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Barrie Jefferies’ Aunt Phyllis
The search for clues … Barrie Jefferies’ aunt, Phyllis Jordan
The search for clues … Barrie Jefferies’ aunt, Phyllis Jordan

‘Why was my Aunt Phyllis murdered? I badly needed to know’

This article is more than 7 years old
The nephew of a woman killed by her lodger in Cheltenham in 1970 knew little about her death. Ageing, and in ill health, he asked two crime reporters to unravel the mystery

In 1970, Barrie Jefferies, an adventurous young photographer living in Malawi, received a letter from a nurse in the home for blind people where his mother was living. “Your mother is in a rather bad state. Her sister was murdered,” said the letter, adding no details.

He was stunned. Murdered? Why? How? By whom?

Information was hard to come by. His mother had suffered a brain tumour – she died two years later – and was in no fit state to let him know what had happened. He was no longer in touch with his other aunt and there were no other family members.

Jefferies tried to find out more through solicitors in Malawi and Cheltenham, where his aunt had lived, but information was scant. In those days, when post took could take weeks and long-distance calls from Africa were erratic, he faced many blank walls and was eventually forced to give up. But he never forgot.

Eventually, he retired to England, but fresh inquiries still drew a blank. The national newspapers had not reported the case and there had only been brief local press coverage. Now 86 years old and with failing health, he wanted finally to resolve this family mystery and approached crime reporters at random to help him. We were the first to respond.

“I wish for some help regarding an historic murder,” said his email.

“My maternal maiden aunt, Phyllis Jordan of Cheltenham, was killed by the gentleman with whom she took up some sort of live-in partnership in the 1960s … I have been resident in Africa nearly 50 years and I was attached to my Aunt Phyllis, and am her only remaining relative and still anxious to know how she died. Kindly let me know if this would be of interest to you.”  

Barrie Jefferies
‘As I’ve not been well, it became more and more important to find out what really happened’ … Barrie Jefferies

Intrigued, we travelled to Slough where Jefferies lives with his wife, Zhora, and the youngest of their nine children. “To me, she was a sweet old dear who would go out of her way to help anyone and it was very upsetting to get the news of her death. I always meant to find out more. As I’ve not been well, it became more and more important to find out what really happened.”  

We got to work and what emerged, after a trawl through case papers in the National Archives and the discovery of one of the last people to see Phyllis alive, is a strange tale that Jefferies now feels has finally answered almost all the questions that have troubled him for so many years. 

It was on Christmas Eve 1969 that police went to the home of Phyllis Jordan at 73 Townsend Street, Cheltenham.

Two schoolboys from Cheltenham College, Christopher Williams and Julian Browne, used to walk Phyllis’s dog and do her shopping once a week. They had reported that she was no longer answering the door. 

As the police tried to get into the house, a man appeared at an upstairs window. “Where is the old lady?” asked one of the officers. “She’s gone to Torquay,” said the man, who declined to let them in.

As the police forced their way in through a back window, the man put a noose around his neck and tried to hang himself. Just in time, the police managed to cut the rope. Downstairs they found, on the settee, hidden beneath cushions and coats, the decomposing body of Phyllis Jordan. The man, who gave his name as Lionel Spencer Churchill, was arrested and taken to hospital.  

Phyllis was 68 at the time of her death. An eccentric woman who never married and lived with her spaniel, Prince, she had taken in Churchill as a lodger a few weeks earlier. Whether she would have done had she known his background is another matter.

Churchill had served in the first world war, been invalided out with trench fever and had worked as a hotel porter, a salesman and – very briefly – as a policeman in Cardiff.  He had 11 criminal convictions, including some for child neglect, fraud, indecency and attempted suicide. One of his three children had been sent to Broadmoor for stabbing a girl. Eight years earlier, his wife had killed herself in their home and Churchill had kept her corpse in the house for weeks.

Now 71, he had been evicted many times, most recently because his landlord had taken exception to him using a drawer as a coffin for his dead cat. 

Various mental-health professionals gave him different labels. “Psychopathic with paranoid ideas” was one diagnosis, while a psychiatrist who saw him in 1965 concluded that he was “not suffering from any form of mental illness in the accepted form but was suffering from an inadequate personality, who could not cope with being a widower”.

A nurse who visited church parishioners in her spare time said that, two years before the murder, he had told her he would “do someone in” as his revenge on society and it would “probably be a woman”. 

So how did the murder happen?

The flashpoint, according to Churchill, was when Phyllis had told him he had to leave and, he claimed, had thrown a cup of tea at him. “I suddenly got in a rage and must have had a brainstorm because I picked up a piece of metal out of the grate when she scratched my face … I never meant to kill her.”

Detectives who interviewed him in Cheltenham hospital found him rambling and incoherent. He told them: “Why can’t people be more friendly to each other? What I can’t understand is why some people is so bloody domineering and gets away with it. Life’s life, pal. I loves little animals and babies … I’ve read 2,000 books, so I know what I’m talking about.”

He complained that he was not being allowed to leave the hospital: “If I could find a pair of trousers and me false teeth, I’d be all right … It’s wrong, it ain’t cricket, brother, to keep your trousers away from you.’’

On 20 April 1970,  Churchill was convicted at Oxford crown court of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility and sent to Broadmoor hospital.

Churchill is long dead, as are most of the protagonists. But what about the two schoolboys who visited her every week? An internet search revealed a Julian Browne who would have been the right age. He was a journalist – might he have been attracted to the profession by this early brush with drama? A couple of calls and an email later and we were in contact with Julian Browne, who has had a successful career at the Sunday Times and Reader’s Digest. Might he, by chance, be the Julian Browne who had walked Prince?

He was able to fill in more of the story for us.

“We used to visit the elderly lady as an alternative to the combined cadet force for those not of a military bent – I think social work seemed more interesting. We would help with her shopping and walk the dog. She was not an easy person. She would get enraged by her neighbours and she would be cleaning the house in the middle of the night.  She lived in considerable chaos and squalour. The dog was half starved and generally uncontrollable. Phyllis was sometimes pleased to see us; or would lean out of the window and tell us to get lost, depending on her mood.

“On what turned out to be our final visit, she didn’t answer the door. This did not surprise us. We went home for the holidays. The next I heard, the police turned up at my parents’ house to take a statement.”

Barrie Jefferies had aways wondered whether his aunt’s killer had escaped a murder charge because of his family name. “I knew the man who killed her was called Spencer Churchill, and I wondered if the fact that he was well connected meant that the story had been covered up, because it was barely reported in the press,” he told us. But was Churchill related in any way to his more illustrious namesake? Was he really called Spencer Churchill? The case papers show he was also known as Lionel Henry Churchill. There is no record of any connection to a wealthy, powerful family.

The last time Jefferies saw his aunt was just before he went to Africa. “She was on the promenade in Cheltenham with her two dogs,” he remembers. And now that he knows the full story of his aunt’s sad end, he feels almost every question is answered.

“What remains a puzzle,” he says, “is why Phyllis, who always seemed very frightened of men, would ever have got involved with this person. That may be the one thing we never know.” But for Jefferies it is a relief finally to know the truth – however grim it may be.

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