Norman Elliott

Norman Elliott murdered William Byland Abbey 31 during a bank robbery at the Lloyds Bank in Ferryhill on 16 February 1928 and was sentenced to death. He hit him over the head and then stabbed him in the neck. Just before William Abbey died he managed to throw a paper weight out through the window and when some cobblers who were outside came to his aid he said 'It was a tall man who did it.'. He died with a quarter of an hour. A cobblers knife was found just behind him. It was of an unusual design with a black handle bearing a stamp 'Made in U.S.A., South Bridge, Mass., U.S.A.'. When police examined it they found fingerprints that they believed belonged to the murderer. Just after 3pm a well-dressed man who was a stranger to the neighbourhood was seen to came out of the bank and walk over to a waiting motor-car at an ordinary brisk pace, get in and drive away. Soon after William Abbey threw the paperweight through the window to get help. When the four cobblers went in they saw William Abbey staggering about behind the counter with blood streaming from his neck and soon after he collapsed and died. The police issued a description of the man that was seen leaving the bank as: Wanted for the murder of William Abbey, bank clerk, at 3pm at Ferryhill, a man said to be 5ft. 9ins. to 10ins., about thirty years of age wearing light brown suit with double-breasted jacket, light cap and coloured tie, black boots, clean shaven, dark coloured hair fresh complexion. Motor used was an old two-seater Rover with dickey at back. The dark coloured hood appeared to have been recently repainted a brown or chocolate colour. It had 'Rover' on the radiator and two very heavy head lamps at the front. It was last seen going in the direction of Durham. William Abbey had lodged with a woman at Park Terrace in Ferryhill. She said that on the Monday morning before he was killed he had told her about a dream that he had had. She said that she remarked to him that she had had a dream with him in it and that he had replied that he too had had a terrible dream. She said that he said 'I dreamt that I was being murdered, and that my assailants tried to quieten me, but could not kill me. They got hold of my throat and I felt a terrible sensation of choking. They came for me two or three times, but I could not get away and could not crawl away'. The landlady said that he attached no importance to the dreams. She said that she then asked him what he would do if someone attacked him over the counter and that he had told her that he would pick up a paper-weight and throw it through the window. She said that he then added that in his opinion no-one could get in there to attack him as there was always such a crowd about and that the crashing of glass would bring the crowd and prevent the man from getting away. Lloyds Bank offered a £500 reward for the discovery of the murderer. At his inquest the Coroner stated that bruises and wounds found on his body indicated that William Abbey had put up a good fight and stated that there must have been great violence used.He said that it was quite evident that in attempting to rob the bank the man had become a ferocious wild beast. Norman Elliott was an Asylum Attendant at the Durham County Asylum in Sedgefield near Stockton-on-Tees and was later arrested on 20 February 1928 at Kelloe in Durham. Had had married three weeks earlier. Norman Elliott was a twenty two year old asylum attendant from Ferryhill who was convicted of the murder of William Abbey, a bank clerk, on 16 February. At his trial at Durham Assizes before Mr Justice MacKinnon on 27 June, the prosecution alleged that Elliot, being in need of money, entered the bank at closing time and struck Abbey over the head, then stabbed him in the neck with a cobbler's knife before stealing 200. In his defence, Elliott blamed another unnamed man, a compulsive gambler, but despite intensive enquiries, the police were unable to trace him. He was visited frequently in the death cell by his wife and young child. When the sentence was carried out he was hanged by Thomas Pierrepoint and Robert Wilson on 10th August 1928 in Durham.. Echo Memories delves into the history of a murder – and could be on the verge of solving the mystery. THE death of a onelegged cobbler was officially recorded as “wilful murder against some person or persons unknown”. The Northern Echo concluded its short report of the inquest in 1924 with the enigmatic sentence: “The circumstances surrounding the death of Philip Nash Gee still remain a complete mystery.” The murder of the 47-yearold boot repairer in his shop at 9 Whitworth Terrace is one of only three in County Durham in eight decades that are unsolved. But today, Echo Memories is on the verge of cracking the case. Mr Gee was discovered at 2.45am on Sunday, January 13, 1924 when a patrolling policeman noticed that his shop door was open. “On an examination of the shop being made, the dead body was found on the floor behind the counter,” says the police log. “His skull was fractured in several places both back and front.” He had been struck four times by a three-cornered implement – believed to be a bar from the fire. Mr Gee was single and lived with his sister, Mrs Ramshaw, and her husband in Durham Road, Spennymoor. The Ramshaws were not unduly worried when he didn’t return home on the Saturday evening as he regularly stayed open late “to oblige customers calling for repairs”, or he toured town making his deliveries. “He was well know throughout Spennymoor as an amiable, inoffensive and religious man who paid great attention to his business,” said the Echo. Mr Gee also stood out from the crowd because he had a wooden limb. Apparently, there was a little hole in the floor behind the counter in which he rested his peg leg while he did his cobbling. “It is considered remarkable that such a tragedy should have been enacted in a shop in the main thoroughfare when in all probability numbers of pedestrians would be passing by,” said the Echo. Apart from the dead body behind the counter, the shop was said to be in “perfect order”. The only missing item was a metal watch with a distinctive chain in which the links were alternately large and small. Police initially hunted a deaf and dumb man who was found in Sunderland. When he was eliminated from inquiries, attention turned on Thomas McGowan, “a tramping labourer”. According to the Echo, he was “a well-known character in the town. He had not fixed abode and frequented some disused houses in the vicinity of Tudhoe Grange”. After a week in custody, McGowan too was released without charge. “When first interrogated regarding his movements on the night of the murder, McGowan made two conflicting statements,” said the Echo, “but subsequent inquires have failed to produce any evidence of an incriminating nature against him.” Mr Gee’s funeral was at St Charles Roman Catholic Church, Tudhoe, and he was buried at York Hill cemetery. “There were many beautiful floral tributes, and the large concourse of people at the graveside testified to the general respect in which Gee was held,” said the Echo. And that was that. FOUR years later, just two miles down the road, William Byland Abbey was murdered behind his counter in the Ferryhill branch of Lloyds bank. As Echo Memories told a fortnight ago, he was struck about the head by heavy, blunt instrument on February 16, 1928. “Then, to complete the deed,” said the Echo, the murderer “plunged a cobbler’s knife into Abbey’s throat, inflicting another terrible wound.” The cobbler’s knife was found in the blood beside the bank clerk’s body. It was most unusual. On its black handle were stamped the words: “Made in U.S.A., South Bridge, Mass.” Norman Elliott, 22, was charged with the bank clerk’s murder. He was a male nurse, living and working at Winterton asylum at Sedgefield, who was setting up home with his new bride in Kelloe, five miles from Ferryhill. Elliott, who liked to gamble on the horses, had not had the easiest of childhoods as he was orphaned at 12. His mother had died, which plunged his police constable father into such deep depression that he took his own life on the railway line at Easington Lane. Elliott and his sister had been taken in by his grandparents who lived in Beaumont Terrace, Spennymoor. His grandpa, Joseph, had been Spennymoor’s respected police inspector. After school, Elliott had become an apprentice cabinet-maker at Kenmir Bros in the town, before leaving Beaumont Terrace and moving to Winterton when he was about 20. At his trial, his defence barrister made much of the fact that police had failed to connect Elliott with the distinctive murder weapon – the cobbler’s knife. And in his defence, Elliott himself made much of the fact that the dying bank clerk had failed to identify him, even though they knew each other. Mr Abbey’s last words had been: “It was a tall man that did it.” Why, asked Elliott, given their acquaintanceship, hadn’t he been more precise? Nevertheless, Elliott was found guilty and he was hanged on August 10, 1928, at Durham Gaol. Now comes a Midsomer Murders moment. After a bloody preamble, with the advert break approaching fast, we jump to conclusions and reveal the murderer… Several readers have drawn attention in the past fortnight to Mr Abbey’s last words. They caused everyone to expect the murderer to be of above average height and hinted that there might be two assailants – one shorter than the other. Yet Mr Abbey had been stabbed in the neck with a cobbler’s knife. He was in no position to enunciate clearly. Perhaps his last words weren’t about “a tall man”. Perhaps he really gurgled: “It was Norman that did it.” And what if Norman Elliott murdered Mr Abbey with the distinctive cobbler’s knife that he had stolen as he murdered Mr Gee the cobbler four years earlier? The two crimes were very similar. Both Mr Abbey and Mr Gee were assailed on the head with a blunt instrument. Both Mr Abbey and Mr Gee had been alone in their premises, behind their counters. And both Mr Abbey and Mr Gee and their premises were known to Elliott. He used his acquaintanceship with Mr Abbey in his defence and, as Detective Inspector Tom Barnaby would quickly realise, he lived close enough to Mr Gee to be on nodding terms with him, too: the cobbler’s shop was in Whitworth Terrace; the grandparents’ house was in Beaumont Terrace. In this part of Spennymoor, differently-named terraces lined the same road, causing postmen great confusion. So since the murder, the names have been simplified. Beaumont Terrace, for example, has taken on the name of its neighbour. It is now part of Whitworth Terrace – and although modern Whitworth Terrace is a good quarter-of-a-mile long, it surely is close enough for the cobbler’s shop to have been known intimately to the 18-year-old Elliott. And that’s the story that has been passed down the branches of the Gee family. They’ve been told that Elliott was always in and out of the one-legged cobbler’s shop on the look-out for money. When the opportunity arose, as it did four years later in Ferryhill, he seized it quite brutally. This is not just shoehorning the facts to fit the crime. Echo Memories can reveal – apparently for the first time – the addendum at the foot of the police record of the murder of Philip Nash Gee – Crime No 7/24. In beautiful copperplate script, it says: “NOTE. Norman Elliott, who was executed at Durham Jail on the 10/8/28 for the murder of Byland Abbey, a bank clerk at Ferryhill, was thought might have been connected with the murder of Gee. The Home Office was communicated with on the matter. For correspondence in connection herewith, see Assize File for August 1928.” The “Assize File” appears not to have survived. But surely, after 80 years, we have enough evidence to close both these cases? OF course, there’s another side to the story. In January 1928, a month before William Abbey’s murder, Norman Elliott had married Elizabeth, the daughter of the landlord of the Turk’s Head pub in Kelloe. While Elliott was on trial in June 1928, she gave birth to his child, who she took to show him in his cell on Death Row. “I was told that she went to visit Norman once because he wanted to see the baby,” says a relative. “When she got home, she burned all the clothes the child had on.” That child grew up in central Durham. He emigrated to Australia shortly after he married a lass from Stockton. “He couldn’t go out on a Saturday night without being told: ‘Thy father was a murderer’,” explains the relative. We are pleased to report that, now 80 and a grandfather, he has had a successful life Down Under, running his own business. Only last year, he returned to County Durham to visit relatives. His mother, Elizabeth, widowed by the hangman, remarried and had other children, some of whom still survive in the Sedgefield constituency. The Northern Echo reported that she was “prostrate with grief” when her husband of just five weeks was arrested and charged with murder. Her father collapsed on the floor of the Turk’s Head when he heard the news and required medical assistance. He later had to move out of the pub and find work down the pit. “I remember when I first went to Kelloe nearly 60 years ago,” says the relative who married into the family. “At the bus stand, this man just said ‘it’s so many years to the day that they hanged Norman Elliott’, and he knew who I was, that’s why he said it. This murder affected all their lives. It made things so difficult for all of them.” Night after night, in the month of February 1928, former solider, and bank cashier, Mr. William Byland Abbey was being puzzled by the weird dreams he was suffering. He was suffering visions of two men grabbing him around the throat as he struggled to fight them off. On Sunday 12 February, when he came downstairs in the lodgings of Parker Terrace, Ferryhill, he announced the visions to his landlady, Mrs. Bryan, who, coincidently, had a nightmare of him being killed. Mr. Abbey also announced that, if anyone did attack him whilst at work — the premises of Lloyds Bank (now the Black Bull Public House) — they would not get away as there would be a crowd of people outside, and he would throw a paperweight through the window to attract their attention. After breakfast, he went to the Baptist Chapel in the village, where he was a Sunday school superintendent and choirmaster. The following Monday morning, the 31-year old bachelor was back behind the counter of his bank, having forgotten about his dreams. It would be exactly the same week that Mr. Abbey’s apparent dreams were to come true. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, he was attacked whilst at work, and soon, he was lying in a pool of blood, being bludgeoned across the head and stabbed in the throat. Just before he died. However he threw a paperweight through the main-window, just as he had prophesied. The noise of the crash of glass drew outside attention, and a Mr. William Kell, rushed into the premises. Mr. Kell noticed the cash drawer open and covered in blood. If has been rifled and covered in blood, and empty - with more that £200 being taken. He then heard Mr. Abbey groaning in the corner, and went over, and found the cashier grasping the final words “it was a tall man who did it. He’s taken everything and gone off down the village”. Police soon arrived, and a cobbler’s knife was found nearby the victim. (however later on, it was proved that the knife at the scene of the crime was not that of the killer's.) There was blood splatters on the counter and walls, which showed that the victim had put up a fierce fight. Sunderland’s CID Flying Squad’ was drafted in, and as darkness fell, roadblocks were set up across the county of Durham. Cars were stopped throughout the night as police chased the theory that the killer had made off in an old, dark brown Rover. The theory turned out to be false when the owner of the car contacted the police and was eliminated from the enquiries. The real killer, in fact, was more casual in his escape. Witnesses saw him walk out of the bank and caught a bus at Metal Bridge. The police traced the bus conductress, Ms Gladys Turner, from Shotton. She had no problems remembering the man… His name was Mr. Norman Elliott, a young man with a tragic upbringing. During his childhood, his mother had passed away, and his father, a police constable, never having got over his wife’s death, committed suicide on a railway line. Mr. Elliott was known by the bus conductress to be a friendly, talkative man who regularly caught the bus from his home in KelIoe, to Sedgefield Mental Asylum, where he was employed as an attendant. The 22-year old man had married a few weeks earlier and was known as desperate for money. His wife was Elizabeth Callan, whose parents ran the Turks Head Public House in Kelloe, and was well respected. The young couple had just found cheap lodgings in Burrell Street and Elizabeth was found scrubbing the floor when detectives arrived to arrest her husband.