The cleft chin murder was a killing which occurred as part of a string of crimes during 1944, and was mentioned in George Orwell's essay "Decline of the English Murder". It became known as the "cleft chin murder" because the murder victim, George Edward Heath, a taxi driver, had a cleft chin.
The culprits were Karl Hultén, a Swedish-born deserter from the U.S. Army, and Elizabeth Jones, an eighteen-year-old waitress.
Jones later said she dreamed of "doing something exciting," and fantasized about being a stripper. At the time, Hultén described himself as an officer and as a Chicago gangster, both of which were false.
History
Jones was born in Neath, Wales, in 1926. At the age of thirteen she ran away from home and eventually she was sent to an approved school because she was considered to be "beyond parental control." Hultén was born in Sweden in 1922 and had enlisted in the U.S. Army after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, previously having been a grocery clerk and a mechanic.
On 3 October 1944, Jones (married but separated from her husband) met Hultén (married with a child) in a tea shop. Already AWOL, he claimed to be an officer and a gangster. The relationship lasted only six days, during which time they knocked over a nurse cycling along a country lane and robbed her, before picking up a hitchhiker, knocking her unconscious, robbing her, and then throwing her into a river to drown (though she survived).
Finally they murdered George Edward Heath at Knowle Green near Staines in Middlesex. 34 years old, Heath had been medically discharged from the British Army after being wounded in the evacuation of Dunkirk and at the time of his death was working as an unlicensed taxi driver.
The Americans waived the Visiting Forces Act allowing him to be tried in a British court, given that Jones fell outside their jurisdiction. During the trial they implicated each other, with Jones alleging that she feared violence from Hultén if she did not follow his instructions. They were both found guilty of murdering Heath. Mr Justice Charles sentenced them to be hanged, but while Hultén was executed at Pentonville Prison on 8 March 1945, Jones was reprieved after a recommendation of mercy from the jury.
Jones's reprieve caused some controversy, because many people considered the crimes to be cowardly, and in a war-torn Britain where everyone was pulling together to face a common enemy, almost treasonous. "SHE SHOULD HANG" was graffitied in several places in Jones's home town. A number of references to the murder appear in the contemporary diary of Basil Cottle (1917–1994), a Bletchley Park cryptanalyst. They range from the outrage of his landlady, "Mrs Read, quite desolee, about the Jones reprieve", to the aside by a Foreign Office civilian at Bletchley, Audrey Clare Stobart, "Clare is getting very witty - her remark about men wanting to marry Jones because it'll be safer than taking up taxi-driving."
Cultural references
Three guns from the crime spree are in the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard and so it was documented in "The Jack Handle", an episode of the 1950s radio crime anthology The Black Museum narrated by Orson Welles. It also featured in a 1952 episode of Whitehall 1212 (radio show) called 'The Murder of Charles Brooks'.
A film, Chicago Joe and the Showgirl was made in 1990, based on the story, directed by Bernard Rose, written by David Yallop, and starring Emily Lloyd as Elizabeth Jones, Kiefer Sutherland as Karl, and Patsy Kensit.