross Railway Station in London. It contained the woman’s legs.
The famous pathologist Bernard Spilsbury said the victim was a woman aged about 25. She was well nourished and probably stood about 5 feet 2 inches tall. Sadly, she was 5 months pregnant at the time of her death. Her head was never found, making identification very difficult.
From the condition of her hands, feet, and nails, Spilsbury thought the woman was middle class. He also gave his opinion that whoever dismembered the woman had little surgical skill.
The police appealed for information about missing women, but the dead woman was never identified. The motive for the murder is unknown, and the whole case is a mystery.
Tony Mancini
A third trunk case murder also occurred in Brighton in 1934. By a strange coincidence, police investigating the murder described above discovered a second one. They were searching houses when they found the body of Violet Kaye hidden in a trunk in Kemp Street, Brighton. The unfortunate woman died from a blow on the head.
The police found that a man named Tony Mancini lived in the flat. He was arrested in London. Mancini claimed that he came home and found Violet dead. He assumed that she had been killed by one of her clients. He said he panicked because he had a criminal record and he was sure the police would blame him for the murder.
They did. Macini was arrested for murder and he went for trial in December 1934. However, the defence lawyer argued that it could have been a client who killed Violet while Mancini was out. The jury acquitted him.
However, in 1976, Mancini confessed to a newspaper that indeed he did kill Violet during a row. He said he threw a hammer at her that struck her on the temple. At the time English law stated that nobody could be tried twice for the same crime so Mancini could not be prosecuted again. He died shortly afterwards.
