Chapter 10 - Battered Strumpets

Hannah Tailford, who boasted of having attended a party in Eaton Square - where Lord Boothby lived - in which she was paid £25 to have sex with a man in a gorilla suit, was one who participated in this line of work before it got out of hand and she found herself cast as the star in her very own snuff-movie.

The author Brian McConnell in his expose of the Stripper murders Found Naked and Dead claims that police discovered that Hannah had access to a photographic studio and equipment; perfect for a would be blackmailer:

‘The blackmail theory was uppermost in the detective’s minds. For in their pursuit of her background they found an apartment she rented to entertain her clients. There were cameras, photographic lighting equipment, and an address book.’

Now I am no detective and I don’t want to blow my own strumpet but Hannah Tailford was a mere two-bob, street-walking harlot; there is no way she could have had either the means or the gumption to have set up a sophisticated extortion racket. Somebody was bankrolling this operation. Stephen Ward had the funds and Peter Rachman had the premises.

Likewise Margaret McGowan, aka Frances Brown; who, like the snapper Vasco Lazzolo, had given evidence in defence of Stephen Ward at his high profile trial in 1963, was another lady of the night who was quite happy to get the puppies out for a punter with a Box Brownie until she too fell victim to the Stripper Killer.

Indeed, young Margaret had once been pestered by the aforementioned Vasco Lazzolo, the society photographer and friend of Stephen Ward, to participate in a mucky picture shoot with another girl just weeks before her death.

Margaret McGowan

Irene Lockwood

Yet another mucky muse cursed to die at the hands of the Stripper Killer was Irene Lockwood; only Irene was one who should really have known better given that her best friend Vicki Pender had only recently fallen foul of a customer with a violent temper. Vicki had made the cardinal error of trying to blackmail the client direct and had landed up strangled for her troubles; yet another dead brass on the streets, only not this time due to killer or killers unknown.

Vicki didn’t know that you needed specialist skills to successfully extract the cash from a guilt-ridden and disease-laden punter. Vicki didn’t know that you should only blackmail people actually worth blackmailing. In fact, Vicki didn’t know very much at all until death’s stiff-fingered embrace put an end to her blissful ignorance. Irene Lockwood didn’t know either, but she knew what Vicki knew and that was enough to ensure that she must be silenced.

One thing both Vicki and Irene did know though was where to score those Purple Hearts. So did Hannah Tailford. They knew that the speed-freak trail led east to Brick Lane and to the lair of the twin faces of twentieth-century evil and to the self-same streets that had spawned the original ripper killer a century earlier.

So, Vicki, Irene and Hannah, the speed they peddled, the Kray twins and the spectre of the whore-hating serial-killer had all travelled the self-same, well-worn path from east to west London.

Vicki Pender; or Veronica Walsh as she had been christened by her ever-so proud parents, breathed her last gasp with the vice-like grip of an ex-paratrooper’s strong hands clamped around her throat.

Colin Welt Fisher was that former paratrooper, but was, by then a 33 year old civilian salesman/engineer/art-photographer. Colin had turned to Vicki for her own strong grip technique, though she had, in an amphetamine flash, found that the boot was on the other foot and that things were going spectacularly tits-up very rapidly.

After a 48-hour speed and hash fuelled bender the prosecution claimed Fisher, at a time unknown, had strangled the bejesus out of Vicki before running off to the Daily Mirror with a story to sell. The compassionate newspaper informed Colin that his tale was only of interest to its readership, and, therefore, lucrative for Colin, if he coughed for the murder charge. Clever Colin quickly worked out that dirty money was no good to a man dangling from the end a rope and so decided to keep schtum. A wise move given that the paper was feeding back everything Colin told them to the Old Bill. The Daily Mirror, despite assurances, never did reveal what Colin had told them, which given Colin’s defence had been memory loss, may, or may-not be revealing.

However, Colin was also using his photographic expertise to carve out a niche business in the under-the-counter group-sex photographs racket for which both Vicki and Irene were particularly game. After all, it is infinitely more rewarding to pose with your pal and a strap-on dildo in a nice warm, anonymous room than to lay with your knickers around your ankles in the back of an old Ford Zephyr whilst being impaled by a beer-breathed navvy!

Vicki’s pal, Irene Lockwood, had also developed a neat side-line which involved mugging punters by luring them to a flea-pit hotel room before doing the off with their rapidly dropped trousers and wallets, safe in the knowledge that they were highly unlikely to go running to the law.

That is, of course, before the Stripper Killer added Irene to his expanding roll-call of victims.

So by 1964, and with Peter Rachman, Stephen Ward and the street girls all silenced, Mary Ann de Grimston quickly spotted the gap in the market. Mary could bring with her an ever-growing list of willing devotees who, by dint of the Scientologist auditing process, will have provided a full and frank admission of any and all sexual peccadillos and perversions. Plus there was the additional benefit of being able to add a touch of class and breeding to the cinematic proceedings. Hookers are all well and good but, let’s be honest, you’re just not going to add that hint of English rose, a frisson of virtue or a soupçon of purity to your celluloid masterpiece by using a rough-as-arseholes tart with ‘Mum and Dad’ tattooed on her forearm. Casting is everything after all.

Also, with snuff-movies being what they are there is an ever changing cast-list and landing the coveted lead role is somewhat of a poisoned chalice. If you were selected for that plum position the only thing you could be certain of was that you would give the performance of your life.

You see these girls: the Hammersmith nudes, the Thames torsos, the prey of Jack the Stripper, they weren’t the poor victims of a punter with the pox; they were silenced because of what they knew and who they knew.

Rachman had seen the writing on the wall and had faked his death, but Stephen Ward made the fatal mistake of believing that his friends in high places would save him. Of course once he no longer had direct control over his portfolio of pornography then he was a dead man walking.

L. Ron Hubbard Jr. was wrong about having had Ward by the balls though. Hubbard and his Process allies knew only too well the power that incriminating materials can buy you, but they bought right into the Cold War bullshit and thought that they could play the Americans and the British off against the Russians. But it didn’t work like that, that’s not where the real power lay.

Chapter 11

Chapter 20 - Jack the Stripper

Way back at the beginning I said this; the Profumo affair was the biggest cover-up in global history, its vast tentacles extending way beyond the narrow confines of 1960s London. Its true scope and enormity would shock even the most ardent conspiracy theorist: it encompasses not just Stephen Ward, but all his girls and how he controlled them; it goes to the heart of the JFK assassination; it tells how the hippie movement was created as a tool of government; of how a non-existent serial killer was created; of phoney spies and royal conspiracies. All to protect the world’s oldest secret!

I doubt you believed me then, you may not believe me now, but let me just wrap this all up for you.

Like Peter Rachman, Stephen Ward was prepared to do whatever it took to get the job done. He hated the Royals as much as the Reds and was negotiating with the Russian Ivanov to get evidence on the Royals that would crush them forever. Evidence the Reds had found after the revolution.

Ivanov had helped move this Kompromat evidence from St. Petersburg and archive it in Moscow. He was also looking for a copy in England, files Rudolf Hess had brought with him on that flight of mystery he made in 1941. Roger Hollis, the one-time Director General of MI5, had spotted the files in the archives at the end of the war and had tried to find them again. They had been removed. As had other sensitive files. No record of their existence survived either.

Secrets so volatile they can never be revealed.

Ward had been negotiating a deal with the Russians, via Ivanov, to obtain a copy of Hess’s files. In return Ivanov used a special camera to take copies of the compromising photos of Prince Philip from an album in the possession of Stephen Ward. Ivanov referred to these photographs as his ‘Royal porno collection’.

Ward had also inherited the photographic collection of his friend, and fellow Thursday Club member, Baron Nahum who had died of an alleged heart attack in 1956. Nahum was another who enjoyed hosting orgies.

We in Ward’s team of Baker Street irregulars were told they were lists of all the communists in Britain, but in reality, and it took me years to work this out, we were actually looking for ledgers; genealogical charts; breeding charts, if you will, which would indicate which individuals, or families, the Establishment would consider exchanging bodily fluids with.

It is logical that Ward would try to get the Reds to give him new copies, thus saving a lot of time and trouble and risk. I think I know what he offered in payment, and, although atomic stuff, it was not atomic secrets, if you know what I mean! I better not mention what it actually was; you all think I’m mad anyway!

But at the time it was just a story; an amusing aside, I didn’t know then that Ward’s spy-team was actually looking for these ledgers.

And what of the modern state of mind-control? I don’t know if the current Harley Street mob still experiment on people and the LSD experiments have long since finished; they having finally realised that hallucinogens, and the subjects’ responses to hallucinogens, were not reliable and ergo not the way to go. The American CIA moved into projects such as Operation Often, purportedly designed to ‘explore the world of black magic’ and ‘harness the forces of darkness and challenge the concept that the inner reaches of the mind are beyond reach’, which all sounds depressingly familiar, does it not. I have been out of the loop a long time so I can only speculate on what they do now but my guess is that they use the alien thing.

Think about it, if somebody sees some strange object in the sky – films it even - performing fantastic aeronautical feats then we have become so trained by the years of government denial and Hollywood movies to automatically think that it can’t possibly be of this world.

That is mind-control in action, the very definition of ‘plausible deniability’; this craft performs staggering manoeuvres and moves at fantastic speeds therefore, it must be alien. The perfect cover story whilst the Americans perfect the Nazi technology they’ve been working on for over seventy years.

Except how come so many crash? If aliens really could fly billions of miles across the universe, or manipulate wormholes, then you would expect that they could master the relatively weak gravitational pull of this planet. Human technology on the other hand, especially of the experimental variety, that fucks up all the time.

What about alien abductions you may ask? Well some are clearly just nut jobs demanding attention or notoriety but some clearly believe their abductions to be true. Interestingly a lot of these recollections are only revealed when the subject is hypnotised. Perhaps these abductees are those of us with the ancient psychic gene that have been identified by the Establishment and are now being experimented upon. Not by aliens though, but by the mind-control technicians and these poor unfortunates are then implanted with memories of little green men with rectal probes so that the Establishment has the perfect cover story. Modern day mind-control in action.

The other ploy is the Project Fear operation. As you know these people control the media. Back in the day the Cliveden Set owned, almost exclusively, all the right-wing media. Nowadays it is no different: Murdoch’s News Corporation owns the Times and the Sun; the Barclay brothers own the Telegraph; Lord Rothermere owns the Daily Mail; Richard Desmond the Express. All right-wing and all peddling the self-same tales of impending doom and destruction if we don’t tow the Establishment line that capitalism is the panacea to all society’s ills.

In the States we see the rise of Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric; neatly forgetting that any white American is far from native. The ‘black lives matter’ movement serves to remind us of the impending arrival of Manson’s Helter Skelter project fifty years behind schedule.

He who controls the media controls the people. We believe what we are told, and what we are told is to trust nobody and that the world is going to shit. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We are told that there are terrorists lurking on every street corner, radicalised far more by the right-wing media which then enforces this Western intolerance of their culture than by any mad mullah preaching hatred. Add to this mix a nation that believes it genuinely has a constitutional right to bear arms despite the fact that many of its residents have as many brain cells as a revolver has chambers.

The same nation that then weeps and wails and wonders why innocent children are being slaughtered when a pecker-dicked keyboard warrior has his programming activated, supposedly in response to the actions of the so-called terrorist.

The same nation that formerly believed it had a constitutional right to inject heroin and snort cocaine until the media convinced them that self-medicating was a bad thing in the early twentieth century. These self-medicaters then become criminalised and unemployable, meaning they have to rely on state hand-outs, whereupon they were deemed lazy scroungers by the self-same media that demonised them in the first place and the cycle of misery perpetuates.

Wake up people.

We live in a world of celebrity in which we worship the vacuous and where we would wallow in our own excrement if a Kardashian endorsed it. It is time to lift our gaze up from the level of our smart-phones, remove our blinkers and to embrace the truth. It is time to realise that understanding what happened then is the key to appreciating what is happening now.

It is for these very reasons that events post WWII happened as they did.

It is time, then, to answer the remaining questions. Who was the Stripper Killer and why was Stephen Ward taken out?

One answer leads to the other: The Stripper victims were all Ward’s girls.

One answer leads to more questions:

Why would Ward kill himself when the worst he was looking at was a year or two in jail?

Why would Stephen Ward need to be guarded in his hospital room as he lay in a coma having consumed a lethal overdose of sleeping pills?

Why would someone want to kill an already dead man?

Could it be they just want to make sure that he never opened his mouth again?

If this was the case then Ward’s girls were in very grave danger after vouching that they would name names.

Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies had the powerful protection of notoriety, though the character assassinations performed upon them by the Fleet Street Establishment puppets ensured that the world would never take seriously anything those two had to say. 

But the others were flung into the icy wind of abandonment and died within its cold embrace. Shot full of speed and stripped of all knowledge.

Let us consider their fate.

Hannah Tailford

As previously discussed the first, in my opinion, Stripper Killer victim was 30 year-old Hannah Tailford, discovered in the Thames under a pier close to Hammersmith Bridge on February 2, 1964. Her underwear was stuffed in her mouth. Hannah was known on the pervy party scene and at Dolphin Square and had access to professional photographic equipment and developing services. Filed alongside her autopsy report was a map showing the Brick Lane area in the East End of London.

Irene Lockwood

Irene Lockwood; a peroxide panther somewhat redolent to me of Myra Hindley, washed up on the banks of the Thames on April 8, 1964, not far from where Hannah Tailford had been found. Irene was another who was a fixture and fitting on the blue movie scene and, as already detailed, was well acquainted with the blackmail agenda.

Helene Barthelmy

On the 22^nd of the same month Helene Barthelmy was discovered naked and dead in a back-alley in Brentford. She had last been seen alive at the Jazz Club at 207 Westbourne Park Road, a destination also well known to the next victim, Mary Fleming. Naked, strangled and minus some teeth, Helene of Blackpool was discovered with traces of paint upon her corpse.

Mary Fleming

Similarly strange and unexpected paint spots were also present on Mary Fleming; found naked in July 1964 in Chiswick. Originally from Scotland, Fleming had been working the west London streets since 1955.

Margaret McGowan

Next to die was Margaret McGowan, aka Frances Brown, who had bravely given evidence on behalf of Stephen Ward at his trial the year before. Her body was discovered on a pile of rubbish in a car park in Hornton Street, near to Kensington High Street. Again spots of paint covered her body and she was minus a tooth. She was also a Scottish girl; short dark hair, bit chubby but with nice boobs. She was the only one I knew.

Irish-born Bridget O’Hara, also known as ‘Bridie’, was the last of Ward’s girls to die; her paint splattered corpse was discovered on February 16, 1965.

Recently, according to the Daily Mail, a portrait of a young woman involved in the Profumo affair was found on the back of a drawing of Christine Keeler; I can’t be certain but it does look a lot like Bridget O’Hara to me.

Bridget was found dead at the Heron Trading Estate in Acton behind a storage shed. 

PC Plod inspecting the area where O’Hara’s body was found

Once again, O’Hara’s body also turned up bearing flecks of industrial paint which were traced to a covered transformer just yards from where she had been discovered. She also showed signs of having been stored in a warm environment.

But, to get to the heart of this mystery we need to return to the Profumo affair and focus specifically on the downfall of Stephen Ward.

Chapter 21