The execution of Karl Hulten

On the morning of Thursday 8 March 1945, in London’s Pentonville prison, 23-year-old Karl Gustav Hulten (Hultén in the Swedish spelling), a private in the United States Army who had been a deserter for months, was hanged. The sentence was carried out by Albert Pierrepoint with his assistant Henry Critchell. Hulten died for the murder of the cab driver George Heath, committed in October 1944 together with 18-year-old Elizabeth Jones. The press called it the “Cleft Chin Murder”, after the victim’s distinctive chin.

The case had no bearing whatever on the course of the war. It nevertheless became the most sensational criminal trial in wartime Britain, and its echo – thanks to an essay by George Orwell – has outlasted the memory of many battles. It also revealed a side of the war seldom found in the chronicles: the loosening of morals in blacked-out cities, desertion and crime, and the tensions caused by the presence of more than one and a half million American servicemen in the British Isles.

Six days

Hulten was born in Sweden in March 1922 and was taken to the United States as a child; he grew up near Boston, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He worked as a salesman and a mechanic, married and had a child. He enlisted after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The often-repeated claim that he was a deserter from a parachute regiment comes largely from Hulten himself: he passed himself off as Lieutenant “Ricky Allen” of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division. Investigators established that he was a private who had gone absent without leave and stolen an army lorry and a pistol; sources differ as to his actual unit. All that is certain is that by the time of the crime he had already left it.

Elizabeth Maud Jones came from Neath in South Wales. At thirteen she ran away from home and was sent to an approved school, and very young she married a soldier from whom she soon separated. In London she worked as a waitress, a barmaid and a cinema usherette, and she also tried to perform in nightclubs as a striptease dancer under the name “Georgina Grayson”.

They met on 3 October 1944 in a café in Hammersmith. Hulten claimed to be an officer and a Chicago gangster; Jones said she wanted to do “something exciting”. That same night they set off for a drive in the stolen lorry, during which Hulten knocked down a woman on a bicycle and the pair robbed her. Over the following days they picked up a young woman hitch-hiker, knocked her senseless, took her coat and handbag and threw her, unconscious, into a river; she survived.

On the night of 6–7 October, in Chiswick, they got into a private hire car – a Ford V8 – driven by 34-year-old George Edward Heath, a veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation who had been invalided out of the army with wounds. On a lonely road at Knowle Green near Staines, Hulten shot him in the back. The pair went through the dying man’s pockets and dumped the body in a ditch. Their haul was a few pounds – Orwell gives £8, other accounts less – a silver pencil and a cigarette case. The next day they squandered the money at the greyhound races.

Investigation and jurisdiction

Heath’s body was found on the morning of 7 October. A description of the car was circulated to Metropolitan Police stations, and two days later a constable spotted the Ford parked on the Fulham Palace Road. When a man in the uniform of an American officer approached the car, he was arrested. Handed over to the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, he first gave his name as Richard John Allen, then his real one. He admitted to having the car and the stolen pistol but denied the killing and pointed to Jones. She herself confided to a friend that if the friend had seen what she had seen, she would not be able to sleep, and then made statements to the police incriminating Hulten. He, for his part, claimed she had been a willing and active accomplice.

The case had a legal dimension beyond that of an ordinary murder. Under the United States of America (Visiting Forces) Act of 1942, offences committed by American servicemen in Britain fell exclusively within the jurisdiction of American military courts. The British had agreed to this reluctantly, in return for the mass presence of Allied troops; eighteen US servicemen convicted by American courts martial of murder and rape were executed at the prison in Shepton Mallet, which the Americans had taken over. In Hulten’s case, however, the American authorities waived jurisdiction so that he could be tried in a British court together with his co-defendant, who as a British subject was not subject to US military courts. According to historians of capital punishment in Britain, the waiver was personally signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hulten was the only American serviceman sentenced to death by an English civil court during the war.

Trial and sentence

The trial at the Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – opened on 16 January 1945 before Mr Justice Charles and lasted six days. The defendants blamed each other: Jones maintained that she had acted out of fear of Hulten, he that she had egged him on. The jury found both guilty of murder, recommending mercy in the case of Jones. On 23 January both were sentenced to death by hanging.

The final word lay with the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison. Two days before the date set for the execution, he commuted Jones’s death sentence to life imprisonment; her age is considered to have been decisive. In Hulten’s case he did not exercise the prerogative of mercy. On 8 March some two hundred opponents of capital punishment demonstrated outside the gates of Pentonville with the abolitionist campaigner Violet Van der Elst, who is said to have cried out that the girl had been let off and the man hanged. Jones served nine years in prison and was released on licence in 1954; what became of her afterwards is uncertain.

The reprieve provoked a wave of indignation. Telegrams poured into the Home Office, and in her home town of Neath the words “SHE SHOULD HANG” appeared on walls alongside drawings of a gallows. In a country that for five years had endured bombing, rationing and losses at the front, the senseless killing of a disabled ex-serviceman for a few pounds struck many people almost as a betrayal of the common effort.

Crime in wartime Britain

The Hulten and Jones case was part of a wider phenomenon. Contrary to the legend of a united “Blitz spirit”, crime in Britain rose markedly during the war – according to police statistics, the number of serious offences reported in 1945 was roughly half as high again as in 1939. It was encouraged by the blackout, which was relaxed to a “dim-out” only in the autumn of 1944, by the black market that flourished under rationing, by families broken up by conscription and evacuation, and by thousands of deserters – British and Allied – living without ration books or papers on theft and petty fraud. The presence of hundreds of thousands of young, better-paid American servicemen added to the tensions, summed up in the saying that the Americans were “overpaid, oversexed and over here”.

Attacks from the air also formed the backdrop to the crime and the trial. Hulten and Jones killed while flying bombs were still falling on southern England, and they were tried while London was being harried by V-2 rockets, which the government had officially acknowledged only in November 1944. In newspapers full of bulletins from the front, the reports from the Old Bailey offered readers something entirely different: an ordinary, if brutal, crime story.

Orwell and the memory of the case

It was George Orwell who left the most lasting mark on the case. In his essay Decline of the English Murder, published in the weekly Tribune on 15 February 1946, he called it the most celebrated cause célèbre of the war years and contrasted it with the classic English murders – carefully planned poisonings in respectable middle-class homes, committed out of passion or to preserve social position. The killing of Heath, in his view, had no “depth of feeling”: it was haphazard, committed by two people who had been together for only six days and who may not even have known each other’s real names. Its background was not domesticity but “the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film”. Orwell also observed that the pair had committed their murder to the tune of the V-1 and been convicted to the tune of the V-2, and he commented with distaste on the collective clamour for an eighteen-year-old girl to be hanged.

A full transcript of the trial was published as early as 1945. Three pistols from the series of crimes went to the Scotland Yard Crime Museum, and in 1990 Bernard Rose made a film based on the case, Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Emily Lloyd.

Significance

Hulten’s execution was one of many sentences carried out in Britain during the war, but the only one in which a British court and a British hangman punished a soldier of an Allied army. The case showed that the agreement on jurisdiction over US forces could be applied flexibly, and that cooperation between the British police and the American military police worked efficiently. At the same time it exposed the less heroic side of the “home front”: the weariness, the loosening of social bonds and the crime that accompanied the last months of the war in Europe.

The dispute over Jones’s reprieve, meanwhile, was one episode in the long debate on capital punishment. After the war the House of Commons voted on its suspension, the government set up a Royal Commission to examine it, and the notorious executions of the 1950s – of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis – finally swung public opinion. The death penalty for murder was suspended in Britain in 1965 and abolished permanently in 1969. When Hulten went to the gallows, Germany’s surrender was two months away.