Trunk is a story of man's obsession with the history of murder in the English Seaside town of Brighton, and his subsequent involvement in that history.

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TRUNK
written by pmd. Original version 2003. Current update 2005
Buck in Fudgy 099

EXT. VARIOUS ATMOSPHERIC LOCATIONS B&W - NIGHT
My dearest Solomon, I have always been fascinated by murder. The perfect violence that takes place in the villages, towns and cities in which we all live. Behind its paint pealed splendour and its garish, lurid attractions Brighton is a town cut through with murder.

I decided to embark upon a study. I felt that Molly would share my
enthusiasm for the barbaric arts. But, alas.

EXT. BARTHOLOMEWS - DAY
Brighton's first recorded murder took place by the town's Old Market, near Bartholomews in 1759. Anne Boon suffocated her child before throwing the infant into a Pig Sty in the hope that the Swine would eat the corpse.

EXT. SUSSEX TAVERN, EAST STREET - DAY
In 1794 the head of a local prostitute was found inside the Public well by the Sussex Tavern on East Street. Rumour quickly spread that the trollop had been beheaded at royal bequest as she had become notorious for servicing the Prince Regent.

EXT. JOHN STREET/EDWARD STREET - DAY
On the 14th July 1831 in North Steine Row, a now demolished street known locally as 'Donkey Row', John Holloway became Brighton's first Trunk Murderer.

EXT. 4 CAVENDISH PLACE - DAY
Luring his estranged first wife Celia Holloway from her sister's house at Cavendish Place he took her to...

EXT. 2 JOHN STREET/EDWARD STREET - DAY
11 Donkey Row and strangled her. She was 8 months pregnant. Ann Kennett, Holloway's bigamously married second wife helped him cut off Celia's head and arms...

EXT. 7 MARGARET STREET - DAY
before dumping them in the privy of their lodgings at Margaret Street.
Holloway placed the remaining torso in a trunk

EXT. LOVERS WALK - DAY
and buried it in a copse near Lover's Walk.

EXT. FORMER SITE OF CHAIN PIER, LOWER PROMENADE, SOUTH OF
NEW STEINE - DAY
Holloway, a labourer on the Chain Pier, described Celia, in his death
row confessions as 'a hideously deformed dwarf...I felt ashamed to be
seen with her until after dark'. He had felt aggrieved at being trapped
into marrying her after she had become pregant and the Overseers of the
parish had imprisoned him for 5 weeks until he had agreed to support her.

EXT. HORSHAM PRISON - DAY
On the 21st December Holloway swung from Horsham Gallows. As he took the scaffold he addressed the crowd, 'As sin has borought me to this untimely end, I would entreat you to be aware that there is not one among you who, if he follows a life of sin and folly, may not be brought to the same condition; for when you trifle with sin, you know not where it will end'.

EXT. BRIGHTON TOWN HALL, BARTHOLOMEW SQAURE - DAY
His corpse, laid out at Brighton's Town Hall was visited by 23,000
people. His accomplice, Ann Kennett was acquitted and soon disappeared. I am sure, Solomon, that you are familiar with these sordid, little
histories but please bare with me.

EXT. MARLBOROUGH HOUSE - DAY [2 SHOTS FRONT AND BACK]
In 1853 Caroline Sherwood, a maid at Marlborough House on the Old Steine was convicted of killing her child to save the £5 a week she spent on sweets. She was sent to Australia instead of being hanged.

EXT. MONTPELIER ROAD - DAY
On 1st October 1857 at the corner of Codrington Place and Montpelier Road James Botting, a retired Public Executioner fell out of his
wheelchair. Described as 'a pitiful object who shuffled about the streets, shunned and disliked by his fellow townsmen' no-one came to help him. He died where he fell.

EXT. ANONYMOUS HOUSE - DAY
Molly felt that my research was morbid and refused to encourage my
academic endeavours. She received a sharp rebuke.

EXT. ORANGE ROW & TICHBOURNE STREET - DAY [2 SHOTS]
I unearthed suspicions in the death of Tom Sayers. Sayers was a bricklayer born the in acrid Pimlico Slum in the North Laine in 1826. The slum, made up of Pym's Gardens, Pimlico and Orange Row housed 1000 people, livestock and their cesspits in the length of single street. It was demolished in the 1860s.

EXT. LONDON ROAD VIADUCT - DAY
Sayers helped build the London Road Viaduct, completed in 1846. He was
also the last British bare knuckle boxing champion and contender in the
first international bout held on 17th April 1860 - a legendary fight that lasted 2 hours 20 minutes, split into 42 rounds.

EXT. ORANGE ROW - DAY
Incredibly, Sayers had broken his right arm in the 6th round. The fight, stopped by a riot, was declared a draw. 5 years later, Sayers was dead from diabetes. His burial, at Highgate Cemetery attracted 10,000 people. Contemporary gossip suggested that Sayers had, in fact, been poisoned.

EXT. 14 ROCK STREET - DAY
I found historical mention of a mince pie laced with arsenic that killed Mary Ann Day at Rock Street on Valentine's Day 1863.

EXT. BEDFORD HOTEL, KINGS ROAD - DAY
Three years on, Doctor Alfred Warder murdered his wife by administering the poison aconite, otherwise know as wolf's bane. Fearing the discovery of his heinous act Dr. Warder checked into the Bedford Hotel, and drank prussic acid. In the inquest held after his death it transpired that he had been married twice before. Both wives had died in suspicious circumstances.

EXT. 39-41 WEST STREET - DAY
On 4th August 1871, at J.G. Maynard's of West Street, a confectioner and lozenge maker', 11 year old Sidney Barker was killed inadvertently as part of 43 year old Christina Edmunds personal vendetta against the shop, which involved buying chocolates, inserting them with strychnine, and returning them for other customers to eat. Food, it seems, Solomon, is an appealing way to toy with another's heart.

EXT. 16-17 NEW ROAD - DAY [2 SHOTS]
On the 27th December 1880 at the New Oxford Theatre of Varieties in New
Road, George Smyth sat in the front row watching a performance by a Chinese Juggler named Ling. Ling balanced a small Cannon on a sword
which he partially swallowed. His assistant lit the fuse and warned the crowd to duck. Unfortunately the cannon was pointed too low and the
shot smashed into Smyth's skull, covering neighbouring spectators in
his blood and speckles of his brain.

EXT. VARIOUS ATMOSPHERIC LOCATIONS B&W - NIGHT
It was at this point in my studies where Molly began exhibiting extreme
resentful tendencies, claiming my work was the result of a boyish, comic book obsession with darker forces, especially the necromantic and occult author Dr. Robert Donston Stephenson.

EXT. CRICKETEERS INN, BLACK LION STREET - DAY
After the disappearance of his wife, Ann Deary, in 1887, Dr. Stephenson, aka Dr. Rosyln D'Onston, had lived above the Cricketeers Inn on Black Lion Street, a well-known haunt for prostitutes, Stephenson's favoured company. Edmund Gurney, a London-based psychic researcher, received a letter in June 1888 urging him to
travel to Brighton. He left without telling his family the
reason for his visit.

EXT. ROYAL ALBION HOTEL, BLACK LION STREET - DAY
Gurney checked into the Royal Albion Hotel on 22nd June 1888. He was found dead the following morning with a chloroform pad over his face. Claims were later made that Gurney was murdered because of investigations into Madame Blavatsky, a well-known Theosophist and friend of Stephenson.

EXT. TWITTENS - BLACK LION STREET TO SHIP STREET - NIGHT

[SEVERAL SHOTS]
One month later Stephenson checked himself into the London Hospital in
Whitechapel, a notoriously noxious area of East London. His illness was
listed as 'excessive fatigue' the cure lay in rest and fresh air. Within four months 5 local prostitutes were dead, and Stephenson, a trained surgeon, was a suspect in the Jack the Ripper slayings. Stephenson wrote about the murders for the Pall Mall gazette and left Whitechapel in December. No record of his death was ever found.

EXT. 31 BUCKINGHAM ROAD - DAY
There were whisperings that Stephenson had become involved with the young artist Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley, who was born in Buckingham Road in August 1872. Beardsley was alleged to be a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a complex body of occult teaching and ritual magical practice. He died of TB in 1898.

EXT. ANONYMOUS HOUSE - DAY
Molly appeared evasive when discussing Stephenson, saying that our daily lives were bleak enough without delving in past atrocities. It was only later that I traced Molly's lineage directly back to Ann Kennett, John Holloway's murderous assistant.

INT. PASSAGE - NIGHT
I dreamt of Stephenson one night, and he led me through darkened passages to a cell.

INT. PASSAGE - NIGHT
In the cell I found John Holloway, the original Trunk murderer facing
execution for murdering his wife,Celia. I asked Holloway whether there
was anything I could do for him. He said, simply, 'Exact revenge on my
betrayer, Ann Kennett'.

EXT. POLICE SEASIDE CONVALESCENT HOME, PORTLAND ROAD,
CLARENDON VILLAS - DAY
I discovered further evidence of another Jack the Ripper suspect, Aaron
Kosminski, who, in 1890 was brought down to Brighton to be identified by Joseph Lawende, a policeman who had witnessed a man fleeing the scene of one of the Whitechapel murders. Lawende was recuperating at the Police Seaside Convalescent Home on Portland Road. Two years on from the Ripper killings ,he was unable to provide a conclusive identification and Kosminski was returned an 'asylum for adult imbeciles'.

EXT. 57 NORTH ROAD - DAY
On the 7th April 1914, Percy Evelyn Clifford, a Boer war veteran shot and killed his wife, Maud Clifford, as she slept. After composing an explanatory note concerning Maud's infidelity, Percy turned the pistol on himself. Untrue of aim, he regained consciousness and, four months later, was hanged at Lewes Jail for murder and attempted suicide.

EXT. NEW SUSSEX HOSPITAL, WINDLESHAM AVENUE - DAY
I uncovered rumours of a former intern who had stalked and attacked patients at the New Sussex Psychiatric Hospital which was now closed.

EXT. BRIGHTON STATION - DAY
103 years on from the original trunk murder on the 17th June 1934, staff at Brighton Station's...

INT. BRIGHTON STATION EAST SIDE - DAY
...Left Luggage office were alerted by a nauseous smell to prize open an uncollected trunk. Inside the trunk they found a naked, female torso. It was estimated that the woman had been 25 years old and 5 months pregnant at the time of her death.

EXT. KINGS CROSS TRAIN STATION -DAY
3 days later the dismembered legs and feet of the torso were discovered in a suitcase at Kings Cross. The head and arms were still missing.

EXT. END OF PALACE PIER - DAY
Contemporary wisdom had it that they had been flung off the end of the
Palace Pier.

EXT. 52 KEMP STREET - DAY
Meanwhile, down the road at Kemp Street, Violet Kaye, a 41 year old
dancer turned prostitute had been bludgeoned to death and stuffed inside another trunk.

EXT. 44 PARK CRESCENT - DAY
Killed at her lodgings at Park Crescent, she had been carried to Kemp
Street and placed beside the bed of border, Tony Mancini.

EXT. 52 KEMP STREET - BASEMENT - DAY
Mancini, a man of dubious extraction and Violet Kaye's pimp and lover, kept her decomposing body in the trunk by his bed for two months until his landlady complained of the noxious seeping liquids.
In July, Mancini was arrested. By December, after a brilliant defence he was acquitted. He only admitted to the killing shortly before his death 40 years later. The events drew press from all over Europe.

EXT. BRIGHTON STATION - DAY
The first torso, found at Brighton station, remained unidentified.

EXT. VARIOUS LOCATIONS - NIGHT
By this point in my research Molly had become increasingly hysterical,
offering me an ultimatum, either I abandon my research or she would
abandon me. The consequences of such an action I could not bear to realise. I recalled the words that John Holloway had spoken to me in my
dream. One Kennett was, surely, as good as another.

EXT. ANONYMOUS HOUSE - DAY
This is the house in which I killed Molly. One blow rendered her
unconscious, one kitchen knife left her bloodless. You will find her body, Solomon, laid out in the bath. Her pallor beautifully accentuated by the violet red water. I have no connection with the property. It is merely one of the numerous vacant houses to be found around this city. We broke in as a jape. As Holloway himself said, 'when you trifle with sin, you know not where it will end'.

EXT. BRIGHTON BEACH & SKY - DAY
I have flown into the autumn sky, my destination...a more clement climate.

EXT. BARTHOLOMEW SQUARE POLICE STATION - EVENING
I leave the corpse of my lover to you, to aid your inquiries, Chief Constable Solomon.

TITLE
Brighton's 1st Chief Constable Henry Solomon was killed by a blow from an iron poker at Brighton Police Station by a detainee on 13th March 1844. The murderer John Lawrence, a carpet thief, became the 1st man to be hung at Lewes Gallows.

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