The murderous salesman

1924 may seem like the distant past, but the crime that occurred in April of that year shocked both the police and the people of Eastbourne where it took place. 

A suspicious wife was the downfall of this murderer. Patrick Mahon was a handsome, thirty-five year old travelling salesman whose wife, curious about his constant disappearances and fearing that he may have been having an affair or gambling, found a left luggage ticket in her husband's suit pocket. The ticket led to Waterloo station, and Mrs Mahon asked a friend to investigate. They expected to find love letters or gambling slips. What they found was much more sinister.

The police were contacted and, on their instruction, the ticket was replaced and a police watch put on the luggage department. The very next day Mahon arrived to collect his bag and was taken into custody.

Once at Scotland Yard the bag was opened and Mahon asked to explain its contents: A pair of knickers, a blue scarf, two pieces of white silk and a cook's knife. All were heavily bloodstained.

Some unlikely excuses were offered by Mahon before he eventually settled on the story that led to a lonely bungalow in Eastbourne.

A gruesome discovery and a missing head

When the team entered the house they saw nothing suspicious. On closer inspection, they discovered that the pleasant seaside house had become a butcher’s shop. The eminent pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury was sent for.

Spilsbury found two large saucepans of boiled flesh, dishes swimming with greasy fat, portions of flesh in a hatbox, a biscuit tin full of different human organs and a trunk bearing the initials ‘E.B.K’, containing pieces of torso. A large quantity of charred bones lay in the fireplace and there were more bones in a dustpan, a coal box, and a bath. Spilsbury recovered no fewer than a thousand fragments of bone, much of it almost dust.

The initials E.B.K matched those of Mahon's mistress, Emily Kaye, and eventually Mahon admitted that Emily had died at the house, but claimed that her death was an act of self defence; that she had hit her head during a lover's quarrel. Her head, the one piece of evidence which would have given an accurate cause of death, was missing.

The trial of the killer with the film star looks

The court case created a storm of publicity, and as more gory facts emerged, the public’s interest grew. They wanted to know every detail about the murder and the killer with the film star looks.

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