The cleft chin murder was a killing which occurred as part of a string of crimes during 1944, and referred to in George Orwell's essay "Decline of the English Murder". It became known as the "cleft chin murder" because the murder victim, a taxi driver, had a cleft chin.
On 3 October 1944, an eighteen-year-old Welsh waitress called Elizabeth Jones met an American army deserter called Karl Hulten in a tea shop. The friendship only lasted six days. During that time they knocked over and killed a nurse cycling along a country lane and robbed her, picked up a hitchhiker, knocked her unconscious, robbed her, and then threw her into a river to drown (though she survived), and finally murdered a taxi driver named George Edward Heath. They robbed Heath of £8, which they spent at the races the next day.
Both were dreamers — Jones dreamed of "doing something exciting," and fantasized about being a stripper, whereas Hulten described himself as an officer and as a Chicago gangster, both of which were false.
Jones was born in Neath, Wales, in 1926. At the age of thirteen she ran away from home and eventually she was sent to an approved school because she was considered to be "beyond parental control."
Hulten was born in Sweden in 1922 and had enlisted after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
Initially Hulten had stolen an army truck, which he eventually abandoned, but kept the murdered taxi driver's car. After spending the taxi driver's £8, Elizabeth announced she wanted a fur coat. Hulten attacked a woman in the street and tried to snatch her coat, but the police came and Hulten only just managed to escape in the stolen car.
He was eventually caught because the car was still in his possession. In the meantime Jones had gone to the police and admitted to the crimes, to ease her conscience. During the trial they implicated each other. They were both found guilty of murdering Heath and sentenced to be hanged.[1] Whilst Hulton was executed at Pentonville Prison on 8 March 1945, Jones was reprieved and released in May 1954. Her subsequent fate is unknown.
The reprieve caused some controversy, because many people considered the crimes to be cowardly, and in a war-torn England where everyone was pulling together to face a common enemy, almost treasonous. "SHE SHOULD HANG" was graffitied in several places in Jones's home town.
A film, Chicago Joe and the Showgirl was made in 1990, based on the story, directed by Bernard Rose, written by David Yallop, and starring Emily Lloyd, Kiefer Sutherland, and Patsy Kensit.