The Big House With Big Secrets: 1306 Albemarle Road

Why it is that Some Murder Mysteries Just Won’t Go Away  —   Sometimes They Tie Into the Local Politics  —   Sometimes Into the Local Geography  —   Sometimes the Local History

10 Rillington Place and 1306 Albemarle Road have a few very interesting parallels   —   both in history and mystery  —   Strange Analogues Between a Not-So-Old Brooklyn Case and a Major Case in Wartime and Post-war London

A little while ago, I discovered a surprising connection between the Hynes-Golden insider attorney Arthur Aidala and a case that just won’t go away, or get put to bed, or manage to be swept under the rug, the 2003 Mark Steven Fisher murder case (See my 9/14/14 post “The Curious Cases of Arthur Aidala, ‘Joe’ Hynes and Marty Golden — Part 3*” below on this blog). That post tripled the normal volume on this blog; and so far, no two posts since have totaled either the number of “hits” or the number of “comments” as has “Curious Cases...  Aidala...  Hynes...  Golden...  Part 3*.”

Also, it should be obvious that many people are not happy with the outcome of the Mark Fisher murder case. Standing out among many other people the most important of those not satisfied with the outcome of that case are Nancy and Michael Fisher, the parents of the deceased Mark Fisher; they still run a blog that includes news, background and other information about their son’s case. Probably next would be Doreen Giuca, mother of John Giuca, one of those convicted of the murder, who still maintains that he is not guilty of the murder, and whose mother Doreen has gone to great lengths to discredit the conduct of the trial that convicted her son and the methods used by the prosecution to secure the conviction. And of course, many journalists have been almost untiring in keeping this story alive with new information and repeated editorial criticism of the prosecution and the judicial system that fostered what has gone on in this case so far; and that, to date, refuses to correct any aspect of it.

It is against that backdrop, that I want to take a moment aside and change the focus.


FOR A CHANGE LET’S TAKE A CLOSE LOOK AT A PLACE   —   AND DRAW SOME PARALLELS WITH ANOTHER PLACE AND ANOTHER FAMOUS CASE, LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY


I want to look at ONE PLACE involved in the Fisher murder case that has not received proper scrutiny to this day.  It has received some scant mention, but it needs much more. That place is 1306 Albemarle Road in Brooklyn, New York.

1306 ALBEMARLE ROAD

Up to now, the address  “1306 Albemarle Road” has only occasionally been mentioned in connection with the Mark Fisher murder case, occasionally but not often. That is because there has been a well orchestrated effort to keep that address out of the story line. It was the home of two key witnesses in the Fisher case, Susan Cleary and her son Albert Cleary. It is also a place, according to some accounts, that the murder victim Mark Fisher might well have expected to have finished off the night of October 11-12, 2003 safely tucked-in before taking his trip home to Sparta, New Jersey, on the morning or later in the day of October 12, 2003. Instead, on the morning of October 12th, 2003, he was found murdered at the foot of a driveway across the street from 1306 Albemarle tucked in a blanket.

The house at 1306 Albemarle Road is located in the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn and is situated on a corner plot, whose street side is along Argyle Road, directly across the street from the spot near the front of 150 Argyle Road, where the body of Mark Steven Fisher allegedly was found shortly after his murder. It is very interesting that a recent article by Hella Winston that appeared on the front page of the New York Observer contains one of the few photographs of the turreted and gable-roofed Ditmas Park home at 1306 Albemarle Road in Brooklyn ever associated with the Fisher case (See “Did an Ambitious Prosecutor Convict the Wrong Man for the Killing of Mark Fisher?” by Hella Winston, 9/24/14. NY Observer/ News/ observer.com  [http://observer.com/2014/09/the-mark-fisher-murder/]).

The first reason that 1306 Albemarle Road is a place of interest is because it is one of the closest houses to the place where Mark Steven Fisher was murdered, estimated by some as about fifty feet away from where the body was found. Another is that it is also the house where two or three key witnesses in the Fisher murder case were staying at the time and near the place that Fisher was murdered; those witnesses include Albert Clearly and Angel diPietro, who each allegedly gave incredible and false testimony in the joint trials of two defendants found guilty of murdering Mark Fisher. A third reason that 1306 Albemarle Road is a place of interest is that all three of the witnesses there claim to have been asleep inside and not to have heard the shots, noise of a car and the voices of a young man and woman that were heard by others who were near the corner Albemarle and Argyle Roads shortly before Mark Fisher’s body was found across the street from 1306 Albemarle Road, as well as hearing none of the police that were searching on the grounds of all the houses in and around the crime scene for hours after the body was found. The most interesting unknown about 1306 Albemarle Road is whether New York City Police Officers, Detectives, forensic examiners or investigators of the Kings County DA’s Office ever conducted a complete search of the grounds or any part of the interior of 1306 Albemarle Road and what if any evidence they might have found there.

Also very interesting, according to two of the witnesses themselves, those inside 1306 were probably the first witnesses and/or suspects to discuss obtaining legal counsel in connection with the Fisher murder case. Of particular interest, for this post, Albert Cleary, together with the lawyer he selected, discussed Fisher’s murder and various defenses with John Giuca, a man later put on trial for the murder and against whom Albert Cleary testified at trial.

There is something else that makes 1306 Albemarle Road interesting.  It is the parallels that it holds to a long-ago demolished building in London. That building was the infamous 10 Rillington Place, an address whose infamy was raised to fame by a great piece of investigative writing and criminal history by Ludovic Kennedy, and a chilling movie starring Sir [later Baron] Richard Attenborough,

The decrepit terrace-fronted stack of flats that had been located at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London was never anything like the massive single family home at 1306 Albemarle Road in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.  However, there are a few things that link the two addresses:  murder victims, murderers, false witnesses in murder trials, falsely convicted alleged murderers and a nearness to two neighborhoods named Kensington, one in Brooklyn and one in London.  Almost every detail that I mentioned as being interesting about 1306 Albemerle Road in connection to the Fisher murder case has a parallel or analogue to the murders that happened at 10 Rillington place between 1943 and 1953,

10 RILLINGTON PLACE

The story of 10 Rillington Place is a far more lurid tale than what happened in and around 1306 Albemarle Road, Brooklyn.  The cases at 10 Rillington Road were much more in character with the historical and literary traditions of mysterious multiple murders in London. The terrace style row house at the far end of Rillington Place was the situs of several sexually perverse murders that began during the Blitz in WW II and ended in the early 1950s.  In that time,  John Reginald Halliday Christie, who started his spree as an auxiliary police constable in wartime London, murdered several women over a ten year span at 10 Rillington Place, in Notting Hill, and buried their remains at that location and at a few other places nearby, like bombed out buildings in the adjoining London neighborhood called Kensington, where on occasion he also stalked his prey.

The first trial in the 10 Rillington  murder cases  was brought five years after the war against Timothy Evans, who was convicted of murder by a concatenation of unscrupulous detectives and prosecutors, and his trial turned on the testimony of the actual murderer, Christie. In the Evans case, neither Scotland Yard nor the rest of the Metropolitan Police bothered to thoroughly search the property where Evans supposedly murdered his wife, Beryl and daughter Geraldine. As a result, they failed to see the bones of Christie's earlier wartime victims, some of which were visible in the garden according to Christie’s later statements.

Evans, who was of limited intelligence and illiterate, had been tried for the murders of his wife and his unborn daughter. The trial turned on the testimony of John Christie, who had supposedly been a virtual co-conspirator in Evans’ attempts to cover-up the murder of his wife and daughter. Because of Christie’s testimony, all attempts by Evans lawyers to avoid the impact of a vague and garbled confession failed. That confession related to the killing of “his daughter,” which “confession” had been related to a detective who had taken incomprehensible notes (Evans believed that his wife had died during a botched abortion, because that’s what Christie had told him. According to Evans’ lawyers, Evans thought he was confessing to soliciting Christie to perform an abortion on his wife and to trying to cover up his wife’s death as an accomplice to Christie.). As a result of his confession, Evans was found guilty of the murder of the daughter, but not his wife, and executed in 1950.

Within a few years, Christie committed three more murders and eventually was caught and tied to the actual Beryl Evans murder, although he never admitted to murdering the child of Timothy and Beryl Evans.  After confessing to the murders of eight woman, Christie was charged only with the murder of his wife, tried and executed in 1953. Notably, he wasn’t charged with anything that he did during his police service, nor for which he had testified on behalf of the Crown in the Evans case.

For several years, there was resistance to any reopening of the case against Timothy Evans, even thought there was a widespread belief that the conviction and execution of Evans was a gross miscarriage of justice.  Largely due to the research and writing of a well-connected historical author, Ludovic Kennedy,  the Crown accepted the theory that Evans had been framed by Christie, and Timothy Evans was officially pardoned by the Home Secretary in 1966. The Evans case is one of the first major miscarriages of justice known to have been acknowledged by the British Crown in its prosecutions occurring in the aftermath of WW II.

The connotation of “Rillington Place” was so bad that city officials soon changed its name to “Ruston Place.” However when that failed to stop crime tours and just plain ghoulish Nosy Parkers, city and local planners quickly authorized an urban renewal; and eventually wiped it from the street grid, making any observation of the original site of 10 Rillington Place a virtual impossibility.  They formally and practically wiped out th whole small close (dead end street) of about ten houses, even thought there was a separate historical reason to note it as  the birth place of Charlie Chaplin’s father at 15 Rillington Place, in an earlier time when the street included several more residential buildings.

Thanks, in part, to a great book by Ludovic Kennedy, and a very good but very creepy movie by Clive Exton, Richard Fleischer, John Hurt and Richard Attenborough, the man originally and wrongfully convicted of at least one ( but not two, the child but not the mother?) of the Rillington place murders was vindicated and posthumously pardoned.

Similarly, many American writers and movie-makers are presently trying to do the same with Fisher-Giuca-Russo case(s). No doubt, what happened in and near 1306 Albemarle Road, and what the police, prosecutors and their witnesses did or didn’t see, hear or otherwise search for at that location, will be a big part of the telling of that story.

There are many more specific and interesting parallels between John Christie and Albert Cleary, however the purpose of this post was to draw the analogies and parallels between 10 Rillington Place, London -and- 1306 Albemarle Road, Brooklyn. Let’s leave the rest about Christie and Cleary for another day.