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Louie Calvert - a boot fetishist? |
At a
minute to nine on the summer morning of
The medical officer went down to listen to the weakening heartbeat coming from
the small broken body, now hanging motionless, its head drooping to one side.
It had taken no more than 20 seconds to carry out the sentence of the court
upon Mrs. Louie Calvert. Her body was left on the rope for the customary hour
before being taken down and prepared for autopsy. The autopsy found that her
death had been "instantaneous" and confirmed that she was not
pregnant. These facts were made public at the subsequent inquest, held later in
the day before the Leeds Coroner, Mr. Stuart Rodgers. Her body was then buried
in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds in accordance with her sentence.
She was the first woman to be hanged at Strangeways since Mary Ann Britland in
1886. Louie was calm at the end and was reported to have accepted her fate with
considerable courage. It is unclear why her execution took place at
It has
been said that Louie was somewhat disappointed to find the press were not going
to be allowed to witness her hanging. (This practice had been discontinued some
years earlier.) Apparently, she wanted
to be in the limelight for once in her life. In fact, she didn't arouse much
media interest at all which was probably another disappointment for her, this
being partly due to the General Strike that was going on at the time of her
trial. There are no photos of Louie Calvert, probably because she and her
relatives were too poor to be able to afford a camera or to go to a
photographer, and because newspaper photographers were either on strike or did
not get an opportunity to get a picture of her during the trial.
Louie
Calvert (photo here)
was unusual amongst the women executed in the 20th century in that she was a
known criminal who had convictions for petty theft and prostitution, although
up to the murder of Mrs. Waterhouse, nobody had suspected her of being a
killer. She was a small, unattractive 33 year old who had used several aliases,
as a prostitute she worked under the name of Louie Gomersal
and was known as Louise Jackson to the Salvation Army, whose meetings she
attended. She was known to have an unpleasant and violent temper. She had a 6
year old son, Kenneth, whom she was particularly fond of and asked to have
visit her in the condemned cell. He was taken into care after the execution.
Under the
name of Louise Jackson, Louie took a live in job as housekeeper to one Arthur
Calvert who was a night watchman living at 7 Railway Place in the Pottery
Fields area of Leeds. Louie's son also went to live with them. She and Arthur
had an affair and after a while, Louie claimed that she was pregnant by him and
persuaded Arthur to marry her. She was able to deceive Arthur for some time and
eventually told him she was leaving him to go to her sister's home in Dewsbury
to give birth. She sent Arthur a telegram to let him know she had arrived
safely. There was of course no baby and the pregnancy had been feigned purely
to force Arthur into marriage.
Louie had
in fact returned to Leeds immediately and on the 8th of March 1926, took up
lodgings with a 40 year old rather eccentric widow, called Mrs. Lily
Waterhouse, in Amberley Road, Leeds. The arrangement between the two women was
that Louie would act as maid and housekeeper in return for her board and
lodging. While with Lily, Louie had on March 16th seen an advert for a child to
be adopted. She agreed to adopt the baby girl from an unmarried teenage mum and
she was due to collect the baby on the 31st of March. Presumably, Louie
intended to take the baby home to Arthur and pass it off as her own. (There was
great stigma attached to girls who had a baby out of wedlock in the 1920's.
Whether Louie and the girl went through a formal adoption process is doubtful
as she would probably have been only too pleased to have been rid of the baby.)
The
domestic situation was not at all satisfactory to Mrs. Waterhouse because Louie
refused to work as agreed and they argued constantly over this and other
matters. Also Lily had noticed that her personal items and silverware were
going missing and found pawn shop tickets from which she concluded that it was
Louie who was stealing them. Lily reported her suspicions to the police on the
30th of March and was told to return the next day to lodge a formal complaint
against Louie.
Sadly for Lily, when she got home, she made the mistake of telling Louie what
she had done. The police had arranged for Lily to appear before magistrates on
the 1st of April to apply for a "process" (presumably an injunction).
On the
31st of March 1926, Lily was seen by her neighbours entering her house around
6.15 p.m. About 7.30 p.m. her neighbours in the row of terraced houses, heard
loud banging sounds coming from Lily's house and a few minutes later saw Louie
leaving with the baby. One of the neighbours, Mrs. Clayton, asked Louie what
the noise was all about. Louie told her, "I put up the baby's bed, and it
fell when I was folding it." Mrs. Clayton told Louie that she thought she
heard Mrs. Waterhouse make some strange sounds. "Yes," replied Louie,
I have left her in bed crying because I am leaving her."
As Lily
didn’t show up in court, two detectives were sent round to Lily's home the
following day to find out why she had not turned up. After hearing about the
commotion earlier from her neighbours, they opened the window shutters and saw
that the main bed had not been slept in. They got a key and went into the house
finding Lily lying dead in a small bedroom at the top of the stairs. She had
been hit over the head and strangled to death. There were no signs of a
struggle as might have occurred in a break in, but one of the officers noticed
that Lily was barefoot. There was a mark round her neck consistent with a
ligature and marks on her wrists and legs.
Louie was the prime, and in fact only obvious suspect, and she was soon tracked
down to her marital home in Railway Place. When the police arrived, she opened
the door to them. The officers found she was wearing Lily's boots even though
they were several sizes too large and some of the missing property was also
discovered. She was arrested and taken to the police station and there charged
with Lily's murder. As detectives questioned her, a pack of lies unfolded. She
insisted that the items of Lily's property had been given to her by Lily to
pawn and that Lily was confused and probably forgotten that she had given them
to her.
On
Wednesday, the 7th of April, Louie came before Leeds City magistrates charged
with Lily's murder and was remanded in custody to stand trial at Leeds Assizes.
Her case was heard at the Assizes before Mr. Justice Wright on the 5th and 6th
of May and she was, unsurprisingly, found guilty. She accepted her death
sentence without apparent shock but claimed that she was pregnant and could
not, therefore, be hanged until after she had given birth. In practice, pregnant women were always
reprieved by this time.)
She was
taken to Strangeways prison in Manchester to await execution. (This was unusual
as it was normal to send the condemned prisoner to the county prison in which
the trial had taken place - it was probably because the condemned cell at
Armley Prison in Leeds was already in use.) Here she was examined and it was
thought that it was just possible, although very unlikely, that she might be in
the early stages of pregnancy but that it would not cause a problem to execute
her. This caused public concern and a petition for a reprieve containing 2 to
3,000 signatures, many from her home town of Ossett
in Yorkshire, was got up. This was, as usual, rejected - her execution being
scheduled for the 24th of June. There was even a question in parliament
relating to her pregnancy. However, on Tuesday, the 22nd of June, the Home
Secretary informed her solicitor, Mr. E. Ould, that
there would be no reprieve and that the story of her pregnancy was not believed
to be true. As stated above, the autopsy confirmed that it was just another of
Louie's lies.
Whilst in
the condemned cell, Louie confessed to the murder of John Frobisher in 1922. At
the time, she was calling herself Mrs. Louise Jackson and worked as John
Frobisher's housekeeper at Mercy Street, Wellington Lane, Leeds. His body had
been found by a policeman floating in a canal on the 12th of July 1922, he had
a wound on the back of his head and a fractured skull. A degree of suspicion
had fallen on Louie initially but the Coroner's Court returned a verdict of
misadventure and ruled that his death was a simple drowning. Once again, the
body was discovered fully dressed but without any boots on. One of the police
officers in the Waterhouse case had also been involved in the Frobisher case
and remembered that John had been discovered without his boots, and that they
were nowhere to be found on the bank, facts which seemed unusual in a case of
accidental drowning.
Strangely,
in two completely unrelated cases of murder, she had stolen in addition to the
their "valuables", her victim's boots even though they didn't fit
her. Her motive for this is unclear - unless she really did have a boot fetish.
It seems the motive certainly for Mrs. Waterhouse's murder was gain and it was
probably the same in John Frobisher's case. It seems hard to believe she killed
for the boots but rather took them as an afterthought.
Louie was poor and lived in difficult times, as did so many other men and women
in Britain at the time. She was also a pathological liar and had a bad temper,
but what made her turn to murder? Was it simply the easy way, in her uneducated
mind, of covering up her thefts or was it something deeper within her personality?
Sadly, we will never know the answer to this, as having been examined and found
to be sane for legal purposes, nobody was very interested in getting to the
bottom of her as a person. Her life and death would have passed virtually
un-remembered had it not been for her predilection for her victim's boots.
A sad life and a sad death with at least two other victims along the way.
Acknowledgement : My special thanks to The
Yorkshire Post newspaper for allowing me access to their archive material
on the case.
