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International
A body is discovered
On the 7 October 1942, Royal Marines were carrying out training manoeuvres on Hankley Common, near Godalming in Surrey. One young marine was stunned to come across a woman’s foot sticking out of the ground. The Surrey police were notified, and they immediately called in Scotland Yard and its foremost forensic pathologist, Keith Simpson.
The body was in a fragile state, and she had suffered horrific injuries. Simpson believed that some of these wounds had been caused by an unusual weapon and thought that the point of it had a strange shape, rather like a parrot’s beak.
Search for the weapons
The back of the girl’s skull had been shattered by a single blow; very violent, and certainly lethal. Simpson thought that a pole or piece of branch may have caused this and that the object would be four and a half centimetres in diameter, the size of the injury.
When searching the area, officers found several important items including a large piece of birch that had been cut into a stake, and when Keith Simpson measured it, its diameter was four and a half centimetres. The stake was rough, and no fingerprints could be found on it, but one end of the wood was crushed, and embedded in it were hairs from the dead girl’s head.
A strange knife provides a clue to the killer
August Sangret, a Canadian soldier, was known to the victim, identified as 19-year-old Joan Pearl Wolfe. It transpired she was living rough, and Sangret had built her a kind of wigwam which the couple had started to live in. One of Sangret’s soldier colleagues stated when interviewed by police that he’d found a clasp knife stuck in a tree near a makeshift shelter. He’d handed the knife in to the military police who had returned it to its owner - August Sangret.
Later, a drain in the washhouse at Whitley army camp had overflowed, and causing the blockage was the same knife. It was army issue, but the tip of the blade had been modified to end in a hook.
It appeared that Sangret had hidden the knife while waiting to be interviewed by the police. When inserted into the stabbing wounds at the front of the victim’s head, it matched exactly.
August Sangret was charged and found guilty of murder, and hanged on 23 April 1943. The distinctive knife which had caused Joan’s unusual injuries, pointed without doubt to its owner, allowing police to charge a man who, without this vital evidence, would have walked free.
