Ghastly Chichester murder destined to remain unsolved after 99 years

Little Vera Hoad loved music, and Monday was music day. 99 years ago this week, on February 25 1924, she left her lesson at 6.30pm and headed home to St Pancras. She was not seen alive again. Three days later she was found in a field in the grounds of Graylingwell hospital, a layer of snow her only shroud. She had been strangled and violated.

Of course, with the centenary of her death next year, we can be certain that her killer will have long since died himself; but even after all these years, it’s impossible not to wonder whether someone somewhere in Chichester still guards the most grisly of family secrets. Does someone somewhere know something? I rather suspect someone does.

I certainly stumbled into something distinctly sinister back in 1994 when I interviewed a childhood friend of little Vera’s. Her friend, who asked not to be named, spoke freely of the friend she lost to an unknown killer back in February 1924.

Chillingly, it was an interview which certainly struck a chord with someone when it appeared in the paper a few days later. Almost immediately, I was on the wrong end of a phone call which was distinctly menacing, brutal and openly hostile as a gruff, elderly voice told me to “keep my ******* nose out.” I tried to ask why, but my caller wasn’t brooking any discussion. He repeated his injunction and slammed the phone down. It was so totally out of proportion. The piece in the paper was measured and respectful. It honoured Vera.

It was a disturbing moment. I sat there in silence in the busy office. We were in South Street at the time. Phones were going around me. Other reporters were chatting. All I could think was to scribble out the sums to see if they worked.

Had it been the killer I had spoken to? What was the youngest the killer could have been? 14 or 15 maybe? Which would have made him 84 or 85 now. It really wasn’t impossible, was it. I couldn’t dismiss the thought. Had I just spoken to someone who had quite literally got away with murder and now felt himself threatened? I will never know. All I can say is that I never heard from him again – much to my relief, I have to admit.

Back in 1924, the discovery of poor Vera’s body – by a deaf and dumb patient who worked at the farmhouse at the mental hospital – rocked Chichester, and all manner of rumours did the rounds as police knocked on door after door in a vain effort to find a clue to the killer. A piece of cloth, perhaps from the killer’s clothes, sent shivers through the city.

Washing hanging in the back garden became a rare sight. No one dared offer anyone the chance to find a ripped garment. Two and two would have made five, six or seven in the climate of fear and suspicion. But time passed and the horror subsided. Police inquiries continued, but little came to light. Scotland Yard was at its most diligent, but the person guilty of the atrocious crime was never traced. As The News Of The World wrote nine years later when Vera’s father committed suicide, the tragedy passed into the pigeon holes of murders unsolved.

Inevitably, it was a tragedy which stayed with Vera’s school friend; 70 years later, she broke her silence. She came into the office to see me. Little Vera was her friend, a bright young girl she loved to play with, she told me. Vera’s death had never been far from her thoughts in all the seven decades since.

Vera Hoad was a “bonny child of happy disposition and fair bobbed hair”, The Chichester Observer wrote when her strangled body was found at Graylingwell. Seventy years later, that’s just how her one-time friend still remembered her.

“She was a very bright little girl, always laughing, always joking, riding around on her bike”, said her friend who was now 80 in 1994. Vera would have been 81 by then.

Her friend’s memories were just as fresh then as they ever were. She and Vera used to meet before and after school, and the day 11-year-old Vera disappeared was no different.

“We were coming down the road and she was just going off for a music lesson. She said ‘Cheerio, see you tomorrow’. I never saw her again. She was missing, I don’t know, three or four days, and all these rumours were going round. My mother wouldn’t let me know what was being said, but I flapped my ears. And then Vera was found at Graylingwell by a deaf and dumb patient. The patient tried to get people to understand that he wanted someone to go with him, and it took him some time. When they got there, they found her. She was absolutely frozen solid on to the ground. They had to get a blow torch to release her.”

Only in 1994, a lifetime later, did her friend learn that Vera was strangled. The precise details of Vera’s dreadful fate were kept from her.

“All I know was that we had the detectives coming round asking all these questions. They were going around with a piece of a shirt, a man’s shirt. People were frightened to hang their washing out after that if they had a patch on their shirts. There was a terrific to-do about the whole thing. Those days people had little to interest them so something like this was really big news. Nowadays people get murdered, and it is just one a week. The detectives were asking me if Vera played with boys, if I could say whether she had said anything. I couldn’t think whether or not she had. I was just too terrified. I hid behind my mother.”

She added: “I have been looking through a book on murders in Sussex, and I looked all through it and I couldn’t see any reference to this case, but it was a big noise at the time. She was buried in Westhampnett cemetery, now Portfield. It was just a simple grave with a headstone. I tried to find it the last time I was in the cemetery, and I couldn’t actually find it. I know the area. I’m sure I could find if I tried again some time.”

The woman didn’t attend the burial and didn’t even know it was on – again part of the protective cloak spread around her by her family. But afterwards she became good friends with Vera’s mother, a deeply religious woman who turned to séances in an attempt to solve the crime. A medium told her that it was someone called Jack who committed the murder, but Mrs Hoad knew no one of that name, and there it remained – a story that haunted Vera’s school friend ever since.

“I remember Vera so well. She was such a bright and happy sort of girl. I often used to wonder what she would have become if she had lived. I can see her now.”