It was this request that convinced police he was guilty of the brutal murder of his fifty-seven-year-old grandmother, Grace Jefferies, on Wednesday, June 3, 1970. Found in a 'bloodbath' at her home in Mullin Street, Highdown, on the border between Bournemouth and Poole, Grace had been stabbed and slashed thirty-three times. The press dubbed it 'murder by a thousand cuts' because most of the nonfatal injuries were to her arms and legs, suggesting she had been tortured for some time before her throat was slit. The inescapable conclusion, according to the pathologist, was that she had staggered upstairs to her bedroom while her tormentor slashed at her arms and legs with a carving knife.
Suspicion focused on Stamp when witnesses came forward to say they'd seen him running from Grace's house on Wednesday, June 3, two days before her body was discovered on Friday, June 5. Bloodstains on his clothes seemed to confirm his guilt, and after thirty-six hours of interrogation he confessed to the murder. As with Downing and Kiszko, he had no solicitor present and retracted his confession shortly afterward. He admitted running from Grace's house, but claimed that his grandmother was already dead when he entered with his duplicate key. Horrified by what he had found, he fled home and locked himself in his bedroom, too shocked to tell anyone what he'd seen. It was another forty-eight hours before a postman reported that Grace's curtains had been drawn for several days.
It seemed a straightforward case, yet there were many inconsistencies in the evidence. The pathologist's first estimate suggested Grace had been dead four days before her body was found. This was later amended to forty- eight hours to tie in with the witness statements. At the trial, the pathologist explained the mistake as a 'slip of the pen' and the defense failed to press him. In a similar volte-face, the postman who alerted police to Grace's drawn curtains told the court that when he'd said 'several days' he had meant 'two at the most.' Again, the defense did not press the issue.
The flakes of dried blood on Stamp's trouser knees and shirt cuffs are consistent with his second statement: that ne knelt beside his grandmother's body (two days after the murder if the pathologist's initial estimate was correct) to see if she was dead. They are less consistent with police and prosecution claims that he took a bath to wash off Grace's blood, then, dressed in fresh clothes, brushed against a blood-spattered wall on his departure. If this were true, some of the blood would still have been viscous enough to be absorbed by the fibers, and Stamp's back, behind, shoulders or thighs would have been the contact points, not his knees and cuffs.
The defense made some attempt to challenge the forensic evidence, most of which centered on hair and dried scum taken from the sides and plughole of the bathtub. The prosecution alleged that Stamp had immersed himself in water after the murder in order to clean himself. Both sides agreed that whoever killed Grace would have been covered in blood. The prosecution case was that Stamp had either committed the murder naked or removed bloodstained clothes from the property. This latter suggestion gained credibility after a witness said Stamp was carrying a black polythene bag when he ran from the house. (This bag was never recovered despite an intensive police search.)
The scum showed traces of Grace's blood group, and the hairs were identified as Stamp's. In addition, Stamp's fingerprints were found on the bathroom door and lavatory seat. Adam Fanshaw, Queen Counsel, counsel for the defense, succeeded in striking out the fingerprint evidence by arguing that Stamp was a regular visitor to the house. However, he was hampered over the hair evidence by Stamp's own insistence that he had never taken a bath in Grace's house.
The pathologist for the defense, Dr. John Foyle, put up a strong argument against the hairs being Stamp's by quoting Professor Keith Simpson, the noted Home Office pathologist, in a comment made during the 1943 Leckey trial. (Gunner Dennis Leckey was tried for the murder of Caroline Traylor in 1943. Although found guilty and sentenced to death, Leckey was acquitted by the Court of Criminal Appeal on a technicality and allowed to walk free. Although Professor Simpson's comments referred to a 1943 case, they were still true thirty-five years later when he repeated them in
The word 'identical' does not mean the hairs necessarily came from the same person, only that they
Unfortunately, Dr. Foyle crumpled under cross-examination when Fanshaw failed to protect him against prosecution jibes of inexperience and publicity seeking. In a damaging about-face which implied the hairs were Stamp's, he said it was just as probable that 'the hairs had been deposited in the bath on a previous occasion.'
Stamp's mother, Wynne, made a poor witness for hei son and should never have been called. Timid and of low intelligence, she stammered through her evidence, misunderstanding many of the questions that were put to her She used her day in court to highlight her own problems-'I've had a terrible time because of Howard's physical and mental troubles ... no one knows what I've had to put up with ... there ought to be help for people like me...' She could give no explanation for why Howard had been at Grace's house on the Wednesday when he'd been due to start a job at Jannerway & Co. (a local dairy) that afternoon, except to say that he was 'lazy.' Nevertheless, she held firmly to her belief that Howard would never have hurt his grandmother. 'He always went to her when he was depressed. She understood him because she had a cleft palate too. It runs in the family.'
Grace's disability (an untreated cleft palate had left her with a severe speech impediment) had made her as reclusive as her grandson. Sent into service in 1928 at the age of fifteen, she gave birth to Wynne a year later. Nothing was known about the father, although the fact that she continued to be employed by the same family, and was allowed to keep her child, suggests that she may have been raped by a member of the household. Ten years later, aged twenty-six, she married Arthur Jefferies, forty-three, a merchant seaman who adopted Wynne and provided the home in Highdown, Bournemouth, where Grace lived for the rest of her life.
Tragically for Grace, Arthur was killed in 1942 during an attack on a North Sea convoy, and she became a widow before she was thirty. Three years later, aged just sixteen, Wynne met, and subsequently married, Fred Stamp, a farm worker from Bere Regis in Dorset. The marriage was of short duration-Wynne blamed their baby's 'ugliness' for the break-up-and mother and son returned to Bournemouth to live in council accommodation in Colliton Way, half a mile from Grace's home in Mullin Street. While there is no evidence that Grace and Wynne did not get on, it seems there was little communication between the two women.
Grace was variously described by neighbors as 'odd,' 'eccentric,' 'a bit of a recluse,' 'shy,' 'not very friendly.' She was probably all of these things because, like her grandson, she would have found social interaction difficult. Certainly she had few callers, although a more likely reason for Wynne's failure to visit was that she didn't have a car and worked full-time as a packer at Brackham & Wright's tool factory in Glazeborough Road.
There is some evidence that Stamp went to his grandmother's house whenever he bunked off school. Neighbors mentioned seeing a child in the garden during the summers of the 1950s. If so, Grace never reported it to his mother or the truancy officer, and this would have persuaded Stamp that his grandmother was a safe refuge from bullies. Certainly, as he grew older he became a more frequent visitor, which is why he was identified so easily by the witnesses who saw him running away. 'It was that skinny grandson,' said one. 'He used to hide with Grace instead of signing-on [for work].'
The prosecution argued at trial that Stamp's instability and self-abuse had increased to such a point that Grace had become afraid of him. As proof they quoted a letter to Wynne in which she said, 'Howard's started shouting
