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1924: Patrick Mahon, for the Crumbles Murder

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On this date in 1924, Patrick Mahon was hanged for the so-called “Crumbles Murder”. Despite a nickname worthy of the family pet, this one was decidedly adult fare.

Patrick Mahon was a 30-something minor crook and major tomcat who had recently conquered his co-worker at the bankrupt soda fountain company Consol Automatic Aerators.

Emily Kaye was “a woman of the world” by Mahon’s nudge-nudge wink-wink report, but she had a mind to be more than a bit on the side for Mahon.

“Her idea,” Mahon later explained in the box as he stood trial for Kaye’s murder, “was that if we were alone together and she could act as my wife, doing the cooking and everything, she would convince me that I could be entirely happy with her.” Such a design the 37-year-old Miss Kaye had no real hope of achieving, but our lothario was more than happy to go along with “this experiment — this love experiment, we called it.”

Their laboratory would be a rented bungalow on the Sussex coast near Eastbourne at a charming strip of beach known as the Crumbles.

Mahon figured it would be convenient for everyone. “After we had finished our experiment and Miss Kaye had returned, my wife and I could use the bungalow.” Clearly these were people involved in two altogether different canoodles. But those canoodles stood Kaye two months pregnant by the time they joined up at the bungalow on April 12, and she was putting her opposite number in a tight spot by telling people that they were engaged. The “love experiment” quickly turned into a Frankenstein’s monster.

On Wednesday, April 16, Mahon left the bungalow alone and took a train back to London, where he kept an assignation with yet another woman, Ethel Duncan. At Mahon’s invitation, Duncan spent that weekend — Easter weekend — at that same Crumbles bungalow. Later, when her little fling was the subject of a humiliating public reckoning, Duncan tearfully said she’d seen no sign of foul play there.

But behind a door that Mahon had screwed shut against his latest girlfriend’s accidental intrusion was a large brown trunk, stuffed with Emily Kaye’s contorted remains.

Mahon’s eventual story — once circumstances required him to produce a story — was that the two had quarreled over their mismatched visions of the future until an enraged Kaye attacked her lover and the two toppled over a chair. Miss Kaye struck her head on a coal bucket in the fall, said Mahon: that’s what killed her.

It was a dubious tale. The lead investigator Bernard Spilsbury, knighted for his pioneering forensic work on the English homicide beat since Dr. Crippen and the Brides in the Bath, noted that a fall upon the bucket heavy enough to cause a mortal injury ought also to have crumpled the bucket. Plus, Mahon had suspiciously purchased a knife and saw just hours prior to the fatal rendezvous.

But Plan A was never to talk to an investigator at all. Mahon was a warm-blooded man when the opportunity presented itself, obviously, but he also had the steel nerve to do the revoltingly meticulous butcher’s work that almost gave him a shot to get away with it.

Once Ethel Duncan returned to London, Mahon unscrewed his secret room and set about thoroughly destroying his victim’s corpse. The head that had shared his pillow Mahon incinerated in the sitting-room grate (apocrypha has it that Mahon said Emily Kaye’s dead eyes flew open during the immolation). Day by day he stewed flesh in pots to soften it for his purposes, so he could systematically cut it down for disposal in the fire or in small bags he could casually dump. Remember that knife and saw he bought just before moving into the bungalow?

As so often with mistresses, the downfall was the wife. Mavourneen had called Patrick Mahon husband since 1910, so she knew what being stepped out on looked like. In late April, she surreptitiously checked the traveling salesman’s jacket pockets and found a railway baggage claim ticket; prevailing on a friend to peep on the left luggage revealed human blood — and when it was reported, authorities set a watch on the bag. Once Mahon turned up to claim it, well, he had a good four months left to reflect on the advisability of disposing of his kit just as thoroughly as he had disposed of Emily Kaye. Maybe he meant to: when police turned up to search the fetid bungalow, they had four parcels of not-yet-disposed human remains for Spilsbury to reassemble as best he could.

On this day..