Unsolved case · 1907
Also known as Camden Town Murder
Emily DimmockCredit: Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons (Camden Town murder)Public domainSourceThe short answer
Sex worker Emily Dimmock was found with her throat cut in her Camden Town home in September 1907; artist Robert Wood was tried for her murder and acquitted after a defence by Edward Marshall Hall.
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Suggest coverage for this caseOn 11 September 1907, Emily Elizabeth Dimmock, known as Phyllis, a part-time sex worker in a relationship with railwayman Bertram Shaw, was murdered at her home at Agar Grove (then 29 St Paul's Road) in Camden, London. She had gone there from The Eagle public house on Royal College Street. Her attacker slit her throat while she was asleep and left the following morning.
On 12 September, Shaw returned home in the evening to find his room locked. After borrowing a key from a neighbour, he entered and found Phyllis lying naked on the bed with her throat cut from ear to ear. The attack was described as savage but skillful in its execution. Little appeared to have been taken from the flat, and the motive was never established. The case quickly became a public sensation.
Following initial difficulties, the police investigation, led by Inspector Neill, centred on Robert Wood, an artist. A former girlfriend of Wood's, Ruby Young, recognised his handwriting on a postcard found in Dimmock's room, which had been published in numerous newspapers; she mentioned the resemblance to a friend working in Fleet Street. This led to Wood being identified as a suspect and subsequently put on trial for the murder.
At trial, Wood's defence counsel Edward Marshall Hall conducted the kind of effective and dramatic cross-examination for which he was well known. Marshall Hall was convinced of Wood's innocence and of weaknesses in the prosecution's case. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Grantham, departed mid-summing-up from the pro-conviction stance he had been expected to take, making clear he believed the jury should acquit. The jury did so, after retiring for approximately fifteen minutes between 7:45 and 8:00 pm.
The case had a lasting cultural afterlife. The artist Walter Sickert adopted the phrase "The Camden Town Murder" as the title for a series of etchings, paintings, and drawings produced in 1908–09, each depicting a clothed man and a nude woman. The case was later dramatised in "The Post Card," a 1952 episode of the radio anthology series The Black Museum starring Orson Welles, and in an episode of Secrets of Scotland Yard titled "Scales of Justice," starring Clive Brook. It also featured in "The Robert Wood Trial," an episode of the television series Killer in Close-Up, produced by Sydney station ABN-2 and broadcast on 4 September 1957. More than thirty years later, the case was dramatised again in a 1989 episode of the BBC series Shadow of the Noose, with Jonathan Hyde as Marshall Hall and Peter Capaldi as Wood.
Emily Dimmock is murdered at her home in Camden Town, her throat cut while she slept.
Bertram Shaw returns home, finds the room locked, and discovers Dimmock's body after borrowing a key from a neighbour.
Walter Sickert begins a series of paintings and etchings titled 'The Camden Town Murder' (continuing into 1909).
The case is dramatised as 'The Post Card,' an episode of the radio series The Black Museum starring Orson Welles.
The Robert Wood trial is dramatised in an episode of the television series Killer in Close-Up, broadcast by Sydney station ABN-2.
The case is dramatised in an episode of the BBC series Shadow of the Noose, with Jonathan Hyde as Marshall Hall and Peter Capaldi as Robert Wood.
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