3:10pm Friday 9th October 2009
By Dennis Signy
Sixty years ago this weekend Leopold and Esther Goodman, a well - off middle - aged Jewish couple, were found beaten to death in their home in Edgware.
A murder a year was a lot in our NW London neck of the woods in those post-war years and, as a young reporter starting to build his career on the Times group of newspapers after service abroad in the Army, I was close to events as Danny Raven, the Goodmans' son-in-law was charged with the double murder ... and hanged by the famous executioner Albert Pierrepoint a mere 88 days later.
One of the team of three detectives assigned to the case was Detective Sergeant Phil Grout - he and I played cards together in the CID office at Edgware and socialised and worked together) - and when he died his son Jeff found a neat file containing original papers and scene-of-crime photographs of the Raven case.
As a result, Jeff, a motivational business speaker,and freelance writer Liz Fisher have produced a compelling book, 'Murder Without Motive' (Shoehorn Books Hardback, £18 - via Amazon), which describes life in Edgware in 1949 and analyses the case in commendable detail.
Did Danny Raven murder his in-laws? I have no doubt. He had changed his clothes after visiting his wife and new born baby at a nursing home and returning to Edgware with his in-laws and the discovery of his burnt suit in the boiler at his home seems conclusive enough and led to his arrest. The motive? Unclear to this day. Raven's solicitor Sydney Rutter, a well-known advocate and Hendon Court regular in those days who lived round the corner from me at my then home by Brent Cross Station, hinted to journalists in the days before Raven's execution that, given a choice, he would have pursued a defence of not guilty due to insanity during the trial. That he did not, it seems, was down to the explicit instructions of Danny and his father.
It was a different world then. Police procedures were different. Today the Police and Criminal Evidence Act would have precluded the police visiting Raven's home before his arrest and discovering the vital evidence of the bloostained burnt suit.
Only eight executions were carried out after hangings were suspended altogether for 18 months in 1948 while Parliament decided whether the death penalty should remain. If Raven had been given life imprisonment, on today's terms, he would have been released in his 40s.
'Murder Without Motive' is fascinating to me as I knew so many of the principal characters. Phil Grout later served at Hendon and worked on many high profile crimes including the Great Train Robbery, the Hanratty Case and the Profumo Affair. One of the leading investigators was Detective Inspector Bert Tansill, a real old--time copper who regularly used to take his young officers and myself to the Royal Oak at Temple Fortune when work was done. Tradition decreed that we stayed as long as he did. "Get your belly up to the counter", was an expression I learned from him.
Bert lived in Hendon. Eventually he would pull himself up to his full height, brush the cigarette ash from the front of his suit and declare: "Home to flaming Mum".
Police surgeon Dr Abraham Matthews, an eccentric loveable character, went to school with my father and was a regular source of news from my days covering Hendon Court.
A young journalist in those days became part of the police team. I used to breakfast each day at Hendon Police Station and be in the CID office looking at the overnight burglaries - NW London was a housebreaker's paradise - before the detectives came in. "What have we got today Dennis?" they would ask.
I would regularly go in police cars to the scene of incidents. Our contacts were so good that then photographer Rod Brewster, the son of a policeman, and I arrived on a murder scene before the police one morning I reccomend 'Murder Without Motive'. At the launch of the book at the Skylon Restaurant at the Royal Festival Hall Jeff Grout brought along a copy of a Tottenham Hotspur book I wrote years ago for me to sign.
I've got a signed copy of 'Murder Without Motive' ... plus hundreds of fascinating memories of life as it was then.
Footnote: The Danny Raven case was one of the biggest stories I covered in three decades as a reporter or editor of the Times series. Number 1 was the day a plane landed in a garden at the top of Highwood Hill, Mill Hill, killing more than 30 passengers.
Colleagues and I followed fire engines passing the office in Church Road, Hendon, to the scene ... and got front page lead stories in the Star, News and Standard, London's evening papers. But that's another story.
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