The Murder of Dagmar Peters (Kent, 1946)
The year 1946 in England was one of uneasy transition. The Second World War had ended the previous year, but rationing remained, bomb damage scarred many towns and cities, and German prisoners of war were still working in Britain. It was against this backdrop, in the county of Kent — commonly known as the Garden of England — that a senseless and tragic murder unfolded.
Body Discovery
On Thursday 31 October, around noon, lorry driver Joe Hammond was travelling from Aylesford to Dartford, a journey of about 20 miles. As he drove along Wrotham Hill on the A20, he noticed a woman’s blue suede shoe lying at the side of the road near a hedgerow. Despite the wet and windy weather, Joe pulled over and climbed down from his cab to take a closer look. The shoe was a size 6, the same size his wife wore. With rationing still in force and new clothing hard to come by, he began searching for the other shoe, imagining how pleased his wife would be if he brought them home. As he looked around, Joe noticed that the nearby hedgerow had been disturbed. He carefully parted the brambles and then stepped back in horror. Inside the tangle of foliage, just out of sight of the road, lay the body of a woman.
Crime Scene
After discovering the body just off the A20, Joe Hammond drove quickly to the nearest telephone box and called the police. Officers arrived soon afterwards, accompanied by a local doctor, who confirmed the woman was dead. The area was cordoned off, including a narrow path behind the hedgerows, called Labour-in-Vain Road. Wrotham Hill, normally known for its sweeping views across the Kent Weald and the North Downs, had become the scene of a murder.
Chief Inspector Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard and Detective Superintendent Frank Smeed of Kent C.I.D were placed in charge of the investigation. Photographs were taken at the scene, and Home Office Pathologist Dr Keith Simpson arrived later that evening to examine the body in situ, working by the headlights of police cars. He also collected loose strands of hair and samples of earth for analysis at the lab.
Post-Mortem Examination
The body was then taken to the mortuary for a post-mortem. The woman was fully clothed and wearing a winter coat, but had no hat or gloves, and her right shoe was missing. There was no sign of sexual assault. Dr Simpson concluded she had been killed elsewhere and her body dumped at the roadside. The woman had blue-grey eyes and brown hair, and there was a small, well-healed scar beneath her left nostril. They found no identification or purse, and there were no labels in her clothing to indicate where they had been purchased. Beneath a homemade coat, she wore a pink woollen vest, a blue frock and a blue jumper. She looked to be around 50 years old. There were no rings on her fingers, and no marks to suggest she usually wore one, suggesting she was unmarried. Grazes on her legs showed she had been dragged through brambles and twigs. The cause of death was strangulation with a cloth or scarf, and her neck had been fractured. Lividity, the settling of blood in the body after death, suggested she had remained upright in a sitting position for some time before being moved. Dr Simpson estimated that she had died between 7 and 9 o’clock that morning.
Police Establish Victim’s Identity
A description of the woman was circulated to police stations and published in the press in the hope that someone might recognise her. The following morning, Friday 1 November, a 79-year-old widow named Mame Ann Petrzywalski, known locally as Mrs Peters, was sitting in her bungalow on Hever Avenue in the village of West Kingsdown, about four miles from the murder scene. She was growing increasingly worried about her daughter, Dagmar. Dagmar had gone to visit her brother Ralph and his wife in Surrey, and she should have returned home by now. When Mrs Peters opened her morning newspaper and read the description, she immediately recognised the details and contacted the police.
Mrs Peters met Chief Inspector Fabian and confirmed that the clothes found on the murdered woman belonged to her 48-year-old daughter. She was too distressed to view the body, so she contacted her son Ralph, who travelled from Surrey to make the formal identification. Together, the grieving mother and brother provided police with details about Dagmar’s life.
The Victim Dagmar Peters
Dagmar Peters had been born on 25 October 1898 in Catford, South London, and had celebrated her 48th birthday just six days before her death. The family later moved to nearby Lewisham. Her father, Francis Raphael Jules Petrzywalski, known as Jules, had worked as a tobacconist, a warehouseman, and a French translator. Dagmar had grown up with four brothers, but by 1944, only she and Ralph were still alive. One brother had been killed in the First World War at the age of 26, another died from a heart attack, and a third had died when Dagmar was just a year old.
By all accounts, Dagmar was a quiet and solitary woman and had worked as a telephone operator at the London Telephone Exchange near London Bridge for 25 years. In 1941, she suffered what was then described as a nervous breakdown and took early retirement. A bomb blast during the Blitz destroyed her lodgings, killing her landlord, and she lost all her possessions. Another loss followed in January 1946, when her father died after a long illness. Her mother moved to the Hever Estate in West Kingsdown, and Dagmar had a small wooden hut built on a piece of former farmland a short distance from her mother’s bungalow. There, she lived a simple, self-sufficient life, growing her own vegetables, keeping a few chickens, and making her own clothes. She had no known romantic relationships and few close friends, though she occasionally visited seaside towns like Margate and Herne Bay with former colleagues.
Police Search for Clues
Mrs Peters told police that the last time she had seen her daughter was on Wednesday 30 October, the day before her death. They had visited the local market together, where Dagmar bought a man’s white vest, intending to turn it into something useful. She also bought a Jack Russell puppy, which she planned to give to her brother Ralph and his wife Elena when she visited them in Surrey. But Dagmar never arrived.
Also missing were her brown attaché case and a distinctive yellow string bag that Elena had crocheted for her as a birthday gift. The puppy, too, had disappeared. The police asked Elena to make a duplicate bag and then took a photograph which they printed in the newspapers, in the hope that it would trigger the memory of someone who had seen it.
Officers carried out extensive searches around Wrotham Hill, combing the hedgerows and visiting nearby garages, farms, and haulage companies. Mrs Peters also told police that her daughter was wary of accepting lifts from private motorists. On one occasion, a driver had made inappropriate remarks that made her feel uneasy. After that, Dagmar would only accept lifts from lorry drivers, believing they were more likely to behave responsibly as they would usually be travelling on work business in a company vehicle. This meant investigators were likely looking for a lorry driver who had passed along the A20 that morning. Police began stopping early morning vehicles on the road and questioning the drivers. Transport cafés were checked, and appeals for information were circulated in the press.
Dagmar’s small wooden hut, which measured just 10ft x 7ft, was photographed by police and guarded around the clock. The tiny dwelling had no electricity and was lit only by oil lamps. Inside, there was little more than a bed, a table and chairs, some basic pots and pans, and a Singer sewing machine which Dagmar used to practice the wartime habit of ‘make do and mend’, turning old blankets into coats and curtains into dresses. Outside, there was a water butt collecting rainwater, an improvised toilet, and a simple shed containing her gardening tools.
Dagmar was described as a quiet and somewhat eccentric woman, but always polite, respectable and honest. Several lorry drivers who had given her lifts in the past came forward, saying that Dagmar always insisted on paying them in return, usually the equivalent of a rail fare, even when they told her it wasn’t necessary. Meanwhile, a number of sightings were reported. Some motorists remembered passing a woman in her forties walking along the road around five o’clock that morning. She appeared to have something white tied around her neck, which police thought might be the vest she had bought the day before. Could it have been used to strangle her? At about the same time, witnesses recalled seeing a lorry loaded with bricks driving along the road in the opposite direction. Police believed the driver of that vehicle may have seen Dagmar too. Another report described a van parked near the murder site at around 6 a.m., and a man seen walking into the nearby bushes.
The Discovery of the Yellow String Bag
It wasn’t long before a significant clue emerged. A 16-year-old farm worker named Peter Nash, the son of a retired police officer, had been reading the newspaper coverage of the case. When he saw the photograph of the distinctive yellow string bag, he immediately knew he had seen it somewhere before. Not long earlier, Peter had pulled an identical bag from a private lake at Clare Park in Maidstone where he had been doing some labouring work. Realising it might be connected to the investigation, he handed the bag over to the police. Although it had been in the water for some time, forensic examination revealed hairs caught in the fibres that matched those of Dagmar Peters. Elena also confirmed that the bag was the one she had crocheted for her sister-in-law. One detail in particular caught investigators’ attention: the lake was not open to the public. Chief Inspector Fabian soon discovered that the lake was fed by a stream that flowed from the Goldwell cider works in East Malling, about a mile away. To test whether an object thrown into the stream could reach the lake, Fabian carried out an experiment, placing a message in a bottle and dropping it into the water at the cider works. Three hours later, the bottle arrived at the Clare Park lake.
Fabian interviewed the foreman at the cider works, who revealed that a delivery of bricks had arrived on the morning of Thursday 31 October. He showed the Inspector the delivery note, which listed the Cambridge company Dickersons Yard as the sender, and the driver’s name as Sidney Sinclair. The fact that a lorry full of bricks had now been mentioned twice during the investigation suggested it could not be a coincidence.
Sidney Sinclair Comes Under Suspicion
On the evening of 9 November, police visited Sidney Sinclair at his home in Little Abington, Cambridgeshire, initially telling him they were just making routine enquiries. Sinclair lived there with his wife Daisy, and appeared friendly, offering them a cup of tea. However, they noticed he seemed slightly nervous. He had been employed by Dickersons for about four years, had no criminal record, and was well respected in the village. When asked about his movements on the morning of the murder, he provided a detailed account, including spending four hours at a roadside café and stopping to ask people for directions.
Other evidence began to fall into place. A constable discovered a man’s white vest lying on a grass verge, and when tested at the police laboratory, hairs found on the garment were matched to Dagmar Peters. Shortly afterwards, her brown attaché case was found in Winterfield Lane, near the cider works, partially hidden beneath a layer of fallen leaves.
On 13 November, police visited Dickerson’s Yard and learned that Sidney Sinclair had left the company the previous day to take up work as a gardener. He had given them a doctor’s note which stated he had ‘anxiety neurosis’ and he also mentioned that a recent accident had caused him distress. The company assured police that Sinclair had been a reliable worker, though there were a few driving incidents in his record; one where he accidentally knocked someone off a bicycle, and another in which a man had been pinned against a wall, but neither had resulted in criminal charges. Chief Inspector Fabian realised it was time to bring Sidney Sinclair in officially.
Harold Hagger alias Sidney Sinclair
During questioning, it became clear that Sidney Sinclair was an alias. The lorry driver’s real name was Harold Hagger – a fact that even his wife Daisy didn’t know. Harold Hagger was the son of a dustman and came from a large family, with a dozen siblings and almost as many aliases. He was born on 27 March 1901 in Hornsey, north London, making him 45 at the time of the murder. From a young age, he had been disruptive at school, frequently getting into fights and stealing. In 1925, while being pursued by a police constable, he jumped from a moving train and was hospitalised for two weeks with a fractured skull. After he recovered, he reinvented himself, fabricated details of his life, and spent the next several years in and out of prison on various charges. In 1939, he joined the army, and the following year he married 34-year-old Daisy, a widow with two daughters, wooing her with gifts obtained from friends on the black market. He went AWOL from the army and was later deemed unfit for military service due to headaches and hand tremors. When police rechecked his criminal record under his real name, they discovered he had 16 convictions, including sexual assault, robbery, and assaulting a police officer. He was also a bigamist, as he was already married to a woman named Sophia, with whom he had a son, Ronald. Even more disturbingly, it transpired that he had molested Daisy’s eight-year-old daughter.
In light of the discoveries, Sinclair made a revised statement. He claimed he had found the vest, attaché case and yellow string bag lying in the road and had thrown them away when he realised they were worthless. To investigate further, Chief Inspector Fabian and Detective Superintendent Smeed took Sinclair on a journey from his home in Cambridge to the Goldwell cider works in East Malling, where he had delivered the bricks. To put him at ease, they were not in uniform and told him they simply wanted his help with their enquiries, asking him to point out where he had found the items and where he had disposed of them.
It was then that Sinclair mentioned, for the first time, that his lorry had overheated around 5 a.m. on the morning of the murder, so he’d pulled over to check the radiator. He claimed he had been out of action for 15 minutes, but this was exactly the time that witnesses reported seeing a lorry loaded with bricks passing Dagmar Peters on the road. Challenged about these inconsistencies, Sinclair then produced another statement. He claimed he had stopped his lorry for a second time to check the radiator, and as he drove on, he saw a female pedestrian signalling, who asked for a lift to London.
Sinclair stated that the woman climbed into the cab, carrying her attaché case. He recalled that she mentioned a puppy, though he didn’t see one, and assumed she had placed it by her side or tucked it inside her coat. A short way down the road, she asked him to pull into a small turning and stop. At this point, she allegedly requested money and offered sexual favours in return. Sinclair claimed that while she spoke, she touched his jacket, and he noticed she was holding his wallet. ‘So that’s your bloody game is it?’ he said, then struck her across the face. A struggle followed. He grabbed at the vest she had tied around her neck like a scarf, but pulled it too hard, and she became motionless. ‘I shook her and she just slumped down,’ he told the officers.
Sinclair claimed that, in a panic, he shut the cab door, drove on, and then stopped halfway down Wrotham Hill, where he carried the body across the verge and hid it inside the hedgerow. Later, he remembered that he still had her attaché case, which contained gloves, the yellow string bag, and her jam sandwiches, so after completing his brick delivery in East Malling, he threw the items into the stream and went about the rest of his day. Following this sequence of events, Harold Hagger, alias Sidney Sinclair, was formally charged with the murder of Dagmar Peters.
The Trial at Maidstone Assizes
The trial began on 24 February 1947 at Maidstone Assizes. Representing the Crown were Mr Derek Curtis Bennett KC and Mr E.J.P. Cusson, while Mr Melford Stevenson K.C. and Mr W. Scrivens led the defence. More than 30 witnesses were called to give evidence. The judge was Mr Justice Byrne, who had famously prosecuted wartime traitor William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, in 1945.
Mr Bennett K.C. told the jury that Sinclair’s claim that Dagmar had sexually propositioned him was implausible. The post-mortem had shown that she was a virgin, and as a shy, mild-mannered woman, there was no reason to believe she would have behaved in such a way. In fact, other lorry drivers who knew her insisted that she was always the one to offer money in exchange for lifts. Bennett pointed out that the evidence of timelines, distances, and locations all matched witness testimony. Bennett pointed out that Sinclair was a habitual liar with multiple previous convictions and that it was likely he had invented past injuries to avoid army duty, and his supposed blackouts, headaches and nervous episodes only appeared when convenient.
Hanged Under the Wrong Name
In his summing up, Mr Justice Byrne told the jury that it did not matter whether Sinclair had intended to kill Dagmar. ‘He is guilty of murder if death results from that act,’ the judge explained. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. On Tuesday 18 March 1947, 45-year-old Harold Hagger, alias Sidney Sinclair, was hanged at Wandsworth Prison by executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
What Happened to the Key Characters
Dagmar Peter’s estate, worth £420, 15 shillings and 3 pence, around £20,000 in today’s money, passed to her elderly mother, Mame. Within a year, Mame sold both her own small bungalow and Dagmar’s hut. The buyer, a local chicken farmer, demolished both buildings and replaced them with hen coops. Mame moved to Woking to live with her son Ralph and his wife Elena, the only family she had left after losing three sons, her husband, and her daughter. She died in January 1956, leaving her modest possessions to Ralph and his son, who was named Jules, after his grandfather.
Hagger’s first wife Sophia remarried, and their son Ronald kept the surname Hagger and went on to marry and have a family of his own. The fate of his second wife Daisy and her daughters remains unknown.
Chief Inspector Robert Honey Fabian, sometimes described as the world’s greatest detective, went on to work on numerous high-profile cases. He wrote two best-selling memoirs; Fabian of the Yard in 1950, and London After Dark, in 1954. Fabian of the Yard was later adapted into a television series starring Sir Bruce Seton.
One final note offers a glimmer of comfort. Hedy, the Jack Russell puppy Dagmar had bought for her brother and her sister-in-law, was reportedly found wandering in the countryside by a local thatcher a couple of weeks after the murder. He took her home, where she lived out her life alongside his spaniel, Webster, in a rare happy ending amid a case full of tragedies.
Researched and written by Prash Ganendran. Published 4 June 2026
© 2026 Prash Ganendran. All Rights Reserved.
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Sources
National Archives: MEPO 3/2743; PCOM 9/740
Ancestry.co.uk
Murder at Wrotham Hill. Quercus, 2012
Daily Mirror – Friday 11 December 1908
Daily Telegraph & Courier (London) – Saturday 12 December 1908
Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser – Friday 25 December 1908
Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette – Friday 01 November 1946
Daily News (London) – Monday 04 November 1946
Evening News (London) – Saturday 23 November 1946
Derby Daily Telegraph – Friday 20 December 1946
Daily Mirror – Saturday 01 March 1947
Evening News (London) – Tuesday 18 March 1947
Western Morning News – Wednesday 19 March 1947
Maidstone Telegraph – Friday 21 March 1947
The People – Sunday 03 August 1947
