Prison Pioneer: The Murder of Agnes Ellacott

"Jacky, as I will call her, lived in her room as a woman. She did not mix with the other inmates whilst she dressed that way. But had to dress in male / androgynous clothes for meal times."

The above quote, from My Wheelchair Vista, is the most recent information I could find on a trans-identifying man I've been researching (while the writer uses a pseudonym, it is clearly the same man).

Between the mid 1980s and 1990s, he fought for access to cross sex hormones, to wear women's clothing and sex reassignment surgery, all while detained under the mental health act, towards the end of an almost 50 year stretch. 

It's a long story.

***

Agnes

Agnes Muriel Ellacott, née Barrett, was a whole person, but a few archived mentions are all that remain of her publicly, and it still wasn't really about her: not to her killer, nor the press. After the first wave of shock coverage, she barely cast a shadow over the whole affair. All we know of her now is that she was doing the housework when it happened. 

Rarely named in the newspapers - invoked in short, tabloid descriptions - she was a 'lover'; his 'friend's wife' or, simply, an event. An NPC, a walk-on role in her own murder, later entirely dispensed with to focus on the more interesting tale of the crazed young man who murdered her. 

And, because of my interest in trans activism, unfortunately I will be focused on him, too...

From Mary Evans' prints online

George & Dennis 

During World War Two, an Auxiliary Fire Service was formed to counter the blazes of a blitzed London, with those too old, young or unfit for active service conscripted to help.
Among them was Dennis John Nash, 17 years old and born in the midsummer, a century ago. His new friend, George Thomas Ellacott was born, or at least Christened, on Christmas day, in 1904.
Both were from Maycot Hale, near Farnham, Surrey, although they were apparently unknown to each other.

Here's some background I find tragically fascinating. It's not really relevant to the bigger story, but feels too poignant to ignore:

Image via Friends of Aldershot Military Museum

The Death of Catherine Ellacott 

George had two sons from his first marriage. I only recently found out, however, they also had a daughter. She was two-and-a-half when Catherine, her mother, disappeared.

After having her, Catherine was unable to shake postnatal depression. 'Nervous depression' they called it. One early morning in November 1937, she left her home in her night dress and coat, and didn't return.

She was later found, drowned in the deep pond built to train WW1 war horses to swim. Her's was the penultimate death for a treacherous place that had claimed many lives; when a woman from the same row of cottages died the next month, it was finally, and forever, drained and filled. It may explain George's subsequent lacklustre defence of his second wife. Perhaps he was just broken.

*

George's second wife came along in the form of Agnes Barrett, seven years younger than George. They married but it seems they would not have children.

By mid 1945, Ellacott was back to work as a baker's roundsman, while Nash was a lorry driver, lodging nearby. They were still close friends and Nash was often at the Ellacott home.

It's tempting to view the friendship as founded on George's sense of paternalist duty, general decency, perhaps weakness or gullibility. Ellacott was now 40, and Nash half his age. His boys were in their late teens. I feel like George saw Dennis as a third son. 

I say this because, there surely must have been a higher motivation; a sense of duty or just pity, given how George overlooked Nash's behaviour.

Nothing To Write Home About 

For, Dennis Nash was a strange young man, driven by obsessive fixations and a fondness - a real passion - for writing. For months, he had penned letters declaring his love for Agnes, delivering them to the door when she was alone at home. Effusive, delusionally romantic missives that weren't even a secret. Apparently, Dennis didn't really consider he had to abide by regular social norms.

Nash later claimed that he and Agnes had been having an affair, a claim thereafter reported as if established fact despite Agnes never admitting that to anyone. Not one person confirmed it, George is not recorded as commenting at all, and by the point it became lore, Agnes was not there to defend herself.

George Ellacott eventually, reluctantly, confronted Nash over his attempts to seduce his wife, albeit with the aggression of a Debrett's-sanctioned Thank You letter. 

He warned Nash if he didn't stop the letters, the harassment of Agnes, he'd cut him out of their lives for good. It was a plea, really, to just stop it, leave Agnes alone and move on - George was prepared to pretend it had never happened, and nothing else changed - they still had drinks at lunchtime, and Nash was at the house regularly.

Whether Nash's fixation was requited or not, he wasn't deterred by George's intervention - in fact, it did nothing but expose his manipulative character. 

Faced with his own behaviour and the cautious limits imposed by George, Nash fell apart.

He wept, he begged, and he threatened: 

"if you do turn me away, you will find my body on the railway in an hour".

It's a shamelessly entitled tactic, and one that would have been even more startling in the comparatively repressed and macho culture of 1945. 

For Nash, playing victim to conceal the inner persecutor was his best strategy. Using the emotional stun grenade of threatened suicide on someone as seemingly naive as George is brutally cynical and self-interested. He was gas lighting, and I assume waging a war of attrition on George's faith in Agnes. We can only imagine what things were like for her during all this. 

Ultimately, I doubt George taking a tougher approach would have made a difference, but it seems he had a remarkably relaxed and forgiving attitude to the much younger man relentlessly pursuing his wife. Nash's self pity, brazen emotional blackmail and deceptive air of vulnerability seem poignantly stark in contrast to such audacious chicanery.

Three months later, in August 1945, Nash was seen at the Ellacott's cottage early one morning.

According to Caroline Maxton's Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Guildford, Nash had tried to kiss Agnes, though I wonder if in reality it was a sexual assault she had fended off. Whatever it was, Agnes was not in the mood for Nash's nonsense and rejected him, offering nothing more than a frosty tone, two cold shoulders and a rigid focus on the pile of washing she was sorting.

This is of course Nash's account. All we know for sure is he was there. Still, even going by his story, Agnes was done with him entirely by now. 

She dispensed with familiarity, and told him to go, referring to George as 'Mr. Ellacott' - presumably an attempt to put some distance between them, or evoke a sense of her husband's seniority, his authority.

Unmoved, having contrived to be there with no other witness, Nash bravely threw down the gauntlet. He would fight for his love.

"Fuck George!" he declared. Agnes, presumably brimming with contempt, shot back "oh? So tell him yourself tonight".

Nash stormed out.

I get the impression this comment was deeply significant for him.

How dare she mock him. That's what I think burned. How fucking dare she? Nash was a creep, sleazing over Agnes, talking big behind George's back while crying and pleading to his face. I doubt he'd ever been so starkly called out. I get the impression this comment was deeply significant for him.

He must have caused so much grief. Whether or not the affair was a lie, and I tend to think it is, Nash was openly stalking Agnes, yet still he was treated with kid gloves. Telling Dennis to grow a spine and confront George himself was probably a long time coming, and perhaps she wanted to trigger a row, elicit anger or passion in her husband; to wake him up to the character they were dealing with. She was being harassed in her own home, George was painfully reticent to act. Anyone would be angry and reaching desperation.

Later that morning, Dennis Nash was reportedly seen at a local cafe with an agitated demeanor odd enough to catch the attention of others. 

He was overwhelmed, and the unbearable static of the impasse prickled his face. The barely-suppressed violent spree was burning a hole in his head, weakening his grasp on restraint.  

He was lost in his own thoughts, he scribbled words in his notebook, crossed them out and barely touched his cup of tea. Then he abruptly stood up, left without goodbyes and set off on his bike, in the direction of the Ellacott's cottage.

Later, Dennis Nash claimed he went to deliver Agnes his finally-complete love letter - he had been writing this one for a year. However, my bet is he had been bitterly ruminating on the humiliation, on all he had sacrificed in his obsession for the woman who had spurned him. For months, maybe years, he had pursued Agnes, and he'd finally realised, it was for nothing. Worse, if Agnes told George everything, even his tolerance would be exceeded. All would be lost.

It was pride and fury, not loss, that was catalyzed. It must have been especially hard for someone as delusional and egocentric as Dennis Nash. He chased his losses with bigger and bigger bids, ignoring the creaks and teetering until collapse - he set himself up, really. He kept adding evermore pressure and weight on foundations of nothing. 

For all his chutzpah and fantasy, he must have known on some level, when it came to sustaining an actual relationship, he had little to offer - a rented room; one pound in his bank account, the emotional fortitude of a box of tissue in the rain. 

It appears he had just one friend, a man for whom he had no respect but still spent all his spare time with, trailing him like a loyal puppy whole spitting venom when he was out of earshot. Even the previous day he had tagged along on the Ellacott family day out to the Essex coast, apparently without any scene or perceptible tension. An inscrutable affect seems to have been a lifelong trait. 

But, inside he was a gathering tsunami of rage. His dreams and reality were set to collide like tectonic plates.

"Tell him yourself tonight". 

The urge for a cathartic binge was making him twitchy. Triggers were raised and acutely sensitized. 

He hurried to the cottage, because for the path of least resistance to be worthwhile, it has to exit, to erupt, at the right place. There's no release in it otherwise.

If I Can't Have, No One Can Have, "My Best Mate's Wife"

In his letter to Agnes, titled "My Best Mate's Wife", the word 'darling' appeared twenty times and was signed off with over a hundred Xs.

While it isn't shown, quoted from or replicated, it seems from the little I've gleaned that Nash was pathetically hopeful, incapable of factoring in Agnes' personhood or the immense opposition and practical difficulties they would, if in love, have to contend with.
It seems he believed that if he could cross his fingers and push hard enough, it would all work out. Even Agnes could be convinced. His fixation would be enough to carry his delusion into reality.
But that was before. Before Agnes ruined it all.

Somehow or other, he gained entry to the cottage. Agnes was ironing.
A fight ensued, and Nash got a hold of Agnes' throat. He started to strangle her. Strangulation is a very personal crime, which might have become too intense, or tiring. So, he tied a rope around her neck and throttled her, before stabbing and slashing her throat with a cutthroat razor he just so happened to have at hand.

For good measure, once she was lifeless on the floor, he wrenched the gas stove off the wall, causing a leak, and fled.

"Everything just went black" he told police "There was a bit of a struggle and I don't know exactly what happened.

"She seemed to fall down, and I got frightened. She went black in the face and was foaming at the mouth.

"I have nearly always got a piece of rope in my pocket. I must have put it around her neck and pulled at it"

Note how passive he is in this explanation; "I must have" suggesting honest guesswork, or "she seemed to fall down", "she went black in the face" as if he was bystander to his victim's bizarre performance. As for 'I got frightened', where do you start?

He claimed he couldn't recall, it was as if he was sincerely lost and seeking the answer, a dispassionate, powerless observer trying to piece it together, until; "I had a razor in my pocket, and I drew it across her throat and then my mind was blank." 

A climax.

It was, according to the officer at the scene, a very deep stab wound, which had then been dragged out through the rest of her neck. But 'drew' sounds better. Cleaner. Less violent.

He was on his bike again, first to his lodgings where he washed himself of Agnes' blood and hid the letter (if he had ever taken it in the first place). He had another cup of tea, rode back into the village, flinging the razor as he crossed the common, and the rope by the railway embankment, where he had told George to find him, if he was so cruel as to cast him out.

Evidence ditched, he headed to the Jolly Sailor for a pint, followed by a second in The Plough, with George.



As they sat down for a drink it had only been about five minutes since Agnes' step sons had found her on the scullery floor, in a cottage choked with gas, garrotted and slashed in a pool of congealing blood.

Poor George, widowed twice in eight years, hadn't noticed anything strange about Dennis at all. 

The events of Nash's arrest are not reported but it happened swiftly after. He gave the above statement, and on remand sent George a furious letter, demanding to know why he hadn't been to visit him during his stressful and lonely days on remand. He wanted an apology.

Displaying an even greater lack of appreciation for the gravity of his crimes, he wrote again, this time asking for a favour - if it wouldn't be too much trouble, he would very much appreciate a photograph of the newly dug grave where Agnes now lay.

Within ten weeks of Agnes' murder, Nash was found guilty but not criminally responsible due to insanity, and was ordered to be detained indefinitely.

It seems a bit of a push to suggest Nash was mentally ill to the extent he lacked criminal responsibility. 

I don't doubt he had the psychopathy he would later be diagnosed with, but that is not considered to render someone incapable of choice in this regard. What it seems to me is, Dennis Nash used a wife beater's blag as old as time, and it worked.

In my very much amateur opinion, there was not much wrong with Nash but for a rancid personality, a gargantuan sense of superiority and the overwhelming self pity that underlined it.

A case in point being, not long after the trial, Nash somehow managed to purchase the burial plot next to Agnes and had the bill sent to the prison. A final attempt to stake a claim on Agnes, never letting her go, and an intrusion on George's grief for his second wife, who quite possibly lay in the same rural churchyard as Catherine, his first wife.

He wanted to dominate them all. A territorial pissing on the community he was now removed from. 

He tried to haunt the living along with the dead. He wanted a space held for him, when he would eventually return. A foreshadowing presence. 

Dennis Nash was sent to Broadmoor, special hospital for the criminally insane, where he was shuttled into middle age with his excuses, indulgences and oddities. It is here he was first diagnosed a psychopath, as other psychiatrists would diagnose him many times over.

For all intents and purposes, Nash was disappeared for the next two and a half decades. 

Back in Maycot Hale, I have found one report of a George Thomas Ellacott dying in Surrey in 1988, which would mean he made it to an impressive 84. His own father made it to 77, and died just over a decade after Agnes, in 1956.

I could find nothing else. I can only hope life was significantly better for the Ellacott children.

Still, the story was not over for Nash.

In 1964, when Nash was 40, a story hit headlines across the country - a patient at Broadmoor had stripped down the fire extinguishers on the landing and harvested the concentrated sulphuric acid inside, which was stored in a tin in preparation for a revenge attack on another patient. While Nash was not named at the time, it was eventually revealed to be him. 

There's a story behind that, which would become clear when he re-emerged, heralding another period in which he would make headlines all over again.

Nash was fixated on what he perceived as slights, injustices, offences against him. 

A habit deeply engrained, as resistant to change as the colour of his eyes, he was wholly solipsistic for the entirety of his life, showing no concern for the feelings, perspective or experience of others.

It would ultimately be blamed on his inner-woman, brutalised in the prison to end all prisons - the male body.

 

I hope to publish that soon.