Murder on a Train: The Money Mystery

"The Sketch," October 4, 1905

On the evening of September 24, 1905, a 21-year-old bookkeeper named Mary Sophia Money left her home in London for a short excursion. At about 7 p.m. she bought some chocolates from a shop at Clapham Junction Station, where she told the proprietor that she was taking the train to Victoria. She seemed in excellent spirits.

This was the last known time anyone ever spoke to Mary Money. The next anyone knows of her was at about 11 p.m. that night, when a woman's badly mangled body was found in Merstham Tunnel, on the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. The body was still warm, indicating that she was recently deceased. Assumptions that it would be a straightforward accident or suicide were soon dismissed when it was discovered that before she died, her long white scarf had been brutally shoved down her throat. The medical examination found bruising on her body unrelated to being hit by a train, as well as evidence the victim had fallen into the tunnel backwards. The doctor who conducted the autopsy believed she had been attacked on a moving train and then thrown from her compartment. There was no identification on the body--not even money or a railway ticket--so the corpse remained nameless until the next day, when a dairy farmer named Robert Money was able to identify the corpse as his sister Mary.

Witnesses at the Money inquest described Mary as an attractive, cheerful, self-reliant young woman with no serious boyfriends, no enemies, no real personal problems, and no known reason to kill herself. Her accounts at the dairy farm where she worked were said to have been in perfect order. The coroner's jury returned an open verdict. Despite the evidence indicating this was a case of foul play, they ruled that Mary Money died as a result of injuries caused by a passing train, but there was insufficient evidence to show if she came to be in the tunnel as a result of accident, suicide, or murder. (Incidentally, Money's purse, which she was known to have had with her, was never found.)

The police found themselves at an utter loss to explain Money's death. The first--and most popular--theory the police ever had was that she was meeting a secret boyfriend at Victoria. She and her lover dined together (the autopsy found that she had eaten a full meal around 8 p.m.,) and then boarded a train, settling into a private compartment. Then, they quarreled--perhaps because his amorous advances went too far for her liking--and the man lost his head, stuffing her scarf down her throat to stifle her screams and throwing the body into the tunnel in the hope of making her death look like a suicide. This conjecture was strengthened when a London Bridge train guard reported that on the night Miss Money vanished, he saw a young man and woman in a first-class compartment of a train stopped at East Croydon. After the train stopped again past Merstham Tunnel, this same compartment was found empty. The man--described as having "a long face and thin chin"--was walking alone towards the station exit. A signalman described how on that same night, he had seen a man and a woman apparently struggling in a compartment of the London Bridge train as it passed his signal box. It was assumed that the couples these men saw were Miss Money and her killer, but that does not seem to have been satisfactorily proven.

And who was this possible clandestine boyfriend? Money's various male acquaintances were all investigated, but they either had solid alibis or no real evidence was found linking them to her death. In 1908, there were some brief hopes that her murderer had been caught. A man named Albert Cooper wrote to the police naming a friend of his named William Wakeman as Money's killer. He said that a few days before Money's death, he had asked to borrow Wakeman's walking stick. Wakeman refused, saying he wanted to make a good appearance for his upcoming meeting with "a very special tart." After Money's death, Wakeman had some bruises and scratches, and seemed nervous, staying holed up in his lodgings for several days. Not long after this, Wakeman and Cooper quarreled. When Cooper told him, "I know something which could hang you," his former friend seemed greatly unnerved.

Assuming Cooper wasn't making up the whole story in the hope of getting a friend-turned-enemy into a spot of trouble, this possible clue failed to develop into anything useful. Mary Money's death was fated to become one of those tragedies that generates large headlines for a few weeks before sinking permanently from view, leaving behind only the disturbing aura of the unsolved.

What sets Mary Money's murder apart from the usual run of puzzling deaths was that it had an appalling postscript. A couple of years after her death, a woman named Florence Paler entered into an affair with Robert Hicks Murray, who said he was a captain in the Gordon Highlanders. The pair lived together, and had two children, but they never married. Then, in 1910, Murray and Florence's sister Edith fell in love. Murray and Edith Paler married, settled down together and had a child. The newlyweds kept their wedding a secret from Florence. When she later heard from another sister of this betrayal, she confronted Murray. She later said that Murray finally admitted to having married Edith. "He told me in brutal terms that he liked her, but said it would make no difference to me. ..I threatened to leave him, but he persuaded me to remain...He pleaded with me, and promised that he would never see Edith again, as he loved me the better." Most unfortunately for everyone concerned, Florence did remain with him.

For two years, Murray kept up this juggling act of two separate families, but the emotional and financial strain began to take its toll on him--to the point where he "snapped" in the worst possible fashion.

In July 1912, he brought Florence and their children to a house in Eastbourne, moving Edith and her child into rather fancier lodgings not far away. Several weeks later, Murray shot Edith and her baby to death and locked the bodies in a closet of their home. The next day, he brought Florence and her children to this house. He shot them all, and then poured gasoline over the bodies and set them ablaze. He then shot himself to death. Florence Paler miraculously survived this mass killing. Although she had two bullets in her neck, she managed to escape this burning slaughterhouse.

Murray left behind a note explaining that he was bankrupt. As he could no longer take care of these women and children who were dependent on him, he thought it was best that they all should die. He added, "Please bury us altogether [sic]"

When this note was published in the papers, some people recognized the handwriting. This led to the discovery that "Captain Murray" was, in reality, Robert Henry Money...the murdered Mary's brother. When "Murray's" true identity was revealed, James Brice, a former Superintendent of the Surrey Constabulary, came forward with new information about Mary Money's death.

 "It was a case of suicide," Brice declared. "The reason for Miss Money taking her life was that she had gambled extensively, had used the money belonging to her employer, and feared the consequences. Robert Money professed to be greatly attached to his sister, but he told the police a tissue of lies and caused no end of trouble. At the inquest I was anxious to road a statement I had prepared in collaboration with Detective-Inspector Fox. but the coroner would not admit it. Had that statement been made public the world would have known the reasons why tho police were convinced that Miss Mary Money committed suicide. There is no doubt that Miss Money gambled, and there was a falling-off in the takings at the shop in which she was employed. Robert Money was questioned, but denied all knowledge of the matter. He was accused of having opened her box, taken out letters referring to betting transactions, and destroyed them. This he stoutly denied, and it was only when be was told that Mr. and Mrs. Bridger [Mary's employers] saw him take the letters from the box and burn them that he admitted it. He told a lot of lies in connection with the matter, and put the police to a great deal of trouble by giving them information which he knew to be false. On the day of the funeral he endeavoured to induce other members of tho family to agree to a story regarding the movements of the girl a fortnight before her death. I wished to point out at the inquest that Miss Money had a disordered mind, as this was proved beyond all doubt by investigation. I am of opinion that Robert was well acquainted with her doings, and that he backed her up in her imaginative stories." 

Brice failed to explain how, if this was a simple suicide, her scarf got shoved down her throat.

Robert Money's deadly coda to the Money Mystery has left crime historians divided about its significance. Did his action merely indicate that, in the words of Richard Whittington-Egan, the Money siblings shared "some strange genetic bias for tragedy," or--pace Superintendent Brice--was the contemporary gossip that Robert was responsible for his sister's death...on the money?