Walter Dew - Police Career

Police Career

In 1898 Dew was promoted to Inspector, and was transferred to Scotland Yard. He moved to T Division in Hammersmith in 1900, and in 1903 was promoted to Inspector First Class and moved to E Division, based at Bow Street. In 1906 he became a Chief Inspector, and returned to Scotland Yard. By the time of his retirement from the police in 1910 Dew had received 130 recommendations and rewards from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, judges and magistrates.

In 1898 Dew was involved in bringing international jewel-thief William Johnson, known as 'Harry the Valet', to justice. Johnson stole jewelry then valued at £30,000 from Mary Caroline (nee Michell), Dowager Duchess of Sutherland while she was travelling by train from Paris to London with her husband, Sir Albert Rollit MP, and her brother, his wife and the Duchess' footman and maid. Dew investigated the case together with Inspectors Walter Dinnie and Frank Froest. They tracked Johnson, who by now was spending large amounts of money, to lodgings in London's South Kensington. Despite receiving a seven year prison sentence, Johnson refused to disclose the whereabouts of the Duchess' jewels, and only £4,000 worth were ever recovered.

Dew had a small role in the Druce-Portland case: he supervised the exhumation of the remains of T. C. Druce which effectively put an end to the Druce claims.

When Russian fraudster Friedlauski obtained a position as a clerk on the staff of New York bank J.S. Bache & Co. using the name Conrad Harms in 1909, and transferred funds totaling £1,637 14s to his bank account in London, where he subsequently fled, it was Dew who tracked him down. Despite claiming that he was Harms' near identical cousin Henry Clifford, a pretence he maintained even when confronted by the wife he had previously abandoned, Friedlauski/Harms was sentenced to six years penal servitude for fraud and bigamy.