Foreign News: In the Blackout

Margaret was No. 3. The neighbors heard her black Scottie howling incessantly, mournfully in the blackout. When police arrived, they found Margaret dead, with a stocking around her throat. Like the other two, she had been strangled and slashed with a knife or a razor.

“It’s ‘im all right,” the police said to the neighbors. No one had heard anything except the dog’s howling.

London’s blackout is dismal everywhere, but around Piccadilly it was horrible, with that special horror which the British put so well into stage and movie chillers, sometimes into real life. The slow footsteps of streetwalkers patrolling the gloom gave way to silence. They had not been afraid of Nazi bombs, but they were afraid of this.

The new ripper’s first victim had tried to fight him off, was dragged into a street air-raid shelter and disposed of there. The police got his fingerprints from the skin of her neck, also from beer bottles in the second victim’s flat, also from Margaret’s handbag. When they made their arrest last week, four women had perished in five days, all strangled, all mutilated.

The man arrested was tall, handsome, pleasant-voiced Frederick George Cummings, 28, an R.A.F. student pilot who had the reputation of being a brave, hard working and intelligent candidate for the Air Force, of being kind to his wife and child. The magistrate postponed the hearing until next month to let things quiet down, and handsome Frederick Cummings went to a cell. Once more, in the gloom around Piccadilly Circus, the streetwalkers took up their patrol.