Rare tour of Black Museum

Press, 1 August 1989, Page 11

Rare tour of Black Museum

Last year marked the centenary of Britain’s most famous unsolved crime — the murder orgy of Jack The Ripper

— and to mark the event New Scotland Yard opened the doors of its notorious Black Museum to television for the first time.

Tonight’s documentary, “The Black Museum” (8.30 on One) resulted, from that tour.

Opened in 1874, the museum consisted originally of prisoners* property, but was soon to add many other infamous exhibits to become the first crime museum in the world. It has never been opened to the - public, even though it is known world-wide because of

its collection of some of the most gruesome relics and macabre secrets of more than a century of crime.

Nowadays the museum is used as an instructional and research facility where curator and criminologist Bill Waddell lectures to police officers and people involved in law enforcement from all around the world. The name Black Museum came from an article published in the “Observer” in 1877. The windowless museum consists of a suite of rooms, whre the temperature is kept at a constant level to preserve the exhibits. Behind each of these exhibits is a story of

crime, detection and sometimes horror. Housed inside the museum are the gallstones and teeth of Mrs Duran Deacon, last victim of Haigh, the acid bath murderer. A pyjama jacket wrapped around a buried body was the clue that convicted Dr Crippen of the murder of his wife. It was also the first time wireless telegraph was used to apprehend a killer. The kitchen illustrates graphically how Denis Nilsen dismembered and then boiled his estimated 16 victims. When the arresting officer, Peter Jay, knocked on Nielsen’s door he said, “I’ve come

about your drains.” They were blocked by parts of one of the corpses. The Tottenham outrage of 1908 was the _ first crime in which an automatic weapon was used. Two anarchists were disturbed while committing a wages snatch. Tonight’s programme dramatically reconstructs how the two men attempted to shoot their way out of trouble as they ran through the streets of Tottenham, leaving a trail of 20 people killed or injured. The documentary also includes an interview with the policeman who took down the statement of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain.