The Man on Bus No. 8

"Gorblimey, mate," exclaimed the homeward-bound worker when he spotted the young man slumped against the wall at the Lee Bank Road bus stop in Birmingham. "What have you been up to?" It was just 7:45 p.m. two days before Christmas; but despite the young man's filthy clothes and his rumpled blond hair, he was clearly not drunk. "I've had a fall," he explained in a clear voice. "I'll be all right as soon as I get on the bus." Two or three minutes later, the young man boarded No. 8 bus, a cream and blue double-decker carrying at least 50 people. He was about 5 ft. 9 in., was in his early twenties, and was wearing a brown, hip-length duffel coat. Dazed, he said nothing when the conductor asked him his destination, silently handed over sixpence and climbed to the upper deck. At one point he was seen talking to two other men. Somewhere in the slummy Ladyswood district, all three got off. Bus No. 8 went on its way--even though the man's coat and the hand that held the sixpence were both soaked with blood.

A City of Terror. Last week the young man was the object of a nationwide manhunt. Short minutes before Bus No. 8 took on its mysterious passenger, one of the goriest crimes had been committed since the days of Jack the Ripper. Creeping into the Y.W.C.A. near the Lee Bank Road bus stop, a killer had broken into the room of fresh-faced Stephanie Baird, 29, an unemployed typist who was packing for a Christmas trip to Scotland. He seized one of Stephanie's blunt table knives, hacked and ripped her body, and ended the sadistic orgy, which police claim must have lasted at least 45 minutes, by cutting off her head. He escaped by the window, but for some reason decided to go back into the dun-colored. Victorian building. In a utility room he came upon 21-year-old Margaret Brown, ironing some clothes, swung at her with a bagful of stones. When Margaret screamed, he fled.

With the killer at large. Birmingham quickly became "Terror City" to London's flashy press. The Aston Villa soccer team canceled an out-of-town match because the wives of the members would not be left alone. Nurses on the night shift in all local hospitals were escorted to and from work in special buses, and movie usherettes ganged together rather than walk home alone. But the brutality of the murder was not the only thing that shocked Britain last week. The other was the strange behavior of the passengers on Bus No. 8.

A Load of Shame. "It is INCREDIBLE!" cried the London Daily Mirror, that not a single person riding on that bus had reported to police the presence of a bloodstained man. Even worse, after the story of the murder appeared in the papers, and the Birmingham C.I.D.'s Chief Superintendent James Haughton made a direct appeal to the passengers ("This bus is vital") that was repeated over radio, on TV, and even flashed on the screens of movie houses, no one came forward.

Haughton canceled the Christmas leaves of all his 120 detectives and police, set up loudspeakers at football matches to plead for help, assigned some men to ride all No. 8 buses for any information they might pick up. By Sunday, four days after the murder, police had heard from only one passenger. "A busload of shame!" cried the Daily Herald.

Gradually, a few other passengers were heard from, but they insisted they had not even seen the bloodstained young man. In spite of offers of nearly $17,000 in rewards, and assurances that their anonymity would be protected, the four vital witnesses--the two men seen talking to the stranger, and a man and a boy who had refused to occupy the bloody seat the stranger had just vacated and would be able to say when he got off the bus--still kept silent. What was the reason? Some papers said fear. Others noted that the bus was filled with passengers from Birmingham's rough-and-tumble tenderloin, Balsall Heath, whose residents are not friendly to cops. Others put it down to the I'm-All-Right-Jack mentality of what the London Daily Express called "the never-had-it-so-good citizenry, stuffed with comfort" and forever asking "What's in it for me?" Said desperate Superintendent Haughton: "The man who committed this dreadful crime is obviously a pathological sadist who could strike again."

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