This grisly trunk is never fully closed

3:08pm Tuesday 26th August 2008

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Even though they took place more than 70 years ago, the two trunk murders of 1934 are among the most famous crimes ever to have been committed in Brighton.

Such was the newspaper interest in the killings that Brighton was known as the Queen Of Slaughtering Places for a while.

Now a play based on them is showing in Brighton this month at the Old Ship Hotel.

The murders also feature prominently in a book by local author Douglas d’Enno on celebrated crimes in Brighton.

In June 1934, the torso of a woman was found in a trunk which had been left unclaimed at Brighton Station. The legs were discovered in another trunk at Kings Cross in London.

Four weeks later the body of another woman was found in a trunk left in a house in Kemp Street, close to the station.

Naturally, police worked on the theory the two crimes were connected but this idea was quickly abandoned.

No one ever found out who the victim was of the first trunk murder and there were no clues to the killer.

But police quickly discovered the second victim was Violet Kaye, an active prostitute well known in Brighton.

A man who had been living with her in a house in Park Crescent was arrested. He had many names but was generally known as Tony Mancini.

He wheeled a trolley containing her body in the trunk from Park Crescent to Kemp Street, where he had lodgings and continued to live there with the rotting corpse for more than a month. Luckily for him, his landlord and landlady had no sense of smell.

But a painter and decorator working on the house was concerned about the appalling stench and lost no time in telling the police.

It seemed clear Mancini was guilty but to everyone’s surprise he was acquitted by the jury after a trial at Lewes Assizes.

This case made the name of Norman (later Lord) Birkett, one of the best defence lawyers there has ever been.

Birkett demolished the case for prosecution, pointing out the lack of motive. His defence was that Mancini had been afraid to tell the police when he had found the body because he had previous convictions.

Douglas d’Enno says: “Birkett turned the trial on its head. His brilliance as an advocate was revealed in these proceedings more than perhaps in any other.”

And the judge at the trial commented simply: “No defence in any court could have been more skilfully conducted.

One theory was that Violet Kaye was being blackmailed and could have been murdered by another man.

For a year after his trial Mancini worked in a travelling fair as The Infamous Brighton Trunk Murder Man. He used a mock guillotine and pretended to chop off the head of a pretty girl.

Then he disappeared and houses in Kemp Street were renumbered so it would have been hard to find the one where the body had been kept all that time.

But, more than 40 years later, he confessed he had committed the crime to the News Of The World. He said she had started to attack him with a hammer when drunk.

In 1986, The Argus tracked him down to an address in South London and he vehemently denied being involved in her death.

For good measure, Mancini said he had not been implicated in the first trunk murder.

Douglas d’Enno says: “It is tempting to think Mancini’s conscience was clear. The trouble is he never had one.”

There was no doubt about Mancini’s seedy and ruthless past.

He had been part of London’s underworld, working for the Sabini gang which had storing connections with Brighton.

Douglas d’Enno says one day Mancini walked into a bar to punish an informer. He took an axe from under his coat and coolly chopped off the man’s left hand.

Violet Kaye, addicted to alcohol and possibly morphine, was no match for such a dangerous man.

Whatever the truth of these two terrible crimes, a fascination with them remains with us today.

• Trunks, by Brighton playwright Stephen Plaice, is being performed by the Brighton Theatre Collective at the Old Ship Hotel at 8pm until August 29. There are matinees today and on Monday at 2pm.Tickets cost £10.50/£12.50. Call 01273 709709 or visit www.brightonticketshop.com.
• Foul Deeds And Suspicious Deaths Around Brighton, by Douglas d’Enno, is published by Wharncliffe Books at £9.99.