The Bowler Hat Murder – Ernest Percival Key

It was Christmas Eve 1938. The weather was icy, and Ernest Percival Key noticed the ground was slippery when he walked to his shop that morning at 74 Victoria Road, Surbiton, Surrey. Ernest was 64 years old and had owned his jewellers’ shop for over 20 years. At about 10:30 a.m., he decided to call his wife at home to remind her to be careful when she went out shopping, due to the weather conditions. Ernest and his wife, son, and daughter were all looking forward to celebrating Christmas the next day.

Portrait of Ernest Key — Ernest Percival Key

Ernest Percival Key was born in 1874 in Beverley, Yorkshire, to parents John and Rachel Key. John worked in a tailor’s shop and was also a Methodist minister. Ernest met Rachel Maud Taylor in 1901, when he was 27, and Rachel was 22, and they married at St Aidan’s Church in South Shields, Durham. They lived briefly with Rachel’s parents in South Shields, then relocated to Surbiton in the south of England. The ambitious Ernest started out as a watchmaker’s assistant but eventually took over management of the shop and started running it as a jewellery business around 1911.

On Christmas Eve of 1938, Ernest was 64 years old and had now been running his jewellery shop for 27 years and had been married to Rachel for 37. They had two daughters, Maude and Edith, and a son who they had named John after his grandfather, but he was known to everyone as Jack.

Discovery of the Body

Just before noon, Jack visited the shop, but found to his confusion that it was locked. His father was a cautious and thorough man and would never leave the premises unattended, so Jack assumed he had gone to the workshop in the back room to have a cup of coffee and had locked up while he did so. He knocked on the door several times, but there was no response. Jack assumed his father simply couldn’t hear him, so he decided it would be quicker to go home and fetch a duplicate key. When he returned, he called out to announce his arrival but was greeted with an eerie silence. It wasn’t until he reached the back room that he realised something truly terrible had happened.

Ernest Key lay barely conscious on the floor, covered with blood. He had been stabbed more than 30 times, and it appeared that someone had stolen a number of expensive items of jewellery after viciously attacking the proprietor.

Jack tried to reassure his father and kept him comfortable while he waited for an ambulance, but his wounds were too severe, and he died on route to the hospital. Pathologist Dr Eric Gardner conducted the postmortem and discovered 17 defensive cuts on Ernest’s hands. He declared that the cause of death was haemorrhage from multiple wounds to the head, and the time of death was estimated to be between 10:35 and 11:50 a.m., shortly after he had spoken to his wife on the telephone.

The Hunt for the Owner of the Bowler Hat

Police questioned the Key family, but it was obvious that they were distraught at the loss of Ernest and had nothing to hide. When they searched the shop, detectives realised that Ernest’s blue overcoat was missing and surmised that it had been taken by the killer to cover up the bloodstains that must have been all over his clothes, given the brutality of the attack. The other significant clue was a bowler hat left behind at the scene, which did not belong to the victim. Dr Gardner examined the hat and was able to establish the size of the owner’s head and the colour of his hair, from some strands found inside. The investigation found that the hat had been purchased from a shop in Richmond. Detectives were soon joined by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, famous for carrying out more than 20,000 postmortems in his 40-year career and for his involvement in the Gordon Cummins and Dr Crippen cases, among many others.

With this dedicated team on the case, the owner of the hat was soon traced. It belonged to a 29-year-old unemployed lorry driver named William Thomas Butler, who lived in Middlesex with his wife and two children. He had previously been a greengrocer, but also had a criminal record for petty theft, and it transpired that within an hour of the murder, he had arrived at a hospital in Kingston seeking treatment for cuts on his hands. He had given a false name and claimed to have injured himself falling off his motorbike. When asked why he gave a pseudonym, he said it was to avoid paying for his treatment – but the police were not convinced. It transpired that two weeks before the murder, Butler had visited a printers firm and had handed them a business card bearing the fake name Reeves, and asked them to write the word “Detective” on it, along with the initials “C.I.D.” Had Butler been masquerading as law enforcement, and could he have used this as a ruse to gain access to Ernest Key’s shop?

When police searched Butler’s Middlesex home, they found a padlock which had belonged to Ernest Key. Traces of Butler’s blood were also found on Key’s clothing, and some of Key’s blood on Butler’s clothing. When questioned, William Butler told a fantastic story about the police driving him to a secluded spot and forcing him to put on the bloodstained garments.

The Trial of William Thomas Butler

Butler was charged with the murder of Ernest Key and faced a jury at the Old Bailey on 15 February 1939, just months before the outbreak of WWII. As he could not afford to hire his own legal counsel, he was represented by a court-appointed barrister under the Legal Aid provision. He appeared in the dock with no tie, unshaven, and clad in shabby clothes. Butler confessed to having committed seven housebreakings in recent months and claimed to have sold some of the stolen goods to Ernest, but on Christmas Eve, Ernest had apparently refused to pay him £15 that he owed.

‘We started quarrelling, and suddenly he turned round to the bench and took up a knife,’ claimed Butler. ‘We fought, and Key got his hands round my neck and used the knife to cut the back of my head.’ Butler showed the jury a scar on his head by way of evidence and admitted that he had slashed the elderly jeweller with the knife before collapsing from his own injury. He maintained that he had acted in self-defence and believed he should be charged only with manslaughter.
The jury didn’t agree. It was hard to imagine how a man acting in self-defence could have inflicted 30 stab wounds on his victim, and there was no proof that Ernest Key had ever bought stolen goods. After two days of deliberations, Butler was found guilty of murder. Some members of the public were more forgiving, and 3,300 people signed a petition to reprieve him. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison dismissed the appeal on 13 March, and the execution date was set for just 16 days later. His wife Evelyn brought their daughters, aged 10 and 6, to visit him for the last time in prison, shielding them from the truth by telling them that it was a munitions factory and that their father had joined the army and might have to go abroad for a long time. The girls would spend the rest of their lives believing that he had died in the war. Having bid his last goodbyes to his family, William Thomas Butler met his maker at Wandsworth Prison on 29 March 1939, executed by prolific hangman Thomas Pierrepoint.

The Clairvoyant Detective Myth

Perhaps the strangest part of this tragic case was its supposed connections to otherworldly forces. Ernest Key himself was considered something of an eccentric and had been an avid member of the Surbiton Spiritualist Church, as well as a Freemason. A few days after the murder, his daughter contacted a medium who conducted a séance. It was reported that Ernest spoke through the medium and gave his daughter the heartfelt message, ‘take care of mother, everything will be alright.’ His funeral took place with full Masonic rites.

After Butler was hanged, the British media fixated on the idea that Dr Eric Gardner had solved the case simply by looking at the hat left behind by the killer. They seemed to ignore the fact that Gardner had used scientific methods to measure the hat and examine the owners’ strands of hair, and it was dogged police work which had led to the discovery of the outfitters that sold the hat, and from there, the identity of the buyer. But the story spread far and wide, and even the German press picked up the tale and requested Gardner’s help to solve their own cases as they believed he was clairvoyant.

What Remains Today

The home in which the Key family lived at 204 Ewell Road, Surbiton, still remains and is recognisable today even after 85 years. The jeweller’s shop is now a barber’s named Al Capone.

The killer might well have been punished, but the Key family were left with heartbreak and questions. It seemed likely that Butler had gone to Ernest’s shop on Christmas Eve with robbery in mind and had viciously murdered the jeweller when he put up resistance. Sadly, the only two people who knew the full details of what took place on that icy Christmas Eve morning were no longer alive, and it seemed that Ernest preferred to share only messages of love from beyond the grave, rather than dwell on the circumstances of his passing..