Alfred Rouse

Alfred Rouse was born in Milkwood Road, Herne Hill, London on 6 April 1894,[n 1] one of three children born to an English father and an Irish mother. His father, Walter, was a hosier, whereas his mother was reportedly an actress[7] who deserted her husband and children in 1900.[7] Following his wife's leaving the household, Rouse's father had little time for his children; consequently, Rouse and his two siblings were largely raised by an aunt on his father's side. Rouse was known as a well-behaved child; he and his siblings attended a local council school where he was regarded as a bright and athletic student. A member of the Church of England, Rouse would later become a sacristan at St Saviour's Church in Stoke Newington.

Upon leaving school at age 14, Rouse worked briefly as an office boy for an estate agent, then found more secure employment at a textile manufacturing firm. He worked at this firm for five years before training as a carpenter, all the while furthering his education by attending numerous evening classes. In addition, Rouse had a substantial musical gift, sang well, and learned how to play various musical instruments, becoming a proficient pianist, violinist, and mandolinist. Rouse's exceptional baritone voice ensured that he regularly sang at his evening classes. In 1909, Rouse obtained employment at a West End furniture manufacturer. Shortly afterwards, he became acquainted with a young clerk named Lily May Watkins, whom he first met at a local dance and with whom he began a relationship.[7]

Just four days after the outbreak of World War I,[8] Rouse enlisted in the British Army and was assigned to the 24th Queen's Regiment as a Private. While training in England before his departure for France, Rouse married his fiancée. This ceremony was conducted at St Saviour's Church, St Albans, on 29 November.

Rouse arrived in France on 15 March 1915, and was stationed in Paris for some weeks before his unit was sent into battle. He would serve with distinction, although he is known to have fathered an illegitimate child during this time. Rouse's unit was then committed to the Battle of Festubert in Artois, which began on 15 May. In a bayonet attack, Rouse came face to face with a German soldier and lunged at him but missed; the memory of waiting just for an instant for the enemy riposte would remain with him for the rest of his life, and his sleep would be plagued by nightmares.[9]

On the last day of the Battle of Festubert (and just ten weeks after his arrival in France), Rouse sustained wounds to his head, knee and thigh from a high-explosive shell which exploded close to his head, sending numerous fragments of shrapnel into his head and leg and rendering him unconscious. Rouse did not regain consciousness until his hospital train passed through the town of Bedford en route to a UK Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit.[10] As a result of his injuries, Rouse remained hospitalised for almost a year; undergoing several operations upon both his left temporal region—some of which were performed to remove embedded shrapnel—and his leg. Rouse's leg injuries left him unable to bend his knee and caused him to develop œdema, severely affecting his ability to walk.[n 2] Rouse was sent to recuperate at military hospitals in Leeds and, later, Clacton-on-Sea.[12] He was formally discharged from the Army on 11 February 1916, and awarded a military pension of twenty shillings per week.[12]

On 30 July 1919, a doctor examining Rouse observed that, while he would not allow his knee to be flexed by more than 30 percent, he now suffered no long-term disability from the head wound he had suffered in battle. This doctor could find no physical reason for Rouse's limitation of his knee movement. As such, this was ascribed to neurosis and his pension, which since September 1918 had been twenty-seven shillings and sixpence per week, was decreased to twelve shillings per week with effect from 17 September 1919. In August 1920, a final examination revealed his head injury had completely healed and the limitations of his knee movement had decreased dramatically. Rouse's pension was terminated the following month, with his receiving a final lump payment of £41. 5s. 0d. in settlement of all his injury claims.

In an effort to regain his health and mobility, Rouse became an active member of a local tennis club. Beginning in 1920, he also undertook a number of jobs which required a degree of physical exertion. Many of these jobs involved the use of vehicles, resulting in Rouse's becoming a moderately skilled mechanic.[9] The same year, he also began to conduct illicit affairs in which he—invariably posing as a single man—seduced any woman or girl he found attractive. The first known woman he seduced was a 14-year-old Edinburgh girl whom he impregnated at age 15, then abandoned, leaving the girl to give birth to her child in a home for unwed mothers.[13] Four years later, in 1925, Rouse began an affair with a Hendon-based domestic servant named Nellie Tucker. In 1928, Tucker gave birth to a baby girl; shortly thereafter, Tucker obtained a child support order (the first of many by various women) against Rouse.[13]

In June 1929, Rouse found employment as a commercial traveller for a Leicester-based firm which primarily sold braces and garters, typically at locations around the South Coast and the Midlands.[14] This employment earned Rouse £4 a week, with expenses paid each Friday, and a sales commission paid every month.[15] Through this employment, Rouse managed to earn sufficient money for him and his wife to obtain a mortgage on a house on Buxted Road in the London borough of Friern Barnet. Furthermore, in the summer of 1930, he also purchased a 1928 Morris Minor.

At just what point Rouse decided on his scheme is not settled, nor how he arrived at it, as following his arrest, he gave several contradictory accounts as to just how and when he devised his plan. However, Rouse did mention that initially, he had begun to think about committing a murder in which he could fake his own death after he had read reports of the murder of a young Scottish barmaid named Agnes Kesson, who had been found murdered in a rural lane[20] in the market town of Epsom in June 1930, and whose murder would ultimately remain unsolved. Furthermore, Rouse would claim the decision for him to ultimately decide to fake his own death had been Tucker's announcement to him in the summer of 1930 that she was expecting her second child by him (an illegitimate daughter would be born on 29 October).[19]

According to Rouse, he had simply "wanted to start afresh", yet to ensure the financial stability of his legal wife and his six-year-old son, he had drawn a life insurance policy for £1,000 in his name months before he executed his plan, to be paid in the event of the accidental death of the owner-driver of his vehicle.[8] This life insurance policy named his legal wife as the beneficiary,[21] and on either 2 or 3 November, he had sought out a man of roughly the same build as himself with whom he had become casually acquainted at a pub named the Swan and Pyramid whom Rouse claimed had previously told him "the usual hard-luck story", and had informed him: "Guv'nor, I've got nobody in the world that cares whether I live or die."[22] In response, Rouse informed the man that, through his employment as a commercial traveller, he would be able to secure a job for him in the Midlands, and that he would be travelling to this location on 5 November.[23]

In his later confession, Rouse specifically stated he had opted to time the fire in his car to be on Guy Fawkes Night, as "a fire would not be noticed so much" on this date due to the typical celebration rituals, and that his victim had readily agreed to accompany him to Leicester on 5 November, upon the promise of his possibly finding work in this city. To minimise any resistance from his victim, Rouse also bought the man a bottle of whisky to consume as he drove north.[24]

At approximately 1:50 in the morning of 6 November 1930, two young men returning from a Guy Fawkes Night dance in the town of Northampton to their homes in the nearby village of Hardingstone saw a fire in the distance. As Guy Fawkes Night had just passed, the men assumed the pyre they could see in the distance was a bonfire. As they walked down Hardingstone Lane[25] toward the fire in the direction of their homes, a neatly dressed man carrying an attaché case passed in the opposite direction. When one of the young men remarked as to the blaze he could see in the distance, Rouse nodded and exclaimed: "It looks like somebody's having a bonfire up there." He then walked past the two men before turning in the direction of the main Northampton-London road.[1][24]

The two men approached the fire, only to discover the source of the flames was actually a Morris Minor ablaze in a verge[14] at the side of the country lane, with the flames reaching up to twelve feet in height. Upon summoning the Hardingstone village constable, Harry Bertie Copping,[26] and the parish constable to the scene, the four men extinguished the fire with water from a nearby pond,[27] only to discover a charred corpse lying across the front seats, with the charred remains of the head on the driver's seat,[28] and the right arm burnt off at the elbow.[29] Constable Copping would later recollect he had initially believed the skull of the victim was actually a scorched rugby ball.[30] Crucially, a wooden mallet was found near the car, with three human hairs attached to the head. Although the fire had all but destroyed the vehicle, the number plate at the rear of the car was largely undamaged in the fire; thus, police were quickly able to determine it belonged to one Alfred Arthur Rouse of Friern Barnet.[31]

Rouse's Morris Minor, photographed on the morning of 6 November.

When the two young men informed investigators of their encounter with the man at the end of Hardingstone Lane, police issued an appeal in both the local and national press, urging the man to come forward and assist them with their inquiries. The case was covered in detail in many national newspapers on 7 November.[32]

A forensic examination of the vehicle revealed a joint on the feeding pipe between the petrol tank and the carburettor of the vehicle had been loosened before the fire had ignited, thus allowing petrol to freely stream both into and beneath the car, indicating the blaze had been deliberate. Moreover, spectroscopic tests[33] conducted upon the victim's blood, and a microscopic examination of his air passages, revealed the victim had been alive, albeit unconscious, when the fire had started.[34] Furthermore, he was estimated to have died within 30 seconds of the onset of the fire. The victim himself was estimated to have been between 33 and 37 years old, and due to the condition of his lungs, had likely worked in an extremely dusty atmosphere throughout his life.

Police visited Rouse's Friern Barnet home to interview his wife. Mrs Rouse was able to confirm her husband had left home at approximately 8:30 p.m. on 5 November to attend a business meeting in Leicester, and that he had arrived home at a time she (incorrectly) believed to be approximately 2 a.m.[35] the following morning, saying nothing. She was then asked to accompany police to Northampton to assist in the identification of the victim. Due to the actual condition of the remains, she was not allowed to see the body, but instead asked to confirm whether she could identify scraps of clothing and a wallet containing 30 shillings which had been found upon the victim. Mrs Rouse stated the items of clothing looked like those her husband had worn, but she could not be certain; the wallet had definitely belonged to her husband.[22]

Rouse himself had hitched a ride to London, arriving at his Friern Barnet home at approximately 6:20 a.m.[35] He remained at his home for just 30 minutes before travelling by train to Glamorganshire to meet with Phyllis Jenkins (whom he had earlier promised to marry). When Jenkins asked Rouse where his car was, he replied that it had been stolen in Northamptonshire the previous day, and that this was why it had taken him 18 hours to reach her. He assured Jenkins that he had reported the theft to both the police and his insurance company. Early the following morning, Rouse's mistress showed him a newspaper displaying an image of his burned-out car which speculated as to whether the deceased occupant had been the owner of the vehicle and questioning whether he had been murdered. In response, Rouse denied that the car was his,[36] before announcing his intentions to travel by coach to Hammersmith Broadway. At 10 a.m. he boarded a coach at Cardiff destined for Hammersmith Broadway. When Rouse's coach had departed, Jenkins informed local police that Rouse had been at her house and of his intended destination; they in turn informed the Metropolitan Police Service of his whereabouts. Consequently, that evening, Rouse was arrested at Hammersmith coach terminal by a Detective-Sergeant Skelly of the Metropolitan Police, who had been waiting for him at the coach terminal.[32]

At the Hammersmith police station, Rouse was informed that officers from Northamptonshire Police were already travelling to Hammersmith to interview him. In response, Rouse offered a rambling statement in which he claimed his victim was a hitchhiker he had encountered near St Albans,[37] and who had accidentally set his vehicle alight while he (Rouse) had left his vehicle to relieve himself. Rouse further claimed he was travelling to Scotland Yard to confess to his crime at the time of his arrest, adding: "I am glad it's all over. I was going to Scotland Yard about it. I was responsible. I am very glad it's over. I have had no sleep."[15][37] Upon the arrival of Northamptonshire police officers, Rouse was cautioned and driven to Northampton police station.

The trial of Alfred Rouse began at the Northampton winter assizes on 26 January 1931.[39] He was tried before Mr. Justice Talbot.[40] The chief prosecuting counsel for the Crown was William Norman Birkett KC; he was assisted by Richard Elwes. The chief defence counsel was Donald Finnemore, who was assisted by A. P. Marshall.[41] On this date, Rouse formally pleaded not guilty to the charge of the murder of an unknown man.[n 5]

The trial lasted just six days. In a final address to the jury Mr. Justice Talbot stated thus: "Of course, there can be no doubt about it that these facts create grave suspicion against this man who was the owner of the car, and who drove it to the place where it was burned. If he is an innocent man he has created a grave suspicion against himself by his own folly."

The jury debated for just 25 minutes before reaching their verdict: Rouse was unanimously found guilty of murder and sentenced to death on 31 January. Having calmly heard the verdict, just prior to the sentence of death being imposed, Rouse firmly declared to Mr. Justice Talbot, "I am innocent, sir."[40] Rouse did lodge an appeal against his conviction, primarily contending immoral character evidence had been submitted at his trial, and that this had influenced the jury. His appeal was heard on 23 February 1931, although it would prove unsuccessful.[1]

The body of Rouse's victim was interred in a grave marked with a simple cross bearing the inscription "In Memory of an Unknown Man. Died Nov. 6, 1930" in the grounds of St. Edmund's Church in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire.[30] A metal box containing several newspaper accounts of Rouse's trial was buried with the victim.[10] A new cross was erected above the grave in August 2022.[50]

Prior to his execution, Rouse refused to assist police in establishing the identity of his victim, simply stating his belief he should not assist officers in this task "as they have not helped me".[51] He did, however, offer a general description of his victim's identity. Rouse claimed the man he killed had been: "Forty years of age, between 5 ft 6 in [and] 5 ft 8 in. tall, respectably dressed in a light-coloured overcoat, with the [general] appearance of a clerk." The man also had "a slight brogue", and had a boxing or sporting tattoo on his right forearm. Furthermore, he had been wearing police boots which Rouse claimed the man had informed him had been given to him by London police. The man also carried a sports diary.[52]

In May 2012, the family of a 23-year-old man named William Briggs—missing since 1930—contacted Northamptonshire Police in the hope advances in DNA profiling may provide a positive identification; the family were redirected to a team of forensic scientists from the University of Leicester and Northumbria University who obtained archived tissue samples of the murdered man for comparison;[53] the mitochondrial DNA samples did not prove to be a match.

To date, DNA testing has revealed nine families whose relatives disappeared around 1930 are not related to the victim of the "Blazing Car Murder."[54][55] Nonetheless, inquiries to establish the victim's identity are ongoing.[5]

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to unidentified murder victims.

• 2014 Science Daily article pertaining to Alfred Rouse
• British Executions case file pertaining to Alred Rouse
• Contemporary BBC news article pertaining to ongoing efforts to establish the identity of Rouse's victim
• Contemporary news article detailing Rouse's appeal against his conviction
• The Daily Telegraph article covering the "Blazing Car Murder" case