A Complicated Murder (from Voices in the Dark)

"Owen, Edith and Leslie on holiday in 1936"

At the beginning of his career as a Direct Voice medium, Leslie Flint (1911-1994) and his close friend Edith Mundin opened a Spiritualist church named the Watford Spiritualist Mission.   Flint reminisced about the early 1930s and the Watford period in his autobiography Voices in the Dark: My Life as a Medium (1971).  “For my own living expenses I relied on private seances for direct voice which I held once a week in the sitting-room of Edith’s council house and for which I charged one guinea for two persons.”

The couple decided to hold what they called an open circle after the usual Thursday evening service.

When the service was over and the congregation had dispersed to their homes a few people who had booked a seat for two schillings would remain behind and we would sit in darkness and people whom the world calls dead would come to talk to us.  My voice mediumship by this time was almost fully developed and more often than not I was fully conscious during these group seances and perforce had to listen to all that was said both by living members of the circle and their friends and relations from the other side of life.  Sometimes the talks between them were so intimate and so charged with emotion I would feel like an eavesdropper.

One of the fascinating anecdotes during this period in Flint’s career involved an apparent murder victim whose voice was repeatedly heard during the open circle meetings.  Here is the passage from the sixth chapter of the book.

. . . after various friends had spoken in the usual way we heard a woman’s voice trying to speak to us, in the uncertain way in which new communicators sometimes manifest.  Eventually her voice became stronger though she sounded distressed.  She told us she was Lucy Doris Covell who had lived in St. Albans Road, Watford.  She was a secretary who had been murdered, and her body had not yet been found.  Her voice faded and one of the entities who guide me from the other side came through to tell us the girl was distressed at the manner of her passing and very worried about the man who had killed her who was her lover and less to blame for what had happened than she was herself.  Naturally we watched the local paper after this sitting to see if the facts the girl had given us about herself would be verified and only a few days later we read that the girl’s body had been discovered and the man she had been living with had disappeared.

At our next open circle the murdered girl returned to speak to us and though she was calmer she was still concerned about her lover who had not yet been found by the police.  She told us that on the night of her death her lover had been out on his own and when he came home in the small hours he wakened her and they had a furious row.  She had said angry and bitter things which goaded him beyond endurance and he hit out at her with the bicycle pump he had in his hand.  He had not meant to do her any serious injury but because of a physical abnormality of her own the blow killed her.  Because the lover was terrified no one would believe his story, foolishly he ran away.

The girl said the police would find him sitting in a local park playing with a piece of string to find the courage to take his own life.  A day or do later we read in the local paper that the man had been found and arrested in just the way the girl had described.  He was sent for trial on a charge of murder and during the trial the girl returned to speak several times.  Each time she came she told us with great confidence her lover would not be found guilty of her murder, the charge would be reduced to manslaughter and he would be sentenced to five years in prison and in the event this is what happened.  Since the lover may well still be living and his debt to society was paid a long time ago it would not be just to reopen a matter which must have caused him great suffering by mentioning his name in this book but there must be many people in the Watford area who remember the seances where the dead girl told her story, and the story of her death and her lover’s trial were fully reported in the local paper at the time.