The most convincing case against the man did not rest on proof of motive, nor on the testimony of those who had watched him hover at the sickbed of a wealthy woman. It rested on nothing at all, because the one thing the law demanded above all else—evidence that a murder had actually been committed—was missing. Edith Marian Ross had died in her house in West London in 1932, and her family, the police, and many others never doubted that she had been murdered. The evidence pointed to the killer.
But the cause of her death proved elusive, and without proof of murder, the strongest case in the world could never be brought before a judge. For that reason, the death of Edith Marian Ross at Hyde Park Terrace in 1932 would come to be called the perfect murder. On 19 August 1932, shortly after lunch, Edith Marian Ross fell violently ill in her home. Before the meal she had felt perfectly well; within minutes of eating she was deathly sick, vomiting and stricken with diarrhea.
Her housekeeper, a woman named Lotty, sent for a doctor and, at Mrs. Ross’s request, also for her friend Arthur Monty Gregory, who shared the house with her but was at his office in Whitehall at the time. “I feel so ill,” she said. “I don’t know whether he will be here in time.
”
In fact, Gregory arrived at Hyde Park Terrace around three o’clock, at the same moment as the doctor, and both hurried to the bedside. Dr. Plummer examined the fifty-nine-year-old woman and concluded that, since the weather on 19 August was very warm, she was suffering from sunstroke. He prescribed complete bed rest, aspirin, and ice.
Ill as she was, or perhaps precisely because she was so ill, Mrs. Ross wanted to make a will. The matter was so urgent that Arthur Monty Gregory, her friend, took a discarded restaurant card from Mayfair and a pencil, and Mrs. Ross dictated her last will to him, which he then wrote out on the back of the menu.
It was signed by Mrs. Ross with some difficulty, witnessed by Dr. Plummer and Mrs. Lotty.
But her conviction that she was in a critical state proved wrong, for in the days that followed she recovered. The next week she went out driving, and by the beginning of September her health and spirits were back to normal. On the evening of Saturday, 3 September, Mrs. Ross dined with Arthur Monty Gregory in the upstairs flat at Hyde Park Terrace.
Shortly after midnight she was struck down by the same terrible illness. It was just after midnight when Dr. Plummer was summoned. This time he thought some form of blood poisoning was responsible, possibly a dysfunction of her kidneys.
In the days that followed, Mrs. Ross regained consciousness only in fits and starts and was confused. Two specialists saw her and gave differing opinions on the cause of her illness. At 12:45 in the early morning of 14 September, she died.
Dr. Plummer gave the cause of death as a brain hemorrhage and chronic Bright’s disease, a collective term for kidney disorders. Arthur Monty Gregory, her friend from the flat upstairs, made the arrangements for her funeral at a small cemetery in Bisham near Marlow, on the banks of the river. It was there that Edith Marian Ross was laid to rest on 19 September 1932.
The familiar addition Requiescat was carved at the foot of her marble cross headstone: May she rest in peace. For a short time, she did. Edith Marian Ross was born Edith Davis in 1873 in Edmonton, North London. She was an attractive woman with a good singing voice, went on the stage, and earned a good income as an actress in musical comedies.
She appeared in Dorothy, The Duchess of Danzig, and in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas under the stage name Vivian Pierpoint. In the early 1900s she met the composer Frederick Ross, and they married in 1908, informally adopting her brother’s daughter, Ethel Davis, after he was widowed around 1911. The couple became very friendly with an actor and impresario named Arthur Monty Gregory, and the three lived together in a wooden bungalow called Vanity Fair on Ditton Island on the Thames. Later they moved to number three Abbey Road in St.
John’s Wood, the house that would be bought forty years later by the Beatles as a recording studio, outside which John, Paul, George, and Ringo famously walked across the zebra crossing in the summer of 1969. In 1923 Edith and Frederick Ross separated. Edith and her niece Ethel stayed with Monty Gregory at Abbey Road. Arthur Gregory and Edith were close in a platonic sense.
He was probably a latent homosexual, and they told people they were brother and sister to keep up appearances. Edith spent much of the money she received from her husband on property. By the time of her death in 1932 she owned four houses and seven flats. She also had considerable savings.
Her niece Ethel stayed with her regularly, but the two women had a stormy relationship. Edith was demanding, and Ethel had a rebellious nature. Edith had made a will in Ethel’s favor, but after a quarrel over a ring she had given Ethel and which Ethel had pawned, she tore it up and said, “Now you have burned your boats behind you. ” Privately she relented, made a new will in Ethel’s favor, and continued to support her with a weekly allowance.
Sometime in the third week of September, Ethel Davis visited her aunt at Hyde Park Terrace. She was shocked to learn from the housekeeper that Mrs. Ross had died and been buried. Everything had been arranged by her aunt’s friend Arthur Gregory, without the family’s knowledge.
Ethel Davis telephoned Arthur Maundy Gregory. He was rather reserved and told her he could not discuss her aunt’s illness with her because it was a matter of professional confidence. Questions put to Dr. Plummer produced an equally short and unhelpful reply.
He too pleaded professional secrecy. Ethel’s father, Fred Davis, visited Monty Gregory’s office at 38 Parliament Street, but his secretary, a Mr. Prattley, said he was too ill to receive anyone. He telephoned Dr.
Plummer’s practice for an appointment, but the next day received a letter from the doctor curtly refusing, again on the grounds of professional secrecy. Fred Davis then went to the coroner in Paddington, who simply advised him to consult a solicitor. He decided to write to Maundy Gregory to ask about his sister’s grave and also about her will, in which, he said, his sister had led him to believe he would share. He received a reply from Mr.
Gregory’s secretary:
“Dear Sir, Mr. Gregory has asked me to thank you for your letter. He would be glad to consider giving you, at some later date, a small present from himself as a memento. Yours faithfully, G.
Prattley. ”
It was frustrating, but Fred Davis did not give up. He visited Somerset House, the public archives, and asked to see Edith Ross’s will. There he discovered, written on the back of a menu in pencil and in a handwriting he did not recognize, a will that read: “All that I possess, should anything happen to me, I leave to Mr.
J. Maury Gregory, to be disposed of as he thinks fit and in accordance with my wishes. ”
It was a shock. Fred Davis thought the will must be a forgery.
He wrote to Edith Ross’s estranged husband, Frederick Ross, who lived in Torquay, and told him of his suspicions. Ross put the matter to his solicitors for advice. He was himself somewhat concerned, because under their separation agreement he had paid Edith half his yearly income for the past ten years, a total of no less than £4,000—at 2020 standards, at least a quarter of a million pounds. He also realized, as he pointed out to Fred Davis, that he was still legally married to Edith at the time of her death and was therefore legally her next of kin.
By the turn of the year 1933, Ethel Davis was living on charity in a convent, and Fred Davis was ruined. Then, on 7 February, Ethel Davis saw a newspaper headline that stunned her. Arthur Maundy Gregory had been charged with trying to sell a knighthood to a rich man for £10,000. The newspapers were full of the story, and Ethel Davis knew she had a bigger story to tell, because she believed Maundy Gregory was more than a swindler.
He was a murderer. Emboldened by this knowledge, she went straight to Scotland Yard and spoke to Inspector Arthur Askew, who was leading the investigation. She soon convinced him she had much to tell about Maundy Gregory. And indeed she did.
It took Detective Percy Ruffett and Constable Hodges three days to record Ethel’s statement, which ran to sixty pages. Inspector Askew pondered the case. On the face of it, a wealthy fifty-nine-year-old woman had died. She had been under a doctor’s care, and the doctor had signed a death certificate giving the cause of death as natural causes.
But Arthur Maundy Gregory, the man present when she died and the sole beneficiary of her will, was not merely someone charged with trying to sell a title. He was suspected of a bewildering number of crimes, including fraud, receiving stolen goods, and blackmail. He was also a man with friends in high places, and so far he had proved surprisingly adept at evading prosecution. Arthur Maundy Gregory was born in 1877 in Southampton, the son of the vicar of St.
Michael’s Church. He attended Banister Court School there and studied divinity for a time at Oxford, intending to be ordained. At school he discovered a love of the theater and became friends with another boy, Harold Davidson, who would become a lifelong acquaintance and would himself be known as the notorious rector of Stiffkey. The parallel is worth noting, for there are extraordinary likenesses in the careers and fortunes of the two friends.
It seems rather strange that two such bad apples were contemporaries, friends, and former pupils of the same school. Harold Davidson’s fall from his pedestal as rector of Stiffkey was as spectacular as that of his friend Monty Gregory, when it was discovered that his calling to save the souls of London prostitutes involved a great deal more than saving their souls. He was defrocked—ironic, given that a photograph surfaced of him with a lady who was herself out of her clothes. After starting out as an actor, Monty Gregory formed a touring company, and in 1908, with the help of his friend Harold Davidson, brought a West End production of Dorothy to the stage.
It was there that he met Edith Ross. The two became platonic friends. The Rosses shared Maundy Gregory’s homes and vice versa, until Frederick and Edith separated. But Monty Gregory was not successful as an impresario.
His talents lay in his bonhomie, his fatherly air of heartiness. It gave him the perfect role, one he would play for the rest of his life. He knew a great number of people in the theater world and beyond. In 1914 he established himself as a kind of private detective.
He had a gift for uncovering people’s private sexual habits and indiscretions, and he soon found he could use the information to blackmail them. He also began supplying information to MI5. He was probably responsible for obtaining the so-called black diaries of Sir Roger Casement, whose wide circulation, with their explicit homosexual content, led to a decline in public sympathy for Casement after he was condemned to death for high treason in 1916. The calls for clemency for Casement had been loud; he had done remarkable humanitarian work in his younger years.
The American Senate spoke in favor of mercy for Casement, and Britain in 1916 was eagerly courting the United States in the hope of drawing it into the First World War. Sharing Casement’s diaries with the American ambassador in St. James brought about a rapid collapse of that support, and Casement was executed. But the secret service did not trust Monty Gregory.
A report written in March 1926 began: “We know him and we do not trust him. ”
He became editor of a society magazine called Mayfair and also of the Whitehall Gazette. But it was in 1918 that he became involved in the scandal for which he is best remembered. Prime Minister Lloyd George needed to raise money for the Liberal Party to fight the coming general election, and he decided to do it by selling titles for cash.
Maundy Gregory was just the man for the job. He used his knowledge of people on the fringes of society, their lives and ambitions and, above all, their vanity, to sell them honors. The going rate for a knighthood was about £10,000—today about three-quarters of a million pounds—and for a peerage £40,000, roughly £2. 5 million now.
Monty Gregory approached people with this tariff, and after 1918 a great many peerages and knighthoods were handed out. The Liberal Party’s war chest filled with money, and so did Monty Gregory’s own pockets. He became a very wealthy man. He was, it must be said, a generous man.
He gave money freely to people he knew. He financed an author to write a book about the eccentric Baron Corvo, whom he admired. He paid £5,000 for gilding in Westminster Abbey and made sure everyone knew it. He acquired the Ambassador’s Club in Conduit Street, which he used as a cover for much of his business, and also the ninety-room Deep Dean Hotel in Surrey, with the help of a shady second-generation Italian named Peter Matsina who was in his employ.
Most of his shady ventures lost money, but the trade in titles was very lucrative. Around 1922 the sale of titles became a national scandal. Four notorious businessmen and war profiteers were elevated to the peerage and took their seats in the House of Lords, which infuriated King George V, even though it was widely known they had bought their titles. Amid public outrage, Parliament decided to intervene.
The practice was curbed by the Honors Commission of 1922, and in 1925 the Honors (Prevention of Abuses) Act explicitly banned the sale of honors and made it an offense to sell or buy a title of the United Kingdom. It was a blow to Monty Gregory, but Monty was nothing if not adaptable. He continued secretly offering honors to people who did not know he had no titles to give at all. When he sold titles that were never granted, the buyers found themselves in the awkward position of being unable to report him to the police, because they themselves would be guilty of attempting to buy one.
Monty Gregory was now a full-time swindler. His approach was comical, even incredible. A prospective client would be brought to his luxurious office at 38 Parliament Square, a stone’s throw from Number 10 Downing Street, where he sat behind a large desk with a battery of telephones and signed photographs of various royal personages. He greeted his intended victim with an outstretched hand covered in rings.
They would notice his diamond-studded cufflinks, a black pearl pin, and he would offer them a cigarette from a gold case, mentioning casually that it was a gift from the King of Greece. Perhaps they would like to meet him. The telephone would ring, and he would carry on a vague conversation, saying at some point, “Of course, Your Majesty,” or “Naturally, Your Royal Highness. ” He would inevitably be interrupted by a private secretary who whispered that Number 10 was on the line.
He would excuse himself apologetically while twisting between his fingers a large pink diamond he kept in his waistcoat pocket, which had apparently once belonged to the Tsar of Russia. He was also known to drive a potential dupe to Buckingham Palace, stop for a moment, apologize, then appear to enter the palace through a side entrance. After a while he would reappear, apologize to his intended victim, and tell them how important it was that he not be seen entering through the main gate. His Majesty would not appreciate it, he would tell them solemnly.
On that point, he was probably right. But Monty Gregory’s fortune was in terminal decline. The new laws and other measures had a serious impact on his activities, and when a wealthy man died after paying him for a title he never received, his family sued, and Monty Gregory was forced to repay the money: £30,000, about £2. 5 million today.
He did not have it, and he took ever greater risks trying to make up his losses. Like a gambler doubling his stake, he also diversified. He converted to Roman Catholicism and began offering papal knighthoods for sale. He awarded one to himself and became Sir Arthur Monty Gregory.
The Roman Catholic father of Mia Farrow paid for an annulment of his marriage so he could marry the actress Maureen O’Sullivan. He did not get it. Gregory then set up the Anglo-Ukrainian Committee, ostensibly to fight Bolshevism, but used it to sell Ukrainian titles and pocketed the money himself. His debts mounted.
His sources of income shrank. He took ever greater risks, and in December 1932 he tried to sell a baronetcy to Lieutenant-Commander Billyard-Leake. That was a mistake. Billyard-Leake was a wealthy landowner—old money, not a new industrialist seeking acceptance at the edges of society.
Billyard-Leake went straight to the authorities. This led to Monty Gregory being charged under the Honors Act. Inspector Askew knew Monty Gregory was dishonest to the core, a man without scruples, a swindler, a practiced liar. But was he a murderer?
By the summer of 1932 Monty Gregory was in serious financial trouble. At that point he turned to his friend Edith Marian Ross for a loan. She refused him, and only a few weeks after she refused the loan, Mrs. Ross fell violently ill and died.
Askew took statements from the doctors, the undertaker, and the brother and niece of the dead woman. Consultation with medical experts produced the unambiguous opinion that the symptoms described by those present during Mrs. Ross’s illness pointed to acute poisoning, and nothing that could be attributed to a brain hemorrhage or Bright’s disease. But the opinion of a whole medical community, based only on reported symptoms, was of little value against the stubborn fact of the death certificate issued by the attending physician.
Askew interviewed Mr. Benjamin Pangelli, the accountant of Monty Gregory and Mrs. Ross, who told him that Mrs. Ross had made a second will after tearing up the original.
Ethel was still the principal beneficiary, and Monty Gregory was still left nothing. Pangelli also told him that the cash books and a ledger of Mrs. Ross’s accounts, which he had requested from Monty Gregory, had been sent to him, but that sections had been removed. In total, twenty-nine pages were missing.
Pangelli also said that Mrs. Ross had told him Monty Gregory had been very short-tempered lately and she thought he was worried about his finances. She expressed surprise at this, because she thought he was very wealthy. She also asked whether Mr.
Pangelli had told Gregory about her financial deposits, which seemed to indicate her concern about Gregory’s interest in her finances. In addition, Frederick Ross, her estranged husband, vigorously denied that his wife would have made such a will, and certainly not while in full possession of her faculties. Inspector Askew had accumulated a large amount of circumstantial evidence, but he knew it did little more than suggest Monty Gregory had the motive to commit murder. There was nothing in the way of actual proof that a murder had been committed.
The prosecution concerning the sale of titles was already difficult enough and loaded with political sensitivities. A poorly supported accusation of murder risked disturbing that delicate matter. The investigation moved slowly. There were discussions at Scotland Yard about the evidence, which was believed strong enough for a conviction, but there was still a lack of proof that a murder had taken place.
The case needed a push to take the next step. On 6 April it came. The solicitors of Mr. Ross applied for an exhumation of the body of Edith Marian Ross.
They wanted a second opinion on the cause of death. Six days later, on the advice of Scotland Yard, it was granted. Meanwhile, Monty Gregory, appearing in court for the attempted sale of a baronetcy, pleaded guilty on the advice of his counsel, Norman Birkett. He may also have received a promise that if he confessed, thereby sparing many public figures a great deal of embarrassment and helping them avoid a huge scandal, he would afterwards be looked after.
As a result, the case never went to trial, and he received a sentence of two months’ imprisonment and a £50 fine. As far as the police were concerned, Monty Gregory was now safely in prison while the matter of Mrs. Ross’s death was investigated. On the morning of 28 April 1933, Askew received the order to exhume Mrs.
Ross’s body, and he acted quickly. By nightfall he, Dr. Roche Lynch, the Home Office analyst, and other detectives stood at the grave in the riverside cemetery at Bisham. A crane was set up over the grave, the half-ton marble cross was lifted off, and then the men began digging away the heavy, sticky river clay.
It did not take long, for the coffin was buried only eighteen inches below the surface. Canvas straps were passed beneath it, and the men raised it to the surface. Water streamed out as the coffin tilted slightly. It was a bad omen.
Roche Lynch swore and tried to catch some of the draining water in a cup. The undertaker peered at the brass nameplate and confirmed it was the coffin of Edith Ross. It was then sealed with red tape, and the ends of the coffin were also sealed. It was rolled some twenty yards to a waiting van, then taken under police escort to the Paddington mortuary, where it arrived that evening and remained overnight.
The next morning at ten o’clock, the press, having learned an inquest would be opened, gathered in force at the coroner’s court in Paddington, which was housed in the same building as the mortuary. Inspector Askew arrived first with other detectives. Then came Roche Lynch with a large square box in which empty specimen jars could be seen. Then the pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, arrived shortly after ten in the morning.
With the coffin on the table, Spilsbury cut through the seals under the watchful eyes of Askew and Roche Lynch. The lid was raised, and Spilsbury was appalled. The coffin, lined with lead because the cemetery was in the Thames floodplain, had not been sealed. It was customary to seal the coffin by soldering down the lid, but this had not been done, and the coffin was full of water.
Since the body had lain underground for several months, the state of preservation was not good. It was a great disappointment. After Frederick Ross had confirmed the identity of his wife’s body, it was lifted from the coffin, and Spilsbury began his grim work with his usual briskness, interrupted only by his short observations. Various organs, including the stomach, liver, kidneys, brain, and heart, were removed and placed by Roche Lynch in glass jars.
While the autopsy was under way, Samuel Ingelby Oddie, the coroner for Paddington, opened the inquest into the death of Edith Marian Ross just a few feet away. Her husband, Frederick Ross, confirmed the identity of the woman in the coffin as his wife, Edith. The formalities of identification were complete. Ingelby Oddie adjourned the inquest to allow the pathologist, the analyst, and the police to complete their inquiries.
It had all taken less than ten minutes. Later that same day, in the early evening of 29 April, the coffin of Edith Marian Ross was reburied in her grave at Bisham cemetery, while a fascinated crowd gathered on the opposite bank of the Thames to watch the proceedings. In the weeks that followed, speculation ran wild. The Daily Herald confidently claimed poison had been found.
It was widely known this was a murder inquiry. Maundy Gregory featured prominently in newspaper reports, and attention on him was intense. He was not seen. Where was he?
It was known he had been released from prison. Inspector Askew hoped to arrest Monty Gregory and subject him to the pressure of questioning, but he received disappointing news. Gregory had been released early from Wormwood Scrubs on the morning of 12 April for good conduct. He had been met at the prison gates by a friend of J.
C. C. Davidson, the chairman of the Conservative Party. He was driven to Newhaven, where he took the ferry to Dieppe.
Within twelve hours of his release from prison, Arthur Maundy Gregory was in Paris. Detective-Inspector Arthur Askew knew nothing of this development until it was too late. It was a serious setback to his investigation. His only hope now was that the coroner would order Monty Gregory to return.
The inquest finally resumed on 19 July. The coroner’s court was full. The family was present, as were the detectives, the expert witnesses, and an army of reporters, but of the principal figure, Monty Gregory, there was of course no trace. The coroner opened the proceedings with an account of the events leading to the death and exhumation of Mrs.
Ross. That account clearly followed the official story. In August 1932, the coroner said, Monty Gregory was in financial difficulties; he owed £1,000 and was being hounded by creditors. He spoke of Mrs.
Ross’s sudden illness after lunch on 19 August and the unlikely diagnosis of sunstroke by Dr. Plummer. He referred to the arrival of Monty Gregory from Whitehall and the hastily dictated will, in pencil on the back of a menu. He referred to Mrs.
Ross’s recovery under her own doctor, and to her being taken seriously ill a second time on the night of 3–4 September after dining with Monty Gregory, which led to her death on 14 September. He said Monty Gregory had then obtained probate of the will and immediately began distributing the estate. Mr. Gregory had arranged her funeral, and the questions of family members had led to a police investigation and the exhumation of her body.
Frederick Ross, her estranged husband, was again the first witness. He gave an account of his separation from his wife in December 1923 and said he had not seen her since. He said he had learned of her death from a letter sent to him by Monty Gregory. It read: “Dear Fred, the poor Edith passed peacefully away early this morning at ten to one.
She had a sunstroke nearly a month ago. She had a relapse last Saturday week. We did everything we could for her. Three specialists and two nurses.
She did not suffer at all at the end. Yours, JMG. ”
Lotty, Mrs. Ross’s housekeeper, said she had always believed her mistress and Monty Gregory were brother and sister.
Mrs. Ross’s lunch on 19 August had consisted of sandwiches and half a bottle of champagne. She had heard Mrs. Ross call out, “Come quickly, Henri.
I am so ill. ” She collapsed on the bed, and Lotty and the other housekeeper, Mrs. Wells, put her to bed. Mrs.
Kate Wells, who was Monty Gregory’s housekeeper on the upper floors, told the court that Monty Gregory had made the drinks on the evening of 3 September. Hilda May Howard, a former housekeeper of Mrs. Ross, said that when she visited her on 4 September she found her ill and cared for her. She said all of Mrs.
Ross’s food was prepared by Mrs. Wells. The coroner’s questioning indicated his suspicions in the case. “Was Mr.
Monty Gregory often in her room? ” he asked her. “Very often,” she replied. Did he ever give her anything to eat?
Nothing at all. Dr. F. Kerno Plummer said he had never treated Mrs.
Ross until he was called in on 19 August. The will was genuine, he said, and was dictated in his presence. The coroner asked him: “Did you ever suspect that your patient had been given any poison? ” “No,” he replied.
Mr. Benjamin George Pangelli, accountant, said Mrs. Ross had left an estate of about £18,800, about £1. 4 million today.
He said Mrs. Ross had told him that Monty Gregory had put pressure on her for financial help before July 1932. She had refused him. She had made a will in 1923 leaving her niece, Miss Ethel Davis, as principal beneficiary, and Monty Gregory benefited not at all.
He said Gregory had persuaded her to tear up and destroy the will because the niece was causing so much trouble. She had, however, relented and made another will, again leaving her niece the principal beneficiary of her estate, and still leaving nothing to Monty Gregory. He spoke of large sections removed from her cash books when he received them from Monty Gregory. Walter William Mann, undertaker, said he had asked Monty Gregory whether he wanted the coffin sealed, and he had refused.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury told the court he could not establish the cause of death. He said there had been no brain hemorrhage and there were no signs of Bright’s disease. He agreed with the coroner that the death certificate was completely wrong. Dr.
Roche Lynch said he had found no trace of poison or harmful substances in the samples he had taken. He said this could be due to the watery condition of the body, as it had lain under water for months because the grave was on the banks of the Thames. Dr. George M.
Blair, Mrs. Ross’s regular physician, said he had been very surprised to learn that Mrs. Ross had died. There was nothing in her health to suggest a serious illness.
Inspector Askew said he had summoned Monty Gregory to appear at the inquest, but he had not done so, and it was believed he was in Paris. The solicitor for Mrs. Ross’s family, a Mr. Vine, questioned Askew searchingly.
“You have had no opportunity of speaking to him? ” he asked. “That is correct,” replied Askew. “He would be a very important witness.
” “I agree with that view. ” He then requested that Monty Gregory be brought before the court for questioning. But the coroner refused. He said that, given that no cause of death had been found, the only possible verdict the jury could return was an open verdict.
He also said it would serve no purpose to subject Maundy Gregory to cross-examination, because it would lead to nothing; the result was negative. He said: “No poison has been found, and no poison will ever be found in the body. ” Therefore, no charge could arise from this inquiry. He recorded: “There is insufficient evidence to show the cause of death of Mrs.
Ross, which therefore remains undetermined,” and with that the case was closed. It was a great pity the coroner refused the opportunity to subject Monty Gregory to critical questioning. He was the most important witness on whom the whole narrative in the courtroom had centered. Inspector Askew had hoped that, despite the negative results of Roche Lynch’s poison tests, he could compel Monty Gregory’s return through a coroner’s warrant, which would allow him to arrest him.
It was highly unsatisfactory. The coroner may have felt he had little choice, since the failure to establish a cause of death meant it could only be an unexplained death. If the death could not be shown to be the result of murder, then there could be no murderer. It was a sad end to the police investigation and thoroughly unsatisfactory for the relatives of Mrs.
Ross. The narrative the coroner followed in the courtroom left little doubt he suspected Monty Gregory of murder. His whole manner of questioning was directed toward that end, constantly probing the motive and opportunity Monty Gregory might have had. And he did this knowing, as he had known for weeks, that no poison had been found in the organs by Roche Lynch and that Spilsbury had been unable to establish a cause of death.
His purpose was therefore clear: to indicate that the death was highly suspicious, that it remained so, and that only Monty Gregory could be connected with it by motive and opportunity. But he was equally clear that, however great those suspicions, further legal steps were impossible because no evidence existed or ever could exist. The coroner, Ingelby Oddie, was both lawyer and doctor. He had even played a part in the prosecution of Dr.
Crippen twenty years earlier. He knew the inquiry could lead nowhere. That may explain why, during the hearing, he so deliberately pointed at Monty Gregory’s actions and questioned in such a suggestive manner. It would, however, still have been within his power to issue a summons for Monty Gregory to account fully for his conduct in the case.
He was, after all, the crucial witness around whom all the actions surrounding Mrs. Ross’s death seemed to revolve. It is unlikely this would have led to a different verdict at the inquest, but it would have allowed critical questions to be put to him. It would also, of course, have given Inspector Askew the opportunity to arrest Gregory and obtain a detailed statement from him.
Spilsbury himself had no doubt about the case. There was no chronic disease that could explain Edith Ross’s death, and her symptoms pointed strongly toward poisoning. He believed the burial had deliberately taken place in the Thames floodplain to ensure evidence would be lost. Roche Lynch too was appalled that the body and coffin were so full of water, because the lead lid had not been sealed.
He also noted in court that he had never seen a coffin buried so close to the surface. And of course, the police were fairly certain Monty Gregory had murdered Mrs. Ross, and that he had done so to obtain her money. Years later, Inspector Askew said: “I am convinced Gregory murdered Mrs.
Ross. Moreover, if he had not fled the country on his release from Wormwood Scrubs, I would have arrested him again on a charge of murder. ”
What sly tricks Monty Gregory used to persuade Mrs. Ross to disinherit her niece in his favor, we cannot know.
But he was a man schooled in the art of getting people to part with money for a handful of beans. It is probable the will she made was written in words devised by Monty Gregory. It is simply not credible that the words in the will were words she herself spoke. In her confused state, he probably asked her a series of carefully phrased suggestive questions, such as: “You want me to arrange matters as you wish, dear?
” She would naturally agree, and a careless doctor and housekeeper would believe they had heard her dictate her will. The use of pencil in the transcription was also remarkable. Both Maundy Gregory and the doctor signed their names in pen. The police suspected it was written in pencil so it could later be altered if needed.
But of course, none of this was enough to charge Monty Gregory, let alone convict him. The most compelling circumstances meant nothing if it could not be proved that a murder had been committed at all. The prosecution does not waste time on cases that cannot be won, or that have no good chance of success. It has been suggested Monty Gregory took advantage of the accidental natural death of Mrs.
Ross. That is unlikely. Too many circumstances speak against it: the timing of her death, the suddenness of her illness, the onset of her final illness after dining with Monty Gregory on 3 September, the will drawn up three weeks earlier in his favor, dictated to him, leaving everything to him, the circumstances of his financial difficulties and her refusal of a loan to him. The choice of burial place, the shallowness of the grave, and the unsealed coffin all raise the overwhelming suspicion that he did indeed murder Edith Ross.
But that is not the same as legal proof. If poison had been found in Mrs. Ross’s organs, the evidence obtained would have been more than enough to hang Monty Gregory. It was not found.
And as a result, there was no proof of a murder to build on. From the standpoint of a historical judgment, whose demands are not limited by considerations affecting the life and liberty of an individual, it can reasonably be judged that Arthur Maundy Gregory in September 1932 probably got away with the murder of Edith Marian Ross. It was said she was a friend of Maundy Gregory’s. But Maundy Gregory had no friends.
He was a strange, sociable but lonely man, somewhat shielded from the world. He had many acquaintances. But if the twenties had begun with Maundy Gregory at the height of his power and wealth, they ended with him disgraced and broke. He had creditors on his heels.
He had debts and no way to pay them. The net was closing around him. The Deep Dean Hotel was closed. The Ambassador’s Club too.
He could no longer pay the rent on his Whitehall office. His empire was shrinking. His urgent request to Edith Ross had been refused. He resented her refusal to lend him money.
She paid him a token rent of £1 a week, and he had paid for her holidays in Monte Carlo. He was undoubtedly a generous man. It was the first time he had asked her for anything, and she turned him down. He believed he had done much for her, and he lived by the principle of quid pro quo.
For every action he took, he expected an equal and opposite reaction in his favor. He knew no other way of doing business. And Edith Ross was a fifty-nine-year-old woman whose value to him was diminishing, both as a friend and as a future resource. But of course she had property, she had wealth, and she probably knew things about Monty Gregory too.
Monty Gregory weighed these factors, and so he found that Edith Ross was worth far more to him dead than alive. The idea of the loan he had asked her for was replaced by a new plan. His creditors grew more insistent and threatening, his needs more urgent. Her trust in him as a friend remained intact.
Of course, he knew a confidence trickster must never lose that. His smile, his kind, fatherly manner, remained undimmed, betraying nothing of what lay beneath. His behavior never gave him away. Edith Ross did not see the glint in his eye that assessed her, searching for the means and the moment to convert his acquaintance with her into cash to offset his financial difficulties.
Gregory knew how to win a person’s trust and, at the right moment, turn that trust into a subtle threat. That was what he did best. He persuaded her, even goaded her, into destroying the earlier will in favor of her niece, at a convenient moment of anger over one of the niece’s many missteps. Of course, the destruction of the will left a vacuum, a problem for the woman who had now disinherited her only relative of the next generation.
This would inevitably gnaw at her, especially in times of illness and doubt. Perhaps she and her niece would reconcile. They always did. She had cared for her niece since she was a child.
Such bonds, even when anger strikes them, are hard to break. She made a new will, but did not tell Monty Gregory. Unaware of this, he continued to feed her ideas, suggesting with great subtlety how she should proceed, giving her confidence in him and belief in his good will to carry out her wishes. And when the moment of crisis came, through the mist of illness that enveloped her, Edith Ross was ready to place everything in the hands of her oldest friend.
And though she did not know it, in signing the will in his favor, she was signing her own death warrant. Arthur “Monty” Gregory certainly escaped the hangman’s noose, but it may not have been the first time, for twelve years earlier there had been another affair whose outcome remains one of the most enduring mysteries of twentieth-century Britain. At the heart of that mystery stands Arthur “Monty” Gregory. In 1920 Monty Gregory was making a fortune from his highly successful trade in honors.
But the more successful such an arrangement, the more notorious it becomes, and people began to take notice. In 1920 the situation came to the attention of a man named Victor Grayson. He was a former member of Parliament and an eccentric, fiery socialist who had come to prominence by winning a sensational by-election in Colne Valley in 1907. Grayson and Gregory became friends, possibly even lovers.
And when Victor Grayson discovered that Monty Gregory was passing information about him to MI5, he felt betrayed. Monty Gregory now had an archenemy. Grayson knew of Monty Gregory’s role in the honors trade, and he also discovered that Monty Gregory was responsible for the discovery of the black diaries of Sir Roger Casement, which had destroyed Casement’s public reputation. He believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that Gregory had forged the Casement diaries himself.
He was determined to expose him. In a public speech in Liverpool, Grayson spoke of the matter. “The sale of honors is a national scandal,” he said. “It can be traced to 10 Downing Street and to a foppish dandy with offices in Whitehall.
I know this man, and one day I will name him. ”
It was clear to Monty Gregory and others that the foppish dandy referred to was himself. Monty Gregory knew he was in danger. He was a man who operated by holding something incriminating over everyone.
Knowledge was the lever with which he believed he could move the world. But now someone had something on him, something that would bring down his intricate house of cards, and with it all his connections, influence, and wealth. Victor Grayson had something on him that would mean his downfall. In 1920 Grayson was living rather lavishly for a man without an income.
He was almost certainly blackmailing Monty Gregory, which explains why he referred only to a “dandy in fashion” without naming him. There was no reason not to name him; it would not have been libel. But releasing the name would nullify the blackmail power. Blackmail exists as the threat to expose someone, not the act itself, for that strips it of its power.
But blackmail is always only a temporary solution. It must sooner or later be resolved in some other way. It was Victor Grayson who disappeared. Accounts of his disappearance vary widely.
One account tells that Grayson was drinking with friends when he received a telephone call, after which he left, promising he would return in a few minutes—but he did not. It has been claimed that Grayson entered the house of Monty Gregory at Thames Ditton that evening, where Gregory was then living, coincidentally together with Edith Marian Ross and her husband Frederick. But the evidence for this is insufficient. It has also been recently claimed that Grayson was bought off and lived under an assumed name in France until the 1950s.
There were naturally countless reported sightings, which the Grayson family dismissed. Whatever the details, on or around 28 September 1920, Victor Grayson disappeared. Grayson’s family searched for him and made public appeals in 1927, 1934, and 1942, without success. An MI5 investigation into the matter also produced nothing.
He was never seen again. For official purposes, his death is presumed to have occurred on 28 September 1920. And despite the enduring appeal of alternative stories, this is the overwhelming probability: the chief suspect, given his known connection to Grayson, the likelihood that he was being blackmailed by Grayson, and the fact that the unstable Grayson had become the greatest threat to him, was Monty Gregory. The weight of that motive and other circumstances that are nonetheless considerable have long made Gregory the chief suspect in Grayson’s disappearance.
It can of course never be proved. Grayson had other enemies, but the greatest of them, and the one for whom he posed an urgent threat, was Monty Gregory. It is by no means a certainty, but enough to satisfy, historically, the balance of probabilities, to conclude that Arthur Maundy Gregory was responsible for these two murders. Having left Britain in great haste that April night in 1933, certainly with the help of others with an interest in the matter, but without the knowledge of the secret services or the police, Monty Gregory lived at number eight Rue d’Anjou, which in 1834 had been the Paris residence of the Marquis de Lafayette.
He must have felt a little like Napoleon on Elba, removed from the world he knew, hoping for a return one day, a recovery of his fortune. An arrangement existed that he would only be arrested if he returned to Britain. He received money from Britain through various channels, many of them illegal. It was said he received a pension of £2,000 a year, paid quarterly by the drinks lobby in Westminster.
But as with most things said about Monty Gregory, it is hard to establish how much of this was true. He lived well; his apartment was grand. But he did not speak French and liked to buy English newspapers. In them he would have read about the fate of his old school friend Harold Davidson, the disgraced rector of Stiffkey, who, while performing in a sideshow in Blackpool in 1937, entered a lion’s cage like a Daniel.
But unlike Daniel, he was seized by a lion and shaken like a rag doll before succumbing to his injuries. Monty Gregory no longer sought the limelight. He was somewhat isolated in those years. He had a small dog named Monsieur Lebot, and he spent most of his days drinking whisky.
Monty Gregory carried within himself both the seed of his success and that of his downfall. Those qualities that had brought him success made his ruin a certainty. He was an enormously vain man, and that was a deep flaw. But his vanity was also his strength, because he recognized it in others and knew how to flatter it into working in his own favor.
It was vanity that led the rich northern cotton manufacturer or industrialist to pay him £10,000 for a knighthood or £40,000 for a peerage, and in doing so, to try to raise themselves above their fellow men. A vanity that set aside their reason, their judgment, and natural caution. It was a confidence trick on the grandest possible scale. Because nothing material was given in exchange for the large sums of money paid, because a title has no substance, he sold them baked air, fine clothes, for the foolish emperor to adorn and flatter himself.
We are all susceptible to flattery and vanity, and no one knew this better than Monty Gregory. It made him a fortune, and it cost him that fortune too. Maundy Gregory remains to this day the only person ever convicted of selling honors under the 1925 Act. If there is a lesson to be learned from the life of Monty Gregory, it is that the gods care nothing for those who try to raise themselves above their fellow men, and mock those who try.
Maundy Gregory was utterly finished by 1933. MI6 was still concerned Maundy Gregory might help the Nazis, and as late as March 1940 asked the French authorities to keep an eye on him. But the war had no place for such practices. Maundy Gregory was still in Paris in May 1940 when the German attack on Western Europe began.
He was by then sixty-three years old. The German blitzkrieg swept everything before it. France fell within six weeks, and Monty Gregory was arrested by the German authorities in October 1940 and interned in Camp Drancy. He was sick, spending most of his time in the camp infirmary, and was then transferred to the Val-de-Grâce hospital on the Left Bank of the Seine, where he died of heart failure on 28 September 1941—curiously, the same day Victor Grayson was presumed to have disappeared two decades earlier.
Death makes all men equal. Maundy Gregory was buried anonymously, and years later his bones were exhumed and ended up in one of the great ossuaries of Paris, together with those of thousands of others. Here there is nothing to distinguish the bones of a prince from those of a beggar. At the entrance to the great Parisian ossuary, the catacombs, which house the skeletons of some seven million people, where the lives, loves, laughter, hopes, fears, and vanities of all have come to a standstill, stand the words engraved: “Stop, this is the empire of the dead.
” Perhaps Arthur Maundy Gregory, like those who sought titles from him and to whom he sold the invisible fine robes he himself wore, had finally found his empire.
