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The Mysterious Madame X

Who really was Celia Jackson, and why was she murdered?
By David Cocksedge

THIS STRANGE STORY has all the ingredients of a fictional tale: a mysterious victim with a murky past; a night time attack by an unknown assailant; anonymous death threats before the murder; suspicion focused on the wrong person, and the disappearance of the murder weapon. Instead of a fictional murder mystery, however, this crime case is true.

On the night of 4 February 1929, a Mrs. Celia Jackson was returning to her bungalow in Limeslade Way, near Swansea in South Wales. She and a friend, Mrs Dimick, had been to the cinema in Swansea and it was just after ten o’clock when the next-door neighbors parted. Mrs. Dimick was just taking off her coat inside her house when she heard screams coming from Mrs. Jackson’s residence. She immediately ran to the back door of the bungalow occupied by Mrs. Jackson and her husband. There, about eight feet outside the door was her friend, lying in a heap. Her husband was bending over her. He said, “Help me to pick her up, Dimmy. I don’t know what has happened.”

Between them they pulled Mrs. Jackson into the scullery. Mrs. Dimick attended to her, and Mrs. Jackson soon recovered enough to stand up and walk into the sitting room. She seemed in a daze, saying nothing. At about midnight Ray Jackson called in a doctor, who took his wife at once to hospital. She lingered there for six days in a semi-conscious condition, then died. Before her death, she was unable to tell the police or doctors who had attacked her. It is probable that she did not know. A fortnight later Mr. Raymond Jackson was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.

Jackson made an odd remark to the doctor on arriving with his wife at the hospital. He had said, “I have been married to her for nearly ten years, and I still don’t know who she really is.” Celia was indeed a woman of mystery. Her neighbors considered her to be independently wealthy. She always wore new and expensive clothes, took taxies everywhere, tipped generously, and often bought herself jewelry. Two years before her death, the Jackson's had moved to the bungalow after living in a large house. Jackson himself was a fish hawker with a small business, but certainly no fortune. The money for all Mrs. Jackson’s extravagances came from her own funds. Money arrived in cash by post every Wednesday morning – sometimes a whole bundle of notes.

Mrs. Jackson’s own explanation to her friends was that she was a novelist and journalist, and earned a steady income from novels and articles she wrote for London papers. Not even her husband suspected the truth. For though Mrs. Jackson conducted a large and lucrative correspondence, she was in fact an unusually successful blackmailer. The bundles of cash arriving by post so regularly every week came from her many “clients”. In a case of misappropriation earlier, an accused man had parted with a large sum of money to a woman referred to in court only as “Madame X”. This mysterious woman was none other than Mrs. Jackson. Even her birth certificate was a work of fiction. She claimed to be a daughter of the “Duke of Abercorn”, but police later established that she had been born in 1895 into a working class family named Atkinson, living near Burnley.

The Crown’s case was flimsy at best. From the position of bloodstains, near the hem, it was concluded that Mrs. Jackson’s coat had been thrown over her head with the lining next to the hem. The inference drawn was that after entering the house, she had been attacked by her husband, who threw her coat over her head to smother her cries and shield himself from becoming bloodstained. She then ran out, and fell down outside the bungalow. It was also stated that Jackson had said on the way to the hospital that he would inform the police of the attack, but did not do so. Also, when two neighbors called on him the next day, Jackson strangely never even mentioned the attack on his wife. Investigating police officers found a tire-lever under a cushion in the bungalow and this was presented in court as the possible murder weapon. The prosecution also alleged that several anonymous and threatening letters received by Mrs. Jackson in the weeks before the murder had been written by her husband to divert suspicion away from himself.

It did not take a genius to establish that the tire-lever was clearly not the murder weapon. The latter inflicted wounds of a peculiar character; two of them might have been made by a blunt instrument and seven were cuts of a triangular nature in the coat and on the body. None of the cuts and wounds on Mrs. Jackson’s body matched in any way with the tire-lever, and eventually even the police had to admit this. Anyway, had Ray Jackson committed the crime he would hardly have left the murder weapon lying around his house so openly. Also, there was no time for Jackson and his wife to have quarreled when she returned from the cinema that evening, for Mrs. Dimick was there by her side in seconds. If Jackson had attacked his wife, he had simply ambushed her.

Counsel for the defense had little trouble demolishing this empty case, but Mr. Justice Wright, the presiding judge, oddly summed up against the defendant. He pronounced that it was “impossible to conceive that the attack could have been made in any other way that that suggested by the police”, and made light of the threatening letters. He also said, “I have heard no evidence at all to indicate that Mrs. Jackson had any enemies likely to do her harm. There is no evidence of a secret enemy here.” The jury did not agree with him, for in spite of this direct lead, every one of them voted to acquit Ray Jackson.

Though it is not difficult to reconstruct the crime, the killer left no clues as to his or her own identity. The assailant must have been waiting for Mrs. Jackson in the shadow of the house, and attacked her as soon as she was about to reach the back door. The attacker may have grasped her by the coat collar; the coat came off in the struggle, and the murderer then flung it over her head exactly as the police suggested. The killer then delivered nine frenzied blows to Mrs. Jackson’s head with some heavy device. By the time that first Ray Jackson and then Mrs. Dimick arrived on the scene, the assailant had made off into the surrounding darkness, taking the murder weapon and perhaps disposing of it later. Her attacker could have covered the first mile or so on foot, and then driven away in a car, motorcycle or perhaps silently on a bicycle. The whole deadly deed had been well planned, and then flawlessly executed.

As the police clearly believed the murderer had been Raymond Jackson, they did not investigate the obvious possibility that his wife may have been killed by one of the people she was blackmailing, or by an assassin hired by them. Celia Jackson had been a high-class hooker during the ‘flapper’ era, and thus in a perfect position to blackmail many of her wealthy customers. Her notebook listing her clients was encrypted. Only she knew the code, and thus the information revealing their identities died with her.

Whoever murdered the mysterious “Madame X” seventy-three years ago in South Wales succeeded in committing the perfect crime.

(Research: ‘Who killed Madame X?’ by Anthony Berkeley, Xanadu Publications Ltd)

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