Vera Page Murdered By Neighbor in Coal Shed in 1931

Vera Page was born in Hammersmith, London, to parents Charles and Isabel Page in 1921. She was described as popular, but shy and well-behaved. On December 14, 1931, Vera left her house and walked down the street to her aunt’s to pick up a couple of swimming certificates she’d left there the day before. When Vera didn’t return, her father visited the aunt, who told him Vera had come by and picked up the certificates and left for home to have dinner. He then visited the houses of all her friends and relatives hoping that his daughter was with someone they knew, and then went to Notting Hill Police to report her missing at around 10:25 pm. Charles and Isabel had spent the rest of the night searching for Vera. The next day, police were circulating physical descriptions of her around and local media had been alerted to her disappearance.

Discovery:

Vera’s body was discovered on the 16th by a milkman, in a patch of shrubbery in the front garden of 89 Addison Road, Kenzington, around a mile away from her home. There was no real effort made to conceal her, so investigators believed that the murderer lived nearby, or at least knew the neighborhood really well. Despite the passage of only around 40 hours, her body was not rigid but in an advanced state of decomposition, leading police to believe she was kept in a warm environment before being deposited. She also had the remains of an ammonia-stained finger bandage stuck firmly to her inner elbow, likely loosed from the murderer’s finger. It had also been fairly rainy and misty those past few days, and Vera’s clothes had absorbed little water in that time and only really the parts touching the ground, leading investigators to believe that she could not have been there for longer than two hours. This opinion was supported by the homeowner who claimed the body had been there before 7:50, and the milkman who claimed the body was not there during his first visit at 5:30.

An autopsy conducted by pathologist Bernard Spilsbury revealed that Vera had been raped and manually strangled to death, shortly after she was last seen alive. Her body was bruised, and a welt caused by a ligature - though this injury likely happened after her death. The level of decomposition of her body, as well as traces of soot and coal dust, as well as candle wax, all indicated that she was kept in a cellar or coal shed an excess of 24 hours and that it didn’t have any electricity given the splattering of wax on her skin and clothes.

The Search:

Vera’s murder was a huge deal in the area, and police mounted an intense operation to catch the murderer. They conducted door-to-door inquiries throughout the whole area of her disappearance and reappearance, resulting in over 1,000 people formally questioned, and thousands of witness statements that police obtained through subsequent inquiries. One of these came from a friend of Vera’s, who claimed that between 5 and 6 pm on the 14th, she spoke with Vera in front of a chemist on Blenheim Crescent and Portobello Road. She claimed Vera intended to buy soap dominoes like the ones on display in the window as a Christmas gift for her parents, and at the time, she was holding an envelope. Vera’s aunt later corroborated that the envelope contained Vera’s swimming certificates.

Since Vera was a small and shy child, investigators assumed that her murderer was someone she knew and trusted and that he lured her into a place where he raped and murdered her, before storing her body in a cellar or coal shed. Later, a woman named Margaret Key told investigators that around 6:40 am on Dec. 16, she watched an individual wheeling a wheelbarrow with a large bundle covered in a red tablecloth toward Addison Road. The individual fit the profile of a local man named Percy Orlando Rush. On the 21st, police received an eyewitness statement that on the morning of Vera’s discovery, the door to a coal shed near Addison was unlocked and ajar, where it would otherwise be invariably locked tight. The aforementioned coal shed, investigators found, had no electric light, lending further credibility to Spilsbury’s theory regarding Vera’s murder and storage.

The day after the discovery of the body, a woman named Kathleen Short, who lived close to Addison Road, reported finding a child’s red beret along with torn pieces of paper and a segment of a candle near the location of her last sighting. The beret was identified as Vera’s by her parents. Short told the investigators that she collected and discarded the papers and candle. 

The Accused:

Percy Rush was a 41-year-old married man who lived near Blenheim Crescent and worked as a flannel cleaner at a laundrette in nearby Earl’s Court. He lived with his wife in his parents’ home at 22 Blenheim Crescent until 1925, when they moved to Talbot Road, though Rush still visited his parents often and had a key to the place. He claimed he knew Vera and saw her often, describing her as a “nice little girl”, but that he also hadn’t seen her for three weeks before her disappearance. It’s also worth noting that he worked with ammoniated water, and sustained an injury on his left little finger a few days prior to Vera’s disappearance.

The presence of his finger bandage, as well as general proximity to the scene of the disappearance, made him the police’s primary suspect, despite his protestations of innocence. Rush told the police that he sustained the injury in early December, and he was given a rough bandage at work, but that his wife made him a more compact one at home so that the ammonia he worked with wouldn’t aggravate the injury. He also claimed he’d disposed of the bandage in the fireplace on the 11th, and hasn’t worn one since. Rush’s colleagues corroborated his story about the bandage, testifying that he injured his finger on the 9th, and came to work the next day with a homemade bandage to keep out ammoniated water, but none were certain if he’d been wearing it on the 14th.

Searches of Rush’s home yielded sections of bandage, as well as a red tablecloth matching the description of the one from Key’s story. A forensic examination revealed that wax from candles found in the house and on Rush’s overcoat matched those found on the body, on top of which the overcoat was discovered to have contained traces of coal dust and semen. Rush insisted on not having worn a bandage since the 11th in order to “harden the wound”, but the remains of the ammoniated finger bandage found on the body were a perfect match for his finger. Forensic analysis done by Dr. Roche Lynch determined that the bandage was used to cover a suppurating wound and that it had been soaked in ammonia a number of times. However, after studying it under an ultra-violet light, Dr. Lynch stated that the composition of the bandage did not match the consistency of the bandage segments recovered from Rush’s home during the formal search.

Facing the Inquisition:

On February 10, 1932, a coroner’s inquest was held regarding Rush’s role in the death of Vera Page. Although nobody could independently corroborate his movements on the 14th, Rush claimed that his wife was absent from the house until the early evening and that after he finished working, he opted to go shopping in Kensington so he wouldn’t be alone in the house. He returned home at around 8:30, and his wife returned shortly after. The couple went to bed at around 10:15. He also claimed that although he usually visited his parents on Mondays, he hadn’t done so on the 14th. When he was implicated in luring Vera to the coal shed, as well as raping and murdering her, Rush vehemently denied doing so, claiming not to have known Vera well and only speaking to her once, contrary to the impression given by his initial statement. A number of gaps in evidence against Rush came up: there were no specific eyewitness accounts of Rush and Vera together on the 14th, no chemists could recall selling bandages of the type found at the site to Rush, and the coal shed in question had been vacated 5 days before the murder, with the owner confirming that he had the door’s padlock.

In the end, much to the outrage of many women in the gallery, in just over 5 minutes of deliberation, the jury decided that there was insufficient evidence – circumstantial or otherwise – to tie Rush to the murder, and reached a formal verdict of murder by persons unknown. Rush was acquitted of the crime, with many of the outraged women shaking fists, booing, and calling him a blatant liar. No individual was ever charged with the murder of Vera Page afterward. Rush himself passed away from natural causes in 1961.