The Murder of Rachel Dobkin

Air raid sirens wailing in the night like a banshee’s harbinger of death. Pitch dark skies without a glimmer of light escaping through thickly woven blackout curtains. Searchlights slicing the sky, and the distant rumble of anti-aircraft guns. These were just some of the sights and sounds of World War II on Britain’s Home Front. But the onset of war didn’t mean that the country’s other troubles ended.  Amongst the chaos of the global conflict, criminals continued to operate, selling black market goods, looting bombed-out buildings, and sometimes… committing murder.

It was Friday 17 July 1942, and labourer Ben Marshall was looking forward to finishing work for the day. His job cleaning up debris in the bombed-out Vauxhall Baptist Chapel in south London was gruelling, and he had struggled to gain entry to the chapel cellar but had eventually managed to access it via the warehouse next door. World War II had been raging for almost three years by now, and Ben paused for a moment to catch his breath as he surveyed the rubble, remembering the day that conflict had broken out on 1 September 1939. Those fateful words uttered by Neville Chamberlain on the radio 2 days later marked the point of no return and were permanently burnt into the minds of everyone who heard them, on one of those rare days in history when everyone, young and old, would forever remember what they were doing at the moment when life changed forever.

At first, not much had happened on the home front during an eerily quiet period which became known as the ‘Phoney War’. Blackout regulations had been in place long before any bombs were dropped, meaning that all windows and doors were covered at night to prevent any escaping sliver of light which could guide enemy planes to their target. Streetlamps were dimmed or switched off entirely, while vehicle headlights were fitted with shrouds. Anyone breaking blackout regulations received a steep fine, and the number of accidents rose dramatically as the population navigated the unnerving darkness. Rationing of clothes, food, and petrol proved a continual frustration, with women queuing for hours every day, clutching their ration coupons, to buy their share of scarce produce to feed their families. Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers were sent to fight on the frontlines, while wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters joined the women’s branches of the services, worked in factories, on farms, as Air Raid Precautions wardens and even as codebreakers.

The Blitz added to people’s woes between September 1940 and May 1941 – a sustained bombing campaign in which over 50,000 high explosive bombs and many more small but ruinous incendiaries battered England’s capital, dropped by hundreds of German planes for more than 50 consecutive nights. The industry and docks of the East End suffered badly but nowhere was safe. Even Buckingham Palace and historic landmarks were hit, while St Paul’s Cathedral was set ablaze but famously survived, its spire rising high as a symbol of defiance amid clouds of smoke and dust. Other cities also suffered bombing raids, but London was one of the most dangerous places to be. 40,000 British people were killed during the Blitz, around half of whom were Londoners, and 1.4 million people in the city were made homeless. Terrified people huddled in air raid shelters, mourning the loss of homes and families, but there was a feeling of camaraderie and Blitz Spirit; a determination never to give in.

Phyllis Warner, a teacher living in Bloomsbury who kept a journal during this period, wrote:

‘One of the oddest things about our everyday life is its mixture of ruthless horror and everyday routine. I pick my way to work past the bomb craters and the shattered glass and sit at my desk in a room with a large hole in the roof. Next to a house reduced to matchwood, housewives are giving prosaic orders to the baker and the milkman. Nobody seems to mind the day raids, which do little damage. It is the nights which are like a continuous nightmare, from which there is no merciful awakening. Yet people won’t move away. I know that I’m a fool to go on sleeping in Central London which gets plastered every night, but I feel that if others can stand it, so can I.’

Now, in July 1942, the Blitz had been over for more than a year, and although bombs still fell, the frequency had reduced, and Londoners were already attempting to rebuild the flattened parts of the capital. Ben Marshall was one of those engaged in this gargantuan task, and as he shovelled dirt and rubble in the airless cellar, he spotted a paving slab leaning against a wall. He pushed it aside, the edges grinding noisily against the stone flooring, then stepped back in dismay. Partially hidden behind the slab were the decomposing remains of a human being.

Marshall called out to his foreman, who came to inspect the grisly find. It was common to find bodies or severed limbs in the wreckage of buildings, but this one was unusual, and the labourers couldn’t help noticing that it didn’t look like the other bomb victims they had seen. The naked corpse had been dismembered, with the arms cut off at the elbow, and the legs cut off at the knee. The head was separated from the rest of the body, and the flesh had been entirely burnt away.   A few hairs remained on the skull.

The body was examined by Home Office Pathologist Dr Keith Simpson at Southwark Mortuary, who established that it was a female aged between 40 and 50, about 5’1” in height, with brown hair turning grey. A small area of bleeding and damage around the thyroid cartilage had occurred while the woman was still alive, indicating that she had been strangled. Agreeing with the labourers’ initial misgivings, Dr Simpson was convinced that this was not a bombing victim – it was a case of murder. Traces of lime were also found on the remains, suggesting that someone had tried to expedite decomposition.

DNA profiling was not yet possible, and fingerprints couldn’t be taken as the skin had been destroyed by fire, so the only way for police to identify the victim was to trawl through the missing persons files for all women of a similar age who had been reported missing around the time that death had taken place. Dr Simpson felt she had been deceased for around 12 to 18 months, narrowing it down to the spring of 1941.

There were hundreds of names in the missing person’s register, so Divisional Detective Inspector Frederick Hatton and Detective Inspector Joseph Keeling of the Metropolitan Police decided to focus on women living in the vicinity of the chapel. It was no easy feat, as police numbers had been cut by 28%, with young and active officers deployed to fight in the war, and although most people came together to do their bit to help the Allies to victory, there were some who took advantage of the chaos to operate under the radar, with crime rising by 57% since the beginning of the war. Despite these challenging conditions, detectives were undeterred and eventually came up with a name. Rachel Dobkin, née Dubinski, seemed to fit the facts.

Rachel Dubinski was born in August 1892 in Mile End to father Barnett, a hat manufacturer, and mother Sarah. Barnett and Sarah had fled persecution in Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, an event which led to the scapegoating of Jews. They arrived in Whitechapel before moving to nearby Bethnal Green, and then Shoreditch, and had four children; Rachel, the eldest, followed by Nathaniel, Mary, and Polly. Later, Nathaniel became a ladies’ hatmaker like his father, while Polly worked as a shorthand typist and then as a bookkeeper. Rachel, too, joined her father in the hat-making business.

On Friday 11 April 1941, 49-year-old Rachel failed to arrive at her mother’s house for dinner. This was highly unusual, as it was a family routine to eat together every night. Concerned, her sister Polly went to Rachel’s flat the next morning and let herself in with a spare key, finding the bedsheets undisturbed, suggesting she hadn’t slept there the night before. Polly reported her missing and provided a photo of her sister but was disappointed by the police’s lack of effort to find Rachel. She visited them several times, explaining that Rachel struggled with her mental health and had spent time in a hospital under observation. Polly placed a notice in the newspaper asking for information about her sister’s whereabouts, and even visited a medium, Madam Nerva, handing the clairvoyant a scarf and jumper belonging to Rachel. As Madam Nerva slipped into a trance, she clutched her throat in terror, making terrifying choking noises, but was unable to speak. Desperate for answers, Polly visited another spiritualist who claimed to see Rachel in a ‘hot room’, and said ominously, ‘There is passing out, a sudden death.’

Eventually, the police had made enquiries and discovered Rachel’s handbag at a post office in Guildford, Surrey. Inside were rail tickets dated the day after her disappearance, and detectives speculated that she had run away to start a new life or had committed suicide. There, the trail had gone cold.

When Detective Inspectors Hatton and Keeling read the notes from the police file, they began to have doubts that the body really was Rachel Dobkin, particularly as her bag had been found more than 30 miles away soon after her disappearance. But pathologist Dr Simpson became obsessed with proving the identity of the burnt and dismembered woman, so he contacted Mary Newman, a forensic photographer at Guy’s Hospital, sending her X-rays of the skull and a photograph of missing Rachel Dobkin. When Newman superimposed Rachel’s face onto the x-ray image, it was obvious that the two were a perfect match. Forensic photography was still in its infancy, although it had been used once before at the trial of murderous doctor Buck Ruxton in 1936, but Simpson didn’t want to take any chances that the identification wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. He contacted every dentist in a five-mile radius of Rachel’s home and finally found the practice she was registered with. They still had her dental records and after comparing them to the teeth belonging to the corpse, Simpson conclusively proved that the body was that of Rachel Dobkin.

One question had been answered, but several remained – who had killed her, and why? And how did her handbag end up in Guildford containing rail tickets dated the day after she went missing? Detectives spoke to Rachel’s sister Polly and learned more about the murdered woman’s life, as well as the person who might have wanted her dead.

When Rachel Dubinski was 28, she met a dark-haired, well-built man named Harry Dobkin through a marriage broker, as it was common in the Jewish community at that time for parents to arrange spouses for their children. The pair married in the autumn of 1920 at Bethnal Green Synagogue and moved into a house at 302 Kennington Lane – the same road as the burnt-out chapel where Rachel’s body was later discovered. The relationship was acrimonious, and they fought constantly, separating after just a few weeks. Rachel had already fallen pregnant and by the time their son Stanley was born in June 1921, Harry was working away at sea as a third-class steward on a Cunard ocean liner.

He visited Rachel and his son when he was on leave, but each time he would hit his wife, leaving her with a black eye, then slope off to stay at his parents’ house a few miles away.

Harry was summoned to the Old Street Police Court for failing to provide for his family and was ordered to pay Rachel £1 a week for the upkeep of their son but spent six weeks in prison for falling behind with the payments. Divorce was not only an expensive option but still carried a stigma at that time, so he chose to remain married, even though it meant finding money for the weekly payments – which he tried to dodge at every opportunity. After leaving prison, he took a job with the White Star Line and stayed at sea for ten years. When he returned, he claimed that Rachel’s parents offered him £8 to reconcile with his wife, and the unhappy couple lived together again for a short time. Harry accused Rachel of hiding his seaman’s discharge papers, while she suspected that he had taken her brooch and reported him to the police. He was arrested on suspicion of theft, but the case was dismissed, and he returned to live with his parents. In 1935, someone set a fire on Rachel’s doorstep with an oily rag and paper, but no damage was done, and the perpetrator was never found. Two years later, Rachel was hospitalised after being beaten by Harry and developed anxiety and depression.

By 1939, Rachel was unable to work due to injuries inflicted by her husband’s constant assaults and was surviving solely on his unreliable maintenance payments. Harry was now working as a street trader making and selling aprons, and their son Stanley, now 18, was earning a wage as a customs shipping clerk.

On 8 April 1941, 49-year-old Rachel visited medium Hilda Nerva, seeking guidance for her uncertain future, as she was still out of work and felt heavyhearted and hopeless. During the session, Madam Nerva’s expression changed when she touched her client’s wedding ring. Shadows cast by the flickering candle flame danced across her sorrowful face as she warned Rachel in a lugubrious tone, ‘You are about to meet someone new. Don’t go. I see sadness in your future.’ Three days later, Rachel disappeared and was never seen alive again, and in a strange coincidence, her sister would visit the same medium in hope of receiving a clue from beyond as to her whereabouts.

Police located a witness who had seen Rachel on Friday 11 April 1941 – a café owner who reported seeing Mr and Mrs Dobkin drinking tea together. When questioned, Harry Dobkin admitted to visiting the café with his wife, but insisted he went to work afterwards at his market stall. Several other witnesses confirmed seeing him at work that afternoon, but knowing how badly he treated Rachel, her sister Polly was convinced he was somehow involved.

The investigation was initially based on the assumption that Rachel Dobkin had been among the 150,000 Londoners trying to make her way to an air raid shelter when the siren went off and had been waylaid in the darkness by someone with murderous intentions. Detective Inspectors Hatton and Keeling decided to re-examine the chapel where the body was found, noticing that it had not only been bombed, but gutted by fire, which they assumed was caused by the Luftwaffe’s devastating incendiaries. They unearthed the records and learned that a fire had been burning for over an hour on Tuesday 15 April 1941 before being reported at 3:30 a.m. However, the bomb damage had been caused earlier, and there were no explosives dropped on the area that night so something else must have started the fire, which experts believed originated in the cellar.

The investigators were surprised that the fire had been allowed to burn for so long without being extinguished. Throughout World War II, firewatchers were stationed on the roofs of buildings or other high vantage points to help them quickly spot and report smoke and flames, smothering any fires in their assigned area with sandbags, buckets of water, or stirrup pumps. Hatton and Keeling knew firewatchers worked and lived in the vicinity of the chapel, so why hadn’t they responded sooner on the night of the blaze? Records confirmed there had been a firewatcher on duty at the time, based in the warehouse next door to the chapel. He had started his role as a firewatcher just a week earlier, and his name… was Harry Dobkin. Curiously, Harry had apparently not spotted the fire right next door to his location, and it was a police constable on his beat who alerted the fire brigade, wondering why the local firewatcher had not already done so.

Hatton and Keeling reinterviewed the fire brigade, who remembered Harry Dobkin’s presence at the scene and insisting he had tried to put the fire out, adding the strange remark, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Coupled with the fact that they now had a positive identification of the body as Rachel Dobkin, and evidence of the abusive marriage, the constabulary had enough to bring Harry in for questioning. When they picked him up at his parents’ house at 21 Navarino Road, Dalston, Harry took a piece of paper out of his pocket and, with no prompting, wrote down that he had nothing to do with killing his wife. This struck the detectives as peculiar, as at this point, they hadn’t even mentioned their reason for asking him to accompany them to the station, nor had they said the word ‘murder’.

Hatton and Keeling took their suspect to visit the wreckage of the chapel, hoping to elicit a memory or a confession. Dobkin denied ever going into the cellar, but a passing local police constable overheard the conversation and said, ‘I know you. I have seen you go into that cellar before.’

Harry Dobkin was arrested on Thursday 27 August 1942 and charged with the murder of his wife 16 months previously. When officers searched his home, they found train tickets which exactly matched the ones found in the victim’s handbag in Guildford, suggesting that after killing his wife, he had deliberately bought two sets of train tickets, travelled out of London, then planted one of the tickets in her bag to suggest she had left the city. PG 18/04/25

Dobkin was tried at the Central Criminal Court, also known as the Old Bailey, on 17 November 1942. It, too, had suffered bomb damage during the Blitz which had forced the public gallery to close, leaving just a few benches available at the back of the court for spectators, behind the large glass wall of the dock. Dobkin pleaded not guilty, and his defence barrister, F.H. Lawton, criticised the forensic photography methods used to identify the body as Mrs Dobkin. He tried to raise further doubt by mentioning that the victim’s height was 5’1”, but Rachel’s own sister had said she was 5’3” when she placed the missing person’s advert in the newspaper. But Crown Prosecutor Lawrence Byrne’s soft voice and calm demeanour masked a shrewd astuteness that quashed Lawton’s efforts to suggest the deceased was simply an air raid victim. Byrne explained to the court that based on the evidence, Harry Dobkin had strangled his wife on the evening of Good Friday, 11 April 1941, dismembered her body, then hidden it in the bombed-out chapel. At some point, he had poured lime over the body in the belief it would decompose faster, and when it did not, he lit a fire in the early hours of Tuesday 15 April in an attempt to permanently erase his crime.

Dobkin maintained his innocence, alleging that police officers had threatened him while writing his statement and urged him to confess. He also claimed that one of the police officers had recited a poem to him called the Wheels of Justice, which ran:

Though the mills of God grind slowly,

Yet they grind exceeding small;

Though with patience he stands waiting,

With exactness grinds he all.

 In response to this literary reminder that justice is always done eventually, whether in this life or the next, Harry apparently quipped, ‘You make a better hangman than a poet.’

 When prosecutor Byrne asked him when he had ceased to have any affection for his wife, Dobkin admitted, ‘On the day I was married.’ He added, ‘I always tried to avoid her. I never wanted to see her again after 11 April.’

The jury of seven, reduced from the usual 12 due to wartime conditions, were presented with the picture of Rachel’s face superimposed on a picture of the skull in the cellar, witness testimony that Harry had been seen with his wife shortly before her death, and the damning catalogue of abuse and missed support payments. In his summing up, the Judge, Justice Wrottesley, advised the court that the identification methods were sound, and the jury could hardly expect the victim’s legs to have been cut off if she had been the victim of a bombing raid. He reminded the jury, ‘Dobkin had stood watching the fire burn for about an hour without calling the brigade. You may ask yourselves why a firewatcher, of all people, should have done this.’

After 20 minutes deliberation, the jury found Harry Dobkin guilty. Before sentence was passed, the defendant rose in the dock and read some remarks aloud from a piece of paper, claiming that the charges had been invented, and he had been roughly treated by the police. He displayed no emotion as he was sentenced to death.

On the cold, foggy morning of Wednesday 27 January 1943, Dobkin was hanged at Wandsworth Prison. The post-mortem of the executed man was conducted by Dr Keith Simpson, who, later in the decade, would examine the body of one of the victims of sadistic sex killer Neville Heath, as well as a victim of acid bath murderer John George Haigh. He became one of Britain’s leading forensic pathologists after Bernard Spilsbury, practicing for 40 years.

Detective Inspectors Keeling and Hatton retired at the end of the war, just a couple of years after the Dobkin case. Rachel’s elderly mother Sarah, tormented by the brutal death, believed that her daughter was trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave, as she often heard unexplained knocking sounds and was woken by her voice at night. Eerily, one of the psychics Polly visited had been close to the truth, having mentioned a ‘hot room’ and a ‘sudden death’, although Madam Nerva had been mistaken when she warned Rachel not to meet ‘someone new’, as the threat came, instead, from someone she knew all too well. The inscription on Rachel Dobkin’s gravestone reads ‘Peace to her dear soul’, and it is to be hoped that any other victims will also find peace, as this case leaves us to wonder how many others may lie beneath London’s streets and old bombed-out buildings, the manner of their violent deaths masked by the effects of war.

Researched and written by Prash Ganendran. Published on 18 April 2025.
© 2025 Prash Ganendran. All Rights Reserved.

My Video Documentary Version of this Case

Watch on YouTube

Sources

Main image – Bomb damage in Balham during the Blitz (1940–41). Bus likely fell into crater due to blackout.https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205398363
Licenced under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Ancestry
Murderous History
Evening Despatch – Thursday 27 August 1942
Daily Mirror – Saturday 12 September 1942
Daily Express – Wednesday 18 November 1942
Daily Herald – Friday 20 November 1942
Derby Daily Telegraph 23 November 1942
Daily Mirror – Tuesday 24 November 1942
Daily News 24 November 1942