August Sangret - Discovery, Evidence and Arrest

Discovery, Evidence and Arrest

Hankley Common was then an army training ground regularly used for military exercises. On 7 October 1942, Royal Marine William Moore was patrolling the area on a routine march when in one of the many tank tracks that criss-crossed the area he saw what looked like a human hand protruding from a mound of earth. As he looked closer, he saw that two of the fingers and the thumb had been gnawed away by rats and nearby a foot also protruded from the earth; Moore realised he had found a human body.

Moore did not interfere with the body, but immediately reported his find to his sergeant who passed the information to Lieutenant Norman McLeod who called the police. By evening, a full scale police investigation was underway. Among the investigators was pathologist Eric Gardner, followed by Inspector Edward Greeno of Scotland Yard with forensic pathologist Cedrick Keith Simpson and his secretary Molly Lefebure.

The body was that of a female placed face down in a shallow grave which had then been disturbed by a passing vehicle, probably a half-track. The exhumation began the next day. There was a strong smell of putrefaction, and flies and maggots were everywhere. The body was badly decomposed and the head practically fell apart. Among the decomposing remains were clothes. The body was removed and taken to Guy's Hospital.

Simpson examined the body. Based on the hydrolysation of body fats saponification and taking into account the extra heat that would be generated by the maggots, Simpson estimated that the victim had died in mid-September. Simpson carefully reconstructed the skull by wiring together all the fragments that could be found, clearly revealing a large impact site. Simpson concluded that the victim died as a result of a single heavy blow to the head while the victim was already lying face down. The blow which caved in the skull and simultaneously broke the jaw and dislodged teeth. The murder weapon was a pole or bough. Simpson found knife wounds on the body, inflicted before the victim had died. The wounds on the arms, particularly the right arm, suggested a struggle in which the victim fended off stabs to the face; the cuts were unusual in that tissue had been pulled out of the lesions. There were knife wounds in the head too; one of the wounds in the reconstructed skull was particularly unusual, it was a round countersunk hole. Simpson concluded that the knife had a blade resembling a parrot's beak.

The police quickly realised that the body and clothes matched the description of the missing Joan Wolfe. A search of the area where she was found was carried out by sixty police constables. Finds included a missing shoe, a tuft of hair, a fragment of skull, and a tooth. Later, Wolfe's bag was found with personal effects and identity papers; and a bloody bough was found that was certainly the murder weapon. A letter was found, written by the victim to August Sangret, informing him that she was pregnant. On Sangret's clothes were found bloodstains, and his army knife was found soon after in a drainpipe.

Sangret was taken to Godalming police station and interviewed at length by Inspector Greeno. The questioning went on for days and Sangret's statement, which was then the longest statement ever made, took a policeman five days to write out in longhand. After making the statement, Sangret was released as he had not incriminated himself: shortly afterwards the knife was found, and Sangret was arrested charged with Wolfe's murder.