If there is a single theme that runs through these stories, it is injustice. However, so far, every death has been ‘solved’, every victim linked indelibly to the person who caused their death, regardless of legal process.
Until today.
Unsolved murders are much rarer than cold case media would have you believe. The majority of people are killed by someone they know, commonly someone they have shared houseroom with, although whether there’s sufficient proof to convict is another matter entirely. This is why stranger-murders attract so much press attention, where speculation becomes currency. This story was difficult to research, because the press, in their haste to secure the details, got so many wrong, including the poor victim’s name.
George Ginger was born in Great Gaddesden on 30th April 1854. He married Selina Kilbey there in 1875, and they moved to the rural outskirts of Hemel Hempstead. George was a shepherd, Selina a straw plaiter, at a time when straw plaiting was rapidly going out of fashion. Money was short, but children came at regular intervals for the next twenty-three years.
By 1896, the year of this tragedy, the Gingers were living at Fields End in Hemel, with their seven surviving children - a shortlived eighth child was born in 1898. George worked for Hugh Procter at nearby Boxted House. This was still a rural area: a few farms, some clusters of housing, a pub, nobody much about. Everyone knew everyone.
The Quatermass (or Quartermass, depending on source) family lived at Bod’s End, an isolated house in modern Warners End. John Smith Quatermass had grown up in Bethnal Green, and was a bootmaker. He married Henrietta Bassett in 1868, and they initially lived in Hornsey in London. However, they moved to Hemel in 1884, shortly before their seventh child was born on 12th July. She joined her three surviving siblings, and was named Kathleen Mabel. She was known as Katie to her family. Two more children were born after Katie, although one died soon after birth. It’s possible the family moved to the countryside to increase their children’s chances of survival, an act of tragic irony.
John worked as a bootmaker in Hornsey, but as a dealer in Bod’s End. He sold cakes and fruit to the workers at Apsley Mill two days a week. In 1896, the family, now consisting of Lilian (23), Cyril (17), Winifred (14), Katie (12) and Robert (7), were poor, but respectable. The eldest son, Ernest (25) lived away from home.
Katie turned twelve on 12th July, although she was tall for her age. She had no friends aside from her sisters, but was well known in the area. On Thursday 14th July, Katie left their home in the pouring rain to fetch some milk around 4pm. At the same time, her parents left the house to go to Apsley Mills to sell their wares.
Katie went half a mile up the road, to the Proctor’s farm, collecting the milk at around 5:20pm. She was never seen alive again.
A little later, her sister Lilian went out to find her, concerned that she’d not got back. She met George Ginger on the road to Counters End, now Berkhamstead Road, and he said:
Did you send Kathleen to get the milk? Then she’s killed.
According to George, he had been walking back to the farm from the field, and come across an abandoned umbrella. Then he’d discovered the milk can - empty, with no sign of spilled milk. He noticed the body, but went to see to his sheep. On his way back, he investigated the body in the field. He then fetched two men working nearby, and met Lilian as he ran towards her house. Soon after, he fetched a policeman to the site.
Katie had been punched hard in the face, at least once, then been repeatedly stabbed in the face and neck before having her throat cut. Her body was then carried down the lane. The grass on the edge of the lane was trampled and spattered with blood, clearly showing where she’d been moved. She’d been carried over a gate - coated in bloody handprints - and put down in a field behind the hedge. This was at the crossroads between Boxted Farm and Warner’s End Farm. And this, claimed George, was how where he found her, with her cloak covering her head, at 5:40pm.
This map shows the whole area, including Bod’s End, c.1906. X marks where I think Katie’s body was found - the newspapers are not very clear, but it was close to the crossroads.
The police arrived at 7:10pm, photographing the scene and measuring out the distances between blood stains, and the milk can. No murder weapon was found. Katie’s father believed she’d been assaulted with a fence stake, not a razor or knife, although the depth of the fatal wound rather suggested otherwise. She bled to death in the field. Katie had not been sexually violated, although naturally the rumour spread that she had.
Initially, the murder was believed to have been committed by a thirsty tramp, and a man named Smallbones was arrested in Bushey, after arriving at the police station covered in blood. However, he had an alibi and was released.
Two days after her death - the 18th July - Katie’s inquest was held at nearby Warner’s End Farm (now a road named Knights Orchard). The house was uninhabited at the time, but too small to fit the coroner, his jury, the witnesses, assembled press and neighbours, so the inquiry was held on the house lawn. So, they stood outside and poured out their grief. If Henrietta attended, she did not speak, but John did, as did Lilian Quatermass, and George Ginger. At the close of the inquest, John went back into the house and kissed his daughter’s face, sobbing bitterly.
Illustrated Police News, 25th July 1896, p.4.
On Monday 20th July, George Ginger was arrested. The police were highly suspicious of his story, and had been carrying out secretive investigations while claiming they had no leads to the public. At inquest, George said that he’d spotted the body, then spent time sorting out his sheep before investigating further. He claimed he climbed over the gate noticing no blood, when the gate was literally covered in it. His hesitancy and his ignorance, as well as his unusually excited demeanour, made him the focus of suspicion.
George attempted to resist arrest, but failed and was roundly abused by the crowd gathered at Hemel police station. He denied everything throughout. Secrecy prevailed over the initial hearing, but it transpired that George’s bloodstained clothes had been seized and sent for analysis. There was no way of determining who the blood belonged to, and the fluid precipitin test to check whether blood was human or not had not been developed, so it’s not clear what exactly the analysis was hoping to show. George claimed the blood belonged to a horse that had recently been injured on the farm. The hearing was adjourned, and George remanded…
On 29th July, the hearing resumed. Witnesses gave evidence that they’d seen George near the scene of the crime shortly before it happened, and that they’d seen nobody else. The hearing was adjourned overnight, and on the 30th, evidence was given that at 5:30pm, George had raised the alarm. A boy working nearby said he’d heard a scream around 5pm.
The evidence about George’s bloodstained clothing did not come back in time to use in the magistrate’s court, and the magistrates declined to commit George to trial on circumstantial evidence. His acquittal was greeted with applause.
But nobody else was ever arrested.
Who killed Katie?
It’s likely that Katie was murdered within a few minutes of leaving Boxted House, although when exactly she left was a matter for debate. Whoever killed her stopped to drink the milk in the milk can, either before or after murdering her - probably after punching her but before stabbing her, as there were no blood stains on the milk can, an oddly unhurried act in an otherwise frenzied attack.
She was stabbed in the road, although she did not die until she was in the field. Her body was not really hidden, just tucked out of the way. It’s possible, indeed probable, that the person who killed her planned to violate her and was disturbed.
Time was an issue in this case. Nobody seemed to know quite what time anything happened, only that it happened between 5 and 6pm. However, it seems only around thirty minutes elapsed between Katie leaving Boxted Farm and being found in a field nearby. A maximum of sixty minutes elapsed between Katie leaving the farm and her sister being told of the murder.
This is not long. This is not long to batter a girl, kill her, drag her and dump her. Not long to clean up, and not long to run away.
Not long to drink a can of milk while a girl lies stunned nearby.
George knew Katie by sight, and knew her sisters too - he had children of similar age to the girls. Katie went to fetch milk every day, around the same time he went to check on the sheep, so it’s likely he knew her route and routine, although he claimed he hadn’t spoken to her for a year. He almost certainly knew her parents were away at Apsley Mill. He was seen near the murder site at 5pm, although this was also the path to his work and home. Nobody else was seen, although all the witnesses acknowledged the thick hedges made it difficult to see out into the lanes from the fields.
Perhaps the most interesting part of his testimony is that he did not appear to notice that the gate was covered in blood. This only really makes sense if he was the one who moved Katie from the lane to the field. It wouldn’t have been covered in blood when he opened the gate, if he opened it with Katie bleeding to death in his arms. George’s house was close to the murder site, close enough to kill her, run home and change, and come back. Perhaps this is what he meant when he told the police that he’d seen the body and then ‘gone to see to his sheep’, little half-truths to make the lie more plausible.
If this murder had taken place even five years later, after fingerprint evidence had been developed, then we’d know who killed Katie, as a very clear bloody handprint was left on the gate.
But it didnt, and we don’t.
This was an exceptionally bold murder, committed in broad daylight on a soggy July afternoon. People were around, even if they saw nothing. George Ginger was the most likely candidate, but he was not even the only candidate in his house: he had two young adult sons. There were multiple men - assuming the murderer was a man - living and working around Boxted House and Fields End.
As it was, George never got into trouble with the law again, and continued to live around the east side of Hemel for the rest of his life, a shameless action if he was the murderer. He died in 1940.
Tragedy in the Quatermass family did not stop with Katie’s death. Their youngest son, Robert Alfred, was killed at the Somme in 1916. Their eldest son, Ernest, died in Brisbane in 1923. John and Henrietta both died in 1925, having buried seven of their ten children.
Katie is buried in Hemel Hempstead’s Heath Lane cemetery. Her memory survives in Quartermass Road, which runs along the old line of Bod’s End.
Kathleen Mabel Quatermass
1884-1896