Henry McKenny: Big Harry
George Brett was a hard man. A well-known East End haulage contractor, he was fond of a fight. On Saturday 4 January 1975, he walked into a church hall in Goodmayes in Essex, accompanied by his 10-year old son Terry Neither was to come out alive.
The old church hall had long been converted for light industrial use. One half was a soft toy business, while an engineering company specialising in underwater equipment occupied the other.
Brett had been lured to the side by a man he knew as Mr Jennings. There was the possibility of some business for his haulage firm, and his son had come along for the ride. The floor of the hall was completely covered in children’s teddy bears, and racks around the wall contained diving equipment. The only other occupant of the building was a very big man, bent over a work bench.
‘Jennings’ sat Brett down on the only chair and gave the boy a teddy bear to hold. Before any more could be said, the man at the bench raised a silenced Sten sub-machine gun and shot Brett through the head. Brett fell, and the big man came closer to make certain of his kill with a second shot to the head.
Then he turned to the 10-year old, who was still clutching the teddy bear. ‘Jennings’ grabbed the boy and held him tight, while the gunman moved round and coldly fired one more shot, into the side of Terry’s head. He died instantly.
Contract killing
George Brett and his son had fallen foul of a pair of hitmen, who had been paid £1,800 to commit murder. To most people, the term ‘hitman’ conjures up images of American gangster movies; they are considered a very un-British kind of criminal. But in the 1970s, ‘Harry the Bandit’ McKenny and his partner John Childs set themselves up as contract killers.
Childs had posed as ‘Mr Jennings’ in order to lure George Brett to his death. Harry McKenny went about their work with cold savagery, and disposed of the bodies of their victims with callous ingenuity.
Henry Jeremiah McKenny, also known as ‘Big Harry’ or ‘Big H’, was a big man indeed. Six feet five inches in height and an athletic 17 stone, he was a feared and respected by his fellow villains. Respected for his ice-cool nerve on armed robberies, and feared because with his sledgehammer fists and easy attitude to violence, he was a man not to be crossed.
McKenny was not just a dumb thug. A qualified pilot, he had also trained and worked as a salvage driver. He had invented and patented a revolutionary new air pump, a design now used by professional frogman worldwide. But Big Harry could make better money from crime. Besides, he liked the life.
Through the 1960w and 1970s he had been involved in scored of robberies, lorry hijacks and warehouse break-ins. He was well known to Scotland Yard as a hard and dangerous villain, and had served several jail terms.
How the police finally brought Big Harry to justice is a fascinating example of how the cracking of a seemingly unrelated case can suddenly lead detectives on the trail of even more serious crime.
Armed robbery
In June1979, a team of gunmen pounced as a security van was collecting money from a bank in the centre of the market town of Hartford. One robber grabbed grabbed a guard and he walked to his armoured Transit van. Pressing a gun to his back, he forced the other guard to let the villains on board. Then they coolly told the security men to continue on their collection rounds in Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield, threatening them with death if they raised the alarm or tried to escape.
Eventually, with more than half a million pounds on board, the robbers told the guards to stop. They were tied up, gagged and bundled into a cubicle of a public lavatory while the crooks sped off with sacks full of money.
But the robbers had made one small vital mistake. They had left the boiler suits they had worn for the robbery in the same lavatory. In one of the pockets, detectives found the numbered key to a BMW 320 car. Contacting BMW in Germany via Interpol, the Hertfordshire police were told that the car which that particular key fitted had been supplied to a garage in Essex. Further enquiries revealed that the BMW had been bought by Phillip Cohen, a wealthy East London greengrocer.
Murder 1: ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve
McKenny’s first killing was for his own direct gain. He was meticulous in planning how the killing would be done and had already prepared a ‘slaughterhouse’ in an East End flat, where the body could be taken to be dismembered without leaving a trace. To help in this grisly task McKenny had bought an electric meat mincer that had been advertised for £25 in Exchange and Mart.
The victim was to be toymaker ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve. In 1974 McKenny and Terry Pinfold had been running a small business manufacturing diving equipment in a converted church hall in Haydon Road, Goodmayes, a district of Ilford. Renting a small unit in the same building was Eve. McKenny had noticed that Eve was making plenty of money out of manufacturing soft toys. He decided that if Eve were to die it would be simplicity itself to take over the enterprise.
Gruesome killing
One evening in August McKenny and a friend called John Childs stayed late in the workshop knowing Eve was set to return after everyone else had left. When Eve got back from the factory after making a delivery to a customer he had no idea he was about to die. He had cheerily expressed his surprise at seeing the two working so late when McKenny hit him over the head with a hammer. The two men rained blows on his head. To make sure he was dead, McKenny then strangled him with a piece of rope.
The two men then spent all night carefully removing all traces of the horror they had committed, even using sulphuric acid to dissolve the bloodstains. Then they loaded Eve’s corpse into the boot of a car and drove the few miles to Childs’ rented council flat in Dolphin House, Popular High Street.
Cutting up the corpse
When, after his arrest, Childs described what happened next, it left experienced detective Frank Cater feeling physically sick. Dumping the body in the room, which had been lined with plastic sheeting, McKenny had then sawn off one of the victim’s legs. He then decided to shift the body to the bath to finish the job. Calling Childs to watch, Big Harry took a razor-sharp butcher’s knife and, with only three swift cuts, severed the head from the body. McKenny then sweated for several hours cutting up the rest of the corpse, stopping now and then for a cup of tea.
Then the ghoulish pair hot a major snag. When they tried to put the bits through the mincer, it jammed. McKenny, the engineer, diagnosed the problem, realising that the domestic electricity supply was not enough to dive the motor. They would have to try something else. Childs took the mincer to bits, then went out and threw the parts in a canal.
Disposing of the remains
Meanwhile McKenny toiled trying to flush bits of body down the lavatory. Eventually, they decided to burn the remains in the fire grate in the living room. After nearly two days all that was left was charred bone. This was ground up, mixed with the ashes and scattered from a car while driving along the A13.
They had learned from their mistakes, and soon they would be doing it again, this time as hired killers.
Informer
Cohen was arrested by the Hertfordshire CID and interrogated. He admitted his involvement in the robbery and, looking for a lenient sentence, informed on the rest of the gang. Three of the other four members of the gang were rounded up in a series of dawn raids. Among them was a small-time petty crook called John Childs. The only man they missed was Henry McKenny.
Since most of the gang members were London-based villains, the Metropolitan Police were called in. Flying Squad Chief Inspector Tony Lundy, already the scourge of London’s armed robbers, sent a team of senior detectives up to Hertford. They interviewed all of the prisoners, hoping that one at least would ‘roll over’ and help clear up more unsolved robberies.
The detective’s got more than they bargained for. Philip Cohen was desperate to avoid a 20-year sentence. He told them: “I can go better then armed robberies. Big Harry, Johnny Childs and Terry Pinfold have been doing the murders for years.”
Terry Pinfold, in prison at the time of the Security Express robbery, had been McKenny’s partner in a company making diving equipment. They had been based at an old church hall in East London. Childs had been in prison with Pinfold in the early 1970s, and had got to know McKenny after his release.
Cohen claimed that they had killed at least four people, and other members of the gang added to the tale with two more possible killings.
The only names the investigating officer was familiar with were those of haulage contractor George Brett and his son Terry. Their disappearance in 1975 had been a major mystery. Brett had gone out to a business meeting and had taken Terry with him. His Jaguar had been found abandoned, but there was no trace of Brett or his boy.
Detectives had always believed that they had been murdered. The underworld had buzzed with rumours; every copper had his own theory about who had done it. Now Lundy and his men were being told that the Bretts had been lured to a warehouse and killed with a sub-machine gun.
Was this all humbug? Was McKenny really a ruthless killer? But what had seemed fantasy took an ominous turn towards fact when the Yard began to check out the list of supposed victims.
Murder 2: Robert Brown
Robert Brown was an old friend of Eve and had been employed at the toy factory. McKenny and Childs found out that Brown had accidentally stumbled in on the mopping-up operation after Eve had been killed. Brown had kept his mouth shut, but McKenny decided he knew too much and would have to be eliminated.
Before they could get to him, Brown was jailed for burglary. But he escaped from Chelmsford jail and, on the run, went to Pinfold for help. Pinfold sent him to child’s flat in Poplar, telling Brown he would be able to hide from the law.
When he turned up his ‘friends’ welcomed him inside. As the front door closed, McKenny shot him three times in the face and head with a silenced gun.
But Brown, who had once been a wrestler, did not die easily. There followed another horrific scene. Brown struggled for his life like a wounded bear. McKenny sunk a fireman’s axe into his skull and Childs plunged a diver’s knife into his chest again and again. Still Brown refused to die. Eventually Childs administered the coup de grace, impaling him to the floor with a sword stuck through his heart. There then followed the familiar ritual of dismembering and burning the body.
‘Teddy Bear’ Eve
Terry Eve, known as ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve because of his soft-toy business, had not been seen since October 1974. He had been ruthlessly rubbed out because McKenny had wanted to take over his money-spinning company which had shared the former church hall in Essex.
Robert Brown, a former professional wrestler, was on the run from Chelmsford Prison. He had been working for Pinfold and McKenny, but had disappeared in January 1975. Apparently he had come upon the killers cleaning up after the murder of Eve. Although Brown had kept his silence for three months, he had been murdered to ensure that he could not spill the beans in the future.
Freddie Sherwood, a 48-year old Bermondsey man, had disappeared in July 1978 from the Herne Bay nursing home he ran. He had set off to sell his Rover car, and had never been seen again. Childs and McKenny had reputedly been paid £4,000 to kill Sherwood, and had lured him to his death at McKenny’s bungalow next to the church hall in Goodmayes.
Ronald Andrews, a 38-year old roofing contractor, had been a friend of McKenny. He had disappeared in October 1978, although by chance his big American car had been found submerged in a river near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. The Lincoln Continental had apparently skidded off the road, gone over a low bank into 12 feet of water. There story here was that Big Harry had been having an affair with Andrew’s wife, and had decided to get rid of his rival.
Murders 3 & 4: George & Terry Brett
According to Childs, it was George Brett’s liking for a fight that brought about his death. In October 1973 Brett was involved in a bloody brawl with another man. Armed with an iron bar, Brett came out on top, inflicting serious injuries on his axe-wielding opponent, who ended up in hospital. Childs claimed that McKenny had been paid £1,800 by the injured man to kill Brett.
Lured to his death
Brett was lured to the same factory at Goodmayes where Eve had met his end, on the pretence that it was a business meeting. Brett, perhaps suspecting he was being set up for a revenge attack and believing that the underworld code of honour would prevent anything happening with a child present, took his 10-year old son, Terry, with him. If he did think it would thwart any attempt to do him harm, he had sadly underestimated the homicidal single-mindedness of Big Harry.
McKenny was inside the little factory with Childs and Terry Pinfold. Brett was being shown the pile of toys and diving gear that was to be his load when McKenny produced a Sten gun and shot him through the head. McKenny then told Childs to hold the boy still, and shot Terry in the head while he clutched a small teddy bear that had been given to him moments before. Before leaving the premises McKenny grabbed Pinfold and smeared his face with blood to drive home the message: “You’re involved, and there’s no going back.”
Unbelievable killing
Childs to Chief Superintendent Cater: “If I had a gun in my hand at that moment, I swear I would have shot Harry to pieces. I could not believe he had gone ahead with it and murdered the boy as well.”
A weekend’s work
The bodies were transported to the flat in Dolphin House and the long, gruesome talk of cutting and burning them began. It took an entire weekend to finish the job, the ashes again being dumped from a car on the A13.
Murder 5: Freddie Sherwood
Freddie Sharewood’s killing provided another pay day, with an obscene twist. There was to be murder on hire purchase. According to Childs, McKenny had been offered $4,000 to kill him by another London gangster. The deal involved a £1,500 deposit, followed by five monthly instalments of £500 when the job was done.
The plan was straightforward. Sherwood, a small-time hood, was proprietor of the Old Vicarage nursing home in Herne Bay. Ay the time Childs and McKenny tool the contract for his murder, Sherwood was trying to sell his Rover car. Childs went to look at the car and agreed to but it. He asked Sherwood to drive it to McKenny’s bungalow, where he would be paid in cash. Instead he was paid in bullets: as Sherwood sat at a table counting out the cash, McKenny stepped into the room and shot him in the head. Childs then clubbed him with a hammer.
The unfortunate Sherwood then made the familiar last journey in the boot of his own car to Poplar, where his body was cut up and burned.
Murder investigation
When Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Powis, then head of the Yard’s detective division, was told about the case, he was convinced that there could be some truth to the tale. He ordered Detective Chief Superintendent Frank Cater, one of his most experienced murder investigators to take over.
McKenny was still missing: with Philip Cohen he had set up an elaborate alibi for the Hertford robbery, and it was believed that he was in France. However, John Childs, who had also been implicated in the supposed killings, was in custody.
When Carter sat down with Childs, the detective was not disappointed. The robber was not a hard man, and the killings he had committed were weighing on his mind. He explained how McKenny had told him he was fed up with being over six feet tall, the Yard always came and took him in for questioning. According to Childs, McKenny had suggested: “It would be a lot easier to do people in for money.”
Weapons haul
Acting on information given by Childs, detectives went to the house of one of his friends. Just after the Hertford robbery he had hidden some ‘luggage’ in her loft. They found two metal boxes and a canvas bag, which contained a small arsenal. Six hand guns included a Walther automatic pistol, a rare Rhoner 8mm automatic, an Enfield .38 pistol with its barrel threaded to take a silencer, and three Webley .455 pistols. There were also four pump-action shotguns, a Belgian .22 rifle and a Mannlicher sporting rifle with telescopic sight. Most interesting of all was the Mark .22 Sten sub-machine gun, with a home-made silencer and pistol grip.
In two weeks of carefully recorded questioning, John Childs gave the murder squad men chapter and verse on the full, gruesome details of a series of killings unsurpassed in cold-bloodedness.
The most unsettling part of the confession was his description of how they disposed of the bodies. They were all transported to Childs council flat in Poplar. They had tried to use an industrial mincing machine to dispose of the body of Terrence Eve, but it required three-phase electricity for operation and would not work from a domestic supply.
Instead, they roughly butchered the body and burned in the flat’s fireplace. According to Childs, this was how they had disposed of all of the bodies. The whole process took many hours, but once complete, the bones left over could be ground up, and with the ashes scattered over a wide area.
The wealth of detail that Childs provided convinced Frank Cater that he was telling the truth, but he though that the grisly method of disposal was physically impossible.
McKenny’s alibi
To reduce the risk of being identified for the Hertford robbery, Harry McKenny and Philip Cohen concocted what they thought was a foolproof alibi.
- 13 June: Harry McKenny, his mistress Gwen Andrews and her two children fly from London to Marseilles for a holiday. There, they check into a small hotel. McKenny makes a point of being seen in bars frequented by British tourists.
- 17 June: Harry, Gwen and the children leave the hotel very early in the morning. They say that they are going on a camping tour of the region, and will be back in a few days. He catches the morning flight from Marseilles to Paris. She takes the children to a remote camping site.
- 17 June: McKenny catches a taxi across Pairs to the Gare du Nord railway station. At about 9 o’clock he phones fellow robber Philip Cohen, who is waiting with a powerboat in Brighton. Once he had received the call, Cohen sets off across the Channel to make a 2.00 p.m. rendezvous with McKenny at Boulogne.
- 17 June: With a couple of hours to spare, McKenny goes window shopping, and misses his train. The only way to make the rendezvous is by car, and he hires a taxi, paying double fare in advance, to cover the 200 kilometres to Boulogne.
- 17 June: McKenny and Cohen meet, and set off for England. Cohen smuggles McKenny ashore. They drive from Brighton to Cohen’s home in Upminster, where the final robbery plans were completed.
- 20 June: McKenny and Cohen lead the gang which steals over half a million pounds from a Security Express van. After the robbery, McKenny goes into hiding at Cohen’s house.
- 23 June: After lying low for three days, McKenny goes to Victoria Station. He catches the Saturday night boat train for Paris, travelling via Newhaven and Dieppe.
- 24 June: Early the next morning, the train arrives at the Gare du Nord. McKenny takes a taxi across Paris to Orly and catches the morning flight to Marseilles. He collects Gwen and the children from their camp site and returns to the hotel they had stayed in before. There he continues his task of making himself known. With any luck, none of his new friends will know that he’s been away.
Murder 6: Ronald Andrews – A Watery Grave
Ronald Andrews murder was a personal matter for McKenny. For many years the two men had been great friends. But then McKenny had taken a fancy to Andrews wife. An affair was not enough: McKenny wanted to marry Mrs Andrews.
To a man like McKenny the solution was easy. He had no qualms about killing his best friend than he did about killing a stranger. As usual, Childs, who Andrews had never met, was a willing helper. For a mere £400, and a new silencer for one of his guns, he helped Big Harry to do the job.
Childs posed as a private detective and offered to help Andrews, who suspected his wife was having an affair, to find out who her lover was. Andrews went to Childs home to discuss the case. Once inside, McKenny stepped forward with a .38 pistol and calmly executed his old buddy. His body was disposed of in the tired and trusted manner. McKenny then took Andrews Lincoln Continental to the River Nene near Wisbech and, under cover of night, rolled it into the water, having first left an empty vodka bottle inside to make it look like a drunken accident. It was found, soon afterwards, by fishermen. Andrews had not even been reported missing.
Reconstruction
Cater asked Professor James Cameron of the London Hospital Medical College if he thought that Childs claims could be true. Cameron, one of the country’s top forensic pathologists, said that he had no idea, but there was one way of finding out: to stage a reconstruction.
Of course, a human body could not be used, so the forensic team acquired the next best thing: an 11-stone pig. It took many hours, but the professor proved that given enough time it could be done.
Careful forensic work also yielded important evidence. Although McKenny and Co, had taken great care in eliminating evidence of their dreadful activities, so much blood had been spilled in so many places, that there was still plenty to find, even if only in microscopic traces.
At McKenny’s bungalow, there was blood in two layers of linoleum, blood traces in the carpet and on the skirting boards, on a chair seat and on a curtain. A bullet hole had been found just as Childs had described, filled with wax and covered over.
At Child’s flat it was the same story: there was blood on the curtains, on the plastic sheeting used to protect the carpet, on a knife used to butcher the bodies, and on a dustbin used to store the remains.
Violent deaths
With no bodies, it was impossible for the police to say whose blood it was, except that it was from at least two different people. But the sheer number of places where bloodstains had been found pointed to only one conclusion, at least two people had died violently and their bodies had subsequently been butchered.
Although not conclusive evidence in itself, small particles of lead were found in the grate of Childs fireplace. Metropolitan Police Forensic Laboratory scientists confirmed that they were almost certainly bullet fragments remaining in the bodies that had melted when the killers had gone about their grisly work.
The hunt for McKenny
The major problem now facing Frank Cater was to find and arrest Henry McKenny. He did not want Harry the Bandit to know he was being investigated for murder, since this might have made an already very dangerous man more wary and at the same time more likely to shoot his way out of trouble. This reasoning went out of the window when the press became interested.
Very early in the investigation, a Fleet Street crime reporter had got wind of the case, but had been persuaded to hold off on reporting the story. Just over a month after the Security Express robbery, however, the Daily Mirror carried a report that the robbery had been tied into the murder investigation. Before long, most of the national newspapers were covering the story in detail. Although they could not by law name Harry McKenny, their nickname of ‘Big H’ and the linking of missing persons George and Terry Brett, Terrence Eve and Ronald Andrews to the case cold leave little doubt whom they were writing.
Cater decided to make a virtue of a necessity, and on 27 July he released photos and full descriptions of McKenny. This brought in a flood of telephone calls for members of the public. Most came to nothing, but one report, that McKenny had seen driving a Volkswagen in Ilford, seemed more promising. The Yard set a trap, into which the wanted man obligingly drove. However, after jumping two red traffic lights, leaving chasing police cars caught in traffic, he abandoned his car and escaped on foot.
McKenny remained on the run until 20 September, until another tip-off sent armed officers to a house in a quiet close in Plaistow, East London. Phoning the occupants of the house at one in the morning, a detective stated that it was surrounded and ordered McKenny out into the street. He came out peacefully, was handcuffed and taken to Plaistow police station. The three-month manhunt was over.
In spite of the lack of any bodies, the police knew that they had a case. Childs confession, allied to the forensic evidence, was enough. He pleased guilty, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Convicted of murder
In October 1980, Henry McKenny was tried for the same crimes. Big Harry denied all the charges. Childs was the chief prosecution witness. After a trial of 40 days, McKenny was convicted of killing George Brett, Terry Brett, Frederick Sherwood and Ronald Andrews. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 25 years. At the minimum, Harry McKenny will be behind bars until past his 70th birthday.
End
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