• THE HISTORY DETECTIVE
DR NELL DARBY INVESTIGATES COLD CASES FROM THE ARCHIVES
The mystery of the vanishing widow
In this month’s column, Dr Nell Darby investigates a woman’s disappearance and the financial fraud that may offer clues to what happened to her
CASE #002
When Louisa Lee, a 64-year-old widow living on her own, went missing from her Kent home in April 1939, for all intents and purposes it seemed that she had vanished into thin air. Sadly, disappearances aren’t all that rare, but her case raises some intriguing details. And it demonstrates that although a suspect and a motive might be identified for a crime, this does not mean it is enough to secure an arrest and get a charge, let alone a conviction.
Pension irregularities
Louisa was originally from Leeds. There’s a possibility that she had a brief first marriage, before the records show that she wed, in 1906, a man named Walter Shaw Mitchell. He died in 1934 and, three years later, Louisa married solicitor Charles William Lee. This was not a successful relationship, with the couple separating after a few years. Louisa then settled on her own in Margate, Kent.
There, she was comfortably off, having received Walter’s company pension since his death. In 1939, however, a secretary at that company raised doubts about letters and cheques supposedly signed by Louisa. It was believed they were not “authentic”. The company solicitor, David Gow, agreed with the secretary and decided that before any future payments were made, Louisa would have to come and identify herself in person.
In response, a letter was delivered supposedly from her, saying it was “inconvenient” for her to visit. Instead, the letter asked that the money be paid to a Margate bank. The signature on this letter was, again, seen as fraudulent and the company never heard back in their further attempts to communicate with Louisa. The police were called.
It quickly emerged that since April that year, Louisa had done nothing with her money or the house she owned. She had not withdrawn anything, nor asked for the pension. She had simply disappeared. Yet still, another letter was sent to her dead husband’s former company purporting to be from her, this time from an address in Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire. In it, ‘Louisa’ attempted to obtain her pension money on the pretext that she intended to relocate abroad.
Then World War II came, and events were disrupted. Gow’s office was hit by a German bomb, destroying most of the documents relating to Louisa. It would not be until 1952 that a police investigation resumed.
A seed of doubt
The key suspect was a man named Charles Seed, since the Rickmansworth address on the letter had been his former home. By then, he had moved to Canada to work as an estate agent, but nearly 15 years after Louisa had vanished detectives in the Metropolitan Police, John Black and Neil Sutherland, travelled to question him. Seed duly complained to the Daily Mail, telling a reporter: “This thing is getting ridiculous”.
Seed argued that rumours of his involvement in a woman’s disappearance would put his real estate business in danger of ruin. Besides, he seemed to have a theory to explain what happened to Louisa: she may have got married once more, without telling any of her friends, and thus vanished with her new spouse and under a new name. Seed couldn’t explain why she would do this, merely complaining that the situation was “unpleasant”.
In January 1954, Black retired from the Met having failed to solve the case and four months later, Louisa was officially declared dead. Her body has never been found and nobody charged in relation to her disappearance.
Dr Nell Darby is a crime historian and writer, and the presenter of the CBS Reality series Murder by the Sea. Her latest book is Sister Sleuths: Female Detectives in Britain (Pen & Sword History, 2021)
LISTEN
A new podcast, Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley, explores the crimes of Victorian women from a feminist perspective: bbc.in/3d27ylb