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The Crimes

Crime Files

The Crimes

Claiming he wanted to go straight Fontaine was in for a shock when an ex-cellmate from Hull Prison and former lover, David Wright, showed up. Lady Hudson employed 30-year-old Wright as a gamekeeper and gardener around the stately home, but he stole some of her silver and threatened to tell her about Fontaine’s past.On a rabbit hunting expedition in July, Fontaine shot Wright in the back of the head and buried the body under boulders in a stream on the estate. With a new found taste for blood Fontaine gave up the idea of living an honest life and in November 1977 moved back to London. He acquired the position of butler to a wealthy antique collector and ex-Labour MP Walter Scott-Elliot and his wife Dorothy. Planning to extort them he asked small time crook Michael Kitto to help.While showing Kitto round the couple’s home Mrs Scott-Elliot returned unexpectedly with her husband. The two men put their hand over her mouth and suffocated her with a pillow before she could raise the alarm. They then drugged her 82-year-old husband with whisky and sleeping pills.Mary Coggle put on a wig and wore Mrs Scott-Elliot’s clothes. They put the dead woman’s body in the boot of a car and set off for the 400-mile journey to Scotland. They buried Mrs Scott-Elliot by the side of a quiet road in Braco, Perthshire. Still sedated they beat her husband to death with a spade and buried him in a remote spot near Glen Affric, Inverness.The following day an argument broke out between the three of them. Coggle wanted to keep Mrs Scott-Elliot’s mink coat, but the men wanted the evidence destroyed. So Fontaine hit Coggle over the head with a poker and suffocated her with a plastic bag before dumping her in a stream in Dumfriesshire.The two men headed for Fontaine’s family home in Cumbria only to find Fontaine’s brother Donald released from prison three days earlier. Donald was too interested in Fontaine’s recent adventures and with murder now second nature to him, Fontaine held a chloroformed rag over Donald’s face and drowned him in a bath. A few days later the two murderers found themselves driving north to dispose of yet another body.