Love letters to serial killers and Rose West’s underwear; Inside Britain’s scariest museum | UK News

As her mother read from a nearby information board, a little girl, staring intently at a towering container of acid, said in a cadence: “The lady’s head is gone. The acid turned her head to sludge.”

“Mud?” her mother asked. “Yes, mud,” the little girl replied.

The huge barrel the pair were looking at is now on display at the True Crime Museum in White Rock, Hastings, and once belonged to the gruesome John George HaigThe British serial killer claimed to drink the blood of those he ensnared and dissolved his victims in vats of sulphuric acid.

After agreeing that Hagrid was “a naughty man”, the young girl and her mother happily went on to visit what is probably the UK’s creepiest museum in the seaside town of Hastings.

“Parents know if their children are going to be sensitive to this kind of thing,” museum director Joel Griggs told reporters. subway“It’s reality and it’s part of history. I don’t think you can wrap someone up in cotton wool and pretend these things don’t happen. There are still bad people in the world.”

Surrounded by a sprawling beach and squawking seagulls, the True Crime Museum is an unexpected treasure trove of grizzly items on the British coast… if you’re into that sort of thing.

It contains love letters from an American serial killer Richard Ramirez For British author Ricky Thomas, the bathtub in which hitman John Childs dismembered his victims was the skull of murderer and rapist Louis Lefevre.

Although many of the objects have dark pasts – they were acquired through donations or auctions – Joel said he did not want to trivialize the horrors they caused. He pointed to the museum’s latest exhibit – a pair of giant white The underwear worn by killer Ross West The items were bought at auction for £2,500.

“We tried to present the exhibition in a tasteful way – admittedly, using the word ‘panties’ to describe panties seems a bit odd – and show the full extent of her crimes, rather than just being flippant and saying ‘Oh my god, these are Rose West’s panties!'” he explained. “The heinous crimes she and her husband committed had a huge impact on people’s consciousness. Do we celebrate them? No, of course not.”

The trousers were acquired by a former prison officer who worked at Bronzefield, Europe’s largest women’s prison. Lucy Lightby – West lived there for four years, until 2008.

As part of the purchase, Joel also received some letters between West and the former prison officer, but he decided not to show them because they were “bland” and “very uninteresting”, with West’s questions about EastEnders plots and a scribbled recipe for Indian chutney.

Joel also politely declined criminal donations that might cause panic among local people, e.g. Billie Joe Jenkins Case (The schoolgirl was murdered in Hastings in 1997.) “It’s very fresh, very local,” the curator explains.

The True Crime Museum has only one “normal” room, the staff lounge, which is filled with creepy collectibles and grizzly gadgets, replaced by blue scrolls, a few desks and various files. But among the shift sheets and calendars, there are hand-drawn photos of the Kray twins, who are in London. Notorious gangster brotherslooking after the staff.

There was also a large white sheet of paper with some strange blue scribbles on it, which were later confirmed to have been written by a local paranormal group during a séance.

“I don’t like it (I don’t like the paranormal myself),” Joel admits. “I have to work here and it’s spooky enough without the ghosts. I remember coming back to the locker room at 1am after a paranormal panel and the guy said ‘You won’t believe this, we’ve got Jack the Ripper.’ I couldn’t help but ask ‘Well, have you found out?’ Who is he?”

Today marks the True Crime Museum’s tenth anniversary, and over the past decade Joel has overseen several paranormal nights, crime walks at the museum, and even a special “Mother’s Day” celebration – highlighting killer moms throughout history.

His interest in crime stems from his late father John, who died in January and worked with Scotland Yard. The Londoner was a “classic collector of anything slightly macabre”, which meant Joel stumbled across everything from vintage pinball machines to stuffed seagulls to autopsy books while cleaning out his father’s attic.

The curator himself moved to Hastings 20 years ago from London’s East End, where he worked in the seaside town with young offenders and children with erratic behaviour. After being made redundant in 2011, Joel set his sights on a rambling area of ​​caves on the seafront that he hoped would house some of his family’s unique collection. He invested his £6,000 redundancy pay into this dream.

“It was clogged from floor to ceiling with trash, and we had to crawl through it,” Joel recalls. “There was old furniture, pool tables, and locals had dumped their stuff there. I contacted the landlord of the building connected to the cave because it was going up for auction, and at the last minute he agreed to a very low rent because the space was really not habitable at that time.”

When the museum first opened in 2014, Joel wrote in his business model that it would be “mostly men” who walked through the doors. But the 56-year-old was pleasantly surprised to discover that, in fact, 75 percent of the museum’s visitors were women.

“When I see crime magazines in stores, they seem to be the same as soap opera magazines and celebrity magazines, so they are seen as a similar form of entertainment,” he explained. “I think women might be more interested in psychology and what makes people ‘turned on’, and I don’t want to generalize, but that’s perhaps a lot of (women) It’s like true crime.’

He added with a laugh: “We had some rugby lads in with their girlfriends and she was there wolfing down her food and he was a bit shocked and said he didn’t like anything to do with blood.”

Today, Joel knows every nook and cranny of the sprawling museum. While touring the exhibits, the curator highlights “interesting” items, like a tiny cell phone, slightly larger than a thimble, so popular with criminals that they would smuggle them into prison in their pants.

He also points to a 2015 article in the Hastings and St Leonards Observer about a “shocking robbery” at the True Crime Museum itself. However, the thieves did not steal museum pieces, but electronics.

As he shows Metro around the museum, he pauses briefly under the cobwebs on the ceiling and muses, “I should do something with them, but they do add something, don’t they?”

Continue to the Death Chamber exhibit, where different methods of killing are shown, and a surprising sight behind the deathbed for lethal injection. Tiny green leaves grow on the walls of the cave.

“That little flower always strikes me as interesting,” Joel said. “There’s no natural light here at all, so it feels really weird.”

In fact, there are no windows at all deep in the caves, and the air is freezing cold – and yet, in what is arguably Britain’s most spooky museum, life is still possible despite the constant reminders of death.

Learn more about the True Crime Museum Click here.

Featured Exhibits at the True Crime Museum

1. The Art of Murder The exhibition features artwork from famous killers, including a Batman sketch by serial killer Richard Ramirez.
2. “Death Chamber” From a dead man’s bath to a noose used to hang criminals, this macabre exhibition features all sorts of gruesome items.
3. “The Ripper Era” Accompanied by eerie music, follow a timeline from 1878 to 1898 and read about victims and suspects associated with Jack the Ripper.
4. “Gangster” See a pair of boxing gloves signed by Ronald and Reginald Cray, and the order of service from Ronald’s funeral in Bethnal Green.
5. “The Sound of Death” Listen to horrifying real-life police interviews with the killer, e.g. Dennis Nelson.

Do you have a story to share? Contact us by email Kirsten.Robertson@metro.co.uk

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