In 1946 in Kent, the strangled body of a 46-year-old former telephonist known as Dagmar Peters was found by the side of the road

In 1946 in Kent, the strangled body of a 46-year-old former telephonist known as Dagmar Peters was found by the side of the road.

In the same year, not far along the south coast, in Bournemouth, a hunt was launched for a handsome pilot by the name of Neville Heath, suspected of a foul murder in London. And in Eastbourne, another southern coastal town, Dr John Bodkin Adams, a suspected serial killer, was about to "ease the passing" of another wealthy patient with an injection of morphine.

And in that same year, George Orwell wrote an article for Tribune in which he considered just what murder tells us about society. The essay, prompted by a casual killing carried out by an American army deserter, Karl Hulten, and a teenage waitress, Elizabeth Jones, was called "Decline of the English Murder". Nearly 70 years later, those 1946 cases are being examined in full forensic detail. Are murders a mirror of the society we live in? How much, for instance, can we really learn from the 640 committed in Great Britain last year and how much do the notorious murders of the past act as a prism through which we can see more clearly the times in which they were committed? The questions are prompted by a trio of recent books by well-regarded writers that take specific murder cases and place them under the microscope of history.

examines the long-forgotten case of Dagmar Petrzywalski, known as Peters because her name was so difficult to pronounce. It was her habit to hitchhike to London, spurning offers from private cars but taking lifts from lorry drivers to whom she would offer the equivalent of the bus fare – fourpence – which they would usually refuse. This in itself tells us something of that pinched and rationed postwar time; it is hard to imagine a middle-aged woman in Kent trying to hitch to London today.  Her trust was misplaced; it was a lorry driver, Harold Hagger, a bigamist using the name Sidney Sinclair, who would kill her when she resisted his advances. Both victim and murderer had seen their lives affected, if not defined, by the second world war. Dagmar's lodgings in London had been bombed in 1941, prompting a nervous breakdown and a move to the countryside. Hagger was an army deserter and black marketeer. Although both protagonists were low-profile characters – "outsiders", as Souhami calls them – there was no shortage of larger-than-life personalities in their story, men who were to have starring roles in murder cases of the future: the extrovert Robert Fabian, later to be known as Fabian of the Yard, who investigated the case; Albert Pierrepoint, the hangman who dispatched the killer; Dr Keith Simpson, the pathologist who examined the body; Melford Stevenson, who defended the murderer in court and would later fail to save Ruth Ellis from being the last woman to be hanged. A photo of Fabian and Pierrepoint shows them together in cheery mood just after an execution, looking as though they have just tipped a winner at the White City dog track. We learn about Fabian's views on homosexuality – "as a lawbreaking act, it is parallel with robbery with violence" – and that Pierrepoint knew from the age of eight that he wanted to be a professional hangman. What is remarkable about the murder is the speed with which events moved in those days.

The trial was over in two days and less than three weeks passed from a jury delivering the verdict to the hanging. While the condemned man waited for his end, he was allowed a pint of beer and 10 cigarettes a day. We learn that a strong liberal impetus to end hanging was derailed by the horrors of war; it was felt that hanging was the only way to deal with the Nazi atrocities uncovered and thus it was nearly another 20 years before abolition. Sean O'Connor's Handsome Brute: The Story of a Ladykiller, tells a much more familiar tale, that of the "war hero, conman and killer" Neville Heath.

There have been many books on Heath, including Borstal Boy: The Uncensored Life of Neville Heath by Gerald Byrne in 1946, and, the following year, The Life and Death of Neville Heath, the Man No Woman Could Resist by Sydney Brock. (By chance, Heath was incarcerated with a much better known borstal boy, Brendan Behan.) Continue reading