“PHANTOM FORGER”

Evening Star, Issue 22974, 3 June 1938, Page 11

“PHANTOM FORGER ”

TRAPPED AT LAST A tall, dark, military-looking man walked into the St. .John's Hill subpost office, Wandsworth, London, and asked a young girl clerk if he could open a savings account. He gave his address as 11 Rose Avenue, Putney—and that put paid to the “ Phantom Forger,” who for four years had baffled the police and the Post Office, and on whose account the whole system of deposit entries has had to be altered.

The clerk, Miss Rita Souter, aged 17, who lives in Ashlone road, Putney, recognised the address as non-esistent, and dialled the police. The hunt was up. And at the Old Bailey, Noel Cameron, 32-years-o’ld author, left the dock to serve three years' penal serviture for “the -greatest'fraud in the history of the Post Office Savings Bank.” It was revealed that while Miss Souter was on the phone a police car arrived in 30 seconds, and the occupants “ listened-in ” to her through Scotland Yard; by the time she finished a detective was waiting in the post office. Dressed in a neat green overall coat, Miss Souter spent the day as usual behind the counter of the little post office —selling stamps and postal orders, despatching telegrams, weighing parcels, giving change. Not one in a hundred of the customers knew that it was she who had trapped the “ Phantom Forger.” And her chief, the sub-post-master, Mr S. A. .Marlow, shared her reticence.

“ Nothing very extraordinary about it,” he told a reporter. “ We had received certain instructions, . just as other post, offices had, and we carried them out.” But Mrs Percy Souter is delighted with her daughter. “Rita is a clever girl. She wants to get on in the post office, and she will,” said Mrs Souter. “ She was excited the evening she came home and told me how she bad helped to catch the man, but she’s taken it very calmly ever since.” Cameron, the “Phantom Forger”— known to the P.G. as “No.-389W.” had been living for four years at the rate of £8 a week on the proceeds of 477 separate forgeries committed on the Savings Bank. His method was not disclosed in court, but it so affected the bank that the system had to be revised. Well versed in the classics, Cameron, when he left prison in 1934. after serving two months for forging telegrams, used his education at the Technical College of Art at Worcester to help him in crime. His impressive appearance—he was handsome, intellectual, and well-man-nered —was his stock-in-trade, and his seeming indifference when opening an account allayed any suspicion. 5s DEPOSITS, THEN it was while living in West Kensington that he hit on the idea of forging deposit books. He started in a small

way, depositing 5s and drawing 18s. Then ho moved to Leatherhead, Surrey, and neatly every day emerged armed with several savings books witn which he descended on post offices in London or the Home Counties, withdrawing money from some, opening fresh accounts with a. nominal os deposit at others.

In the course of his. 477 forgeries Cameron visited almost every post office in London He slowly amassed £1,317, Always he put miles between his payments and withdrawals. He would open an account at one office. _ Then take a 4d bus ride to some district miles away to withdraw. The only thing the police knew about him was a descritpion by many post office clerks —that he had a little scar on his lower lip, and that his fingernails were unshapely. That description was in every post office in London and tho Home Comities, with the offer of a reward. But still the “ Phantom Forger ” carried on—and wrote a book about cheque forgeries.

To Leatherhead “Derek” Cameron was a mystery. No one knew who he was or what he did for a living. He spoke to very few people, did no entertaining, but lived in a detached five-roomed villa with an acre of ground on Hawks Hill, for which be paid about £9O a ycar'reut.