Edison successfully patented his own motion picture camera. Le Prince’s family was distraught and entered into a long copyright legal battle, even accusing Edison of having Le Prince murdered. It’s an accusation that has never been proved.
IN LIVING COLOUR
Despite being nicknamed ‘Daftie’ as a child, Edinburgh-born James Clerk Maxwell went on to become one of the great nineteenth-century scientists. From his colour vision studies, Maxwell found that all the colours of nature could be counterfeited to the eye by mixing just three pure colours of light – red, green and blue. In May 1861 he presented the first-ever colour photograph at a lecture he gave to the Royal Institute.
His pioneering demonstration used an image of a tartan ribbon photographed three times. A trio of exposures of the ribbon were taken through red, green and blue filters and then projected through separate magic lanterns in order to create one single image – the first colour photo. These experiments have formed the basis of nearly all photochemical and electronic colour photography since.
COLD CASES TO HEAT UP YOUR INNER DETECTIVE
THE GRAVE OF THE UNKNOWN MAN
As a travelling lingerie salesman with an eye for the ladies, Alfred Rouse had a suitcase stuffed with secrets. But the pressure of multiple lives was mounting, and the only way out, he reasoned, was the perfect murder. His own.
Alfred Rouse had served with distinction on the battlefields of the First World War, but a serious head wound caused by an exploded shell left him, according to his doctors, ‘easily excited… (he) laughs immoderately at times.’ He had another strange affliction – an inability to stop talking.
Back in civvies, Alfred appeared to be highly respectable. But his transient job, as well as the gift of the gab and a roving eye, resulted in a bigamous marriage, a string of lovers across the UK and at least two illegitimate children.
Rouse’s finances and sanity were taking a bruising. Chased by paternity suits and attempting to keep his multiple lovers happy, he became increasingly desperate to put a lid on things and on Guy Fawkes Night in 1931 he executed what he thought was a perfect plan to start his life over. Everybody would think he’d been killed in a car crash.
To fake his own death, he decided that somebody had to die to take his place. The case files are held at Northamptonshire Police Headquarters and make eye-popping reading to this day. Police archivist Richard Cowley explains: ‘Rouse met a man in a London pub who was a similar build to him and the idea formed that he would be his victim. On the afternoon of the 5th of November, Rouse duped the man to get into the car and Rouse and the man drove north.’ With Bonfire Night as a cover, Rouse was planning his own blaze. ‘Pulling into a quiet Northampton street, he pounced.’ Rouse knocked his victim unconscious before ‘dousing the body in petrol; he lit a match and ran for cover.’
But Rouse’s inability to keep shtum placed him at the scene.
At 2 a.m. on 6 November 1930, two young men walking home from a party came across the blazing Morris car. From behind a hedge a man popped out, chuckled and jauntily commented: ‘It looks as if someone’s had a bonfire,’ before strolling off.
When the scene was investigated, the police discovered a body, burnt beyond recognition. The number plates were traced to an Albert Rouse and it was presumed the charred remains were his. But then the two young men came forward to tell of their encounter. Northamptonshire Police became suspicious and an identikit based on the description of the ‘chatty man’ was circulated.
Rouse was spotted in London and arrested as he got off a bus. Under interrogation, Rouse said he’d picked up the hitchhiker, who had never revealed his name and who was drunk. Alfred stopped the car to relieve himself by the roadside. He asked the hitchhiker to fill the car up with petrol from a jerry can. The hitchhiker, who was puffing away on a cigar given to him by Rouse, spilt petrol over himself and then dropped the cigar. Rouse said he tried to save him, to no avail. Then he panicked and ran away.
Rouse might well have got away with a charge of accidental death but he just couldn’t stop talking. He revealed to incredulous police officers details about his numerous lovers (referring to them as ‘my harem’, which particularly annoyed one of the detectives), and moaned about the demands for the upkeep of his legion of children. The police decided to charge him with murder.
Rouse’s alibi was systematically destroyed in court. It was almost immediately established that Alfred didn’t smoke, so his cigar story was stubbed out. Bernard Spilsbury, the pioneer of forensic investigation, also proved that Rouse had killed his victim with a mallet (not, as Rouse claimed, strangulation) before setting fire to him. Forensics also proved that Rouse had modified the car so that the fire would be accelerated.
The trial lasted six days and the jury took just 25 minutes to decide that Rouse was guilty. Rouse was sentenced to be hanged at Bedford Gaol on 10 March 1931. As he waited in his cell for the hangman, Tom Pierrepoint, to place a noose around his neck, Rouse filled the time by writing a long letter to the Daily Sketch newspaper. He confirmed the findings of the prosecution and detailed how he murdered his victim.
One key question remained: who was that innocent victim tragically caught up in Rouse’s bizarre scheme? His remains were buried in the graveyard of St Edmund’s Church, Hardingstone, Northampton. The grave is simply inscribed: ‘In Memory of an Unknown Man’. Rouse said in his letter to the press that his victim was chosen because he was precisely ‘the sort of man nobody would miss’.
But William Briggs, who went missing in 1930, was sorely missed and the event haunted his family for generations to come. Briggs was just 23 when he left the family home for an appointment and never returned. His surviving family long believed that William may have been Rouse’s unfortunate victim. William’s niece Jean has spent her life wondering what happened to her mother’s brother. ‘It’s all the things I’ve heard as a child that my mother has told me about. We’ve never known and I know she was so upset and wanted to find out. So I would like to find out for her.’ William’s great-grandniece, Samantha, says there was circumstantial evidence that shouldn’t be discounted:
A lot of the family stories we’ve got, such as William leaving the family home dressed in a plum suit – well, there was plum cloth found at the scene of the crime. William also had auburn hair and a sample of auburn hair was found. There are a lot of things in the crime report that match the stories we’ve grown up with.
The family approached Dr John Bond, a forensic scientist at the University of Leicester (where DNA fingerprinting was pioneered), who specialises in investigating cold cases. ‘Initially I thought that probably after all this time it’s very unlikely we’ll be able to do anything to help,’ he says. But tissue samples had been taken from the victim during the autopsy and then subsequently filed away and forgotten. ‘That was sort of a Eureka moment and I thought, yes, maybe we can get some DNA from this to try and help the family.’
However, there was no DNA match to link Jean to the victim. Jean expressed relief that it wasn’t William who met such a gruesome end but frustration that, so far, there is no closure for either her family or that of the unknown man.
WHO’S QUALTROUGH?
On 20 January 1931, housewife Julia Wallace was brutally murdered in her home in Liverpool. Three months later, her husband William Wallace was convicted of the murder and faced the death penalty – only to make legal history when his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal.
W.
