Blackout serial killer's eerie confession 80 years after he was hanged

Thirty minutes before he was hanged, the Blackout Killer finally told the truth. "Darling, although I don't know, I think I must be guilty - the evidence is overwhelming," Gordon Cummins wrote in a note handed to the prison chaplain. "Don't try and go further in the matter - I think it would be useless." For more than 80 years that confession lay unread in an official file, missed by every book, podcast and documentary about the RAF airman who murdered four women in a single week of the wartime blackout. Now it has been uncovered by author Robin Jarossi, whose new book, Force of Darkness, pieces together one of the most savage killing sprees Britain has ever seen. The blackout that hid Britain from the Luftwaffe also handed its criminals a gift. Looting, robbery and gun crime spread through streets shrouded in darkness. And it created the perfect conditions for a relentless killing spree. "The blackout was ideal for criminals to mug people, and sexual crimes went up," Robin said. "It created real difficulties for the police.” The week of horror began on the freezing night of February 8, 1942. Evelyn Hamilton, a 41-year-old chemist passing through London for a single night, was strangled in an air-raid shelter on Montagu Place, her handbag and savings gone. Hamilton had managed a chemist's shop and was travelling from Essex to Grimsby to start a new job. Shy and studious, her few friends said she was "of the most reserved nature". On her last night she was turned away from one lodging house and grew flustered, searching he frozen streets for a bed. "They must put me up somewhere," she told her cab driver. "I've got the money to pay for a room." Robin said: "Passing through London for one night, she encounters her killer in the street. Rushing home from a late-night meal, she is somehow inveigled into a bomb shelter and murdered, then just left there. A terribly sad and callous killing." The next night Evelyn Oatley was killed, a 34-year-old former poultry farmer's wife who had come to London dreaming of the stage. Her body was mutilated in her Wardour Street flat. She’d danced at Soho's notorious Windmill Theatre, before drifting into sex work under the name Lita Ward. Two nights later came Margaret Lowe, a widow known as "The Lady" who sold sex to fund her teenage daughter's boarding school. She was strangled with her own stocking and slashed with kitchen knives. A neighbour called her a "very refined and superior type of woman," which explained her nickname. She kept her sex work secret to protect her adopted daughter, Barbara. On the day she died, Lowe called at a local butcher's to set aside suet and bones, to cook Barbara a pudding for their weekend together. The 15-year-old arrived to find her mother's door locked. Hours after the murder, Doris Jouannet, 32, was killed the same way in her Sussex Gardens flat - her husband finding the milk still on the step when he came home. Married to Henri, a hotel manager 35 years her senior who slept at his hotel most nights, on the Edgware Road, Doris was known as a woman who "never seemed to be hard-up". Grumbling that her elderly husband bored her, she slipped out to solicit whenever the mood took her. Last seen alive heading back towards home, she told another woman she was "going to try and get off before I go home". Scotland Yard knew it was hunting a monster. "This interesting but sordid series of murders has no parallel, so far as can be ascertained, in the history of the Metropolitan Police," one report said. Pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, hardened by decades of murder scenes, was shaken, telling Chief Inspector Ted Greeno, the detective in charge: "You've got a madman on parade here.” A dropped gas mask and a set of fingerprints finally led detectives to a suspect no one had thought to look at twice. Cummins, 27, was a leading aircraftman. Handsome and well spoken, with a young wife and a doting family, known by the men he trained with as "the Duke", the son of a lord, who always bought the drinks. Truthfully, he had never had an aristocratic penny. A liar and a thief, he prowled the darkened West End for women he could rob, dominate and destroy. Robin said: "He was loved by his family, who simply couldn't assimilate somebody like him. Well-spoken, decently educated, loved by his wife. They could never accept that he could commit such appalling mutilations and murders." "Liked by his superior officers, his squadron leader recommended him for pilot training. But, at the same time, he was hunting women at night and committing the most awful crimes. He was a real Jekyll and Hyde, flip-flopping between savage murders and polite civility." Cummins did not realise that two of his victims had lived to describe him. On that same relentless Thursday night, he first tried to strangle Greta Heywood in a doorway off the Haymarket, having picked her up in a Piccadilly brasserie, boasting of the cash in his tunic. "I'm not broke, you know. I'll show you something," he said, pulling out a bundle of notes. She survived because an 18-year-old night porter, John Shine, stumbled on the attack in the pitch dark. In his panic, Cummins fled, leaving his RAF gas mask beside her, stamped inside with his service number. Later the same night he attacked Catherine Mulcahy in her flat, but she kicked him off the bed and ran naked onto the landing screaming for help. He calmly handed her five pound notes and left. Fighting back, she said to Cummins: “You're the one that's been murdering all the women around here." Traced through the gas mask, Cummins was arrested at his Regent's Park billet at dawn on February 13. Believing he was only in trouble for losing his respirator, he was almost relieved, saying: "Thank god for that." Greeno and his team quickly unpicked his lies. Property stolen from his victims was found in his quarters, including Oatley's cigarette case hidden in a fridge, and his fingerprints placed him inside two of the murder flats. Cummins was tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of Evelyn Oatley alone. The first trial collapsed in farce, when the jury were handed the wrong fingerprint photographs. A second jury convicted him on April 28, 1942. Asked if he had anything to say, without flinching, he said: "I am completely innocent, sir.” Refusing to believe it, his father, sister and wife, Marjorie, bombarded the Home Office, the royal family and Churchill's family with letters begging for a reprieve. His appeal was thrown out and, on the morning of June 25, 1942, Cummins, then 28, was hanged at Wandsworth by executioner Albert Pierrepoint. The confession surfaced by chance, as Robin was checking his facts for the book. He said: "I'd gone back to the London Metropolitan Archives to go over the material on the two women in Camden who were murdered. In one of the boxes I just found the confession, on a slip of paper, with a note from the Home Office saying he'd asked for the message to be passed to his wife." Cummins wrote: "Please don't think, darling, that the padre has been trying to squeeze something out of me, darling, but in saying what I have I am taking a tremendous burden off my soul.” Greeno, the detective who caught him, went to his grave certain of his man, but never knowing Cummins had agreed with him. "I shed no tears for Cummins," Greeno wrote. "He was the lowest form of man." Force of Darkness: Confronting Blackout Killer Gordon Cummins, by Robin Jarossi, is published by History Press on 20 August.