I took a look at the physical evidence sent – a handkerchief, as nicely embroidered as it was at first glance it seemed superfluous so I moved on.

Next I took a look at the two letters. One from Hector to Viola’s mother Olga. The letter dated August 1933, over a year before Viola’s disappearance, apologises for cancelling their meeting where they were meant to go over the wedding preparations. It was also apparent from the letter that the engaged couple had been bought together, with a lot of effort, by Olga and that the date for the wedding was set for the following year. Two things I found odd: that he forgot about a prior engagement and had chosen that over meeting Olga, and that he talked about being a talented performer and playing the part of son-in-law to perfection as well as he and Viola keeping the press’ attention in their next production.

In the first oddity, there is no mention of what the other appointment was but it must have been important enough to blow off his future mother in law. In the second, it was the phraseology he uses that struck me as bizarre. There is no assurances of love for the woman’s daughter just talking about ‘play the part’ and ‘everything I’ve ever wanted in a career’ and that he is sure that Viola feels the same. It feels like this was a marriage of convenience, to further both careers by combining their star power.

I moved on to the second letter. This letter was a little harder to read being hand written. I have provided the transcription in the evidence pack. This letter had lots of coded sections and within the first section the handkerchief became apparent as that helped with the cypher for translating the coded bits. It was pretty straight forward letter from Viola to ‘darling’, the handkerchief was hand embroidered by her to give to this darling as well. The letter spoke their relationship and alluded to how she felt trapped and due to her engagement and the contract with the theatre she was unable to leave the city. She also mentioned about sending Hector off to talk to her mother about reception plans so she and ‘darling’ could meet in her dressing room.

This letter obviously confirms my suspicions in my first blog post that Viola was having an affair. We don’t know if this is George, but it definitely seems to be someone at the theatre if they are able to meet so easily in her dressing room.

This code breaking made me think of a letter from the first pack that Hector sent to Ira. The letter was dated Christmas date the month after Viola went missing and talks about how he hopes she is doing ok. But I had not looked too closely at the numbers scribbled by hand at the bottom of the letter.

Using a basic book cypher they spelt out ‘sending you the money enough to cover your responsibilities’. Presumably, this was also from Hector to Ira. Interesting that he needed to say this in code and made me wonder a little further about the two men.

As there is nothing else to find I moved on to the accounts ledger. Again, more code. These theatre types are an awfully suspicious and secretive bunch! I made my way through both the code and the basic information found within the pages spanning from the beginning of October to the end of November 1934. Over all it seems the theatre was in trouble. In just that 2 month period George spoke to the bank about the theatres mortgage, got a loan, a rather hefty interest loan at 30% ($3000 interest payment meaning the loan must have been in the region of $10,000 and noted that he wanted to look at potential buyers, with Ira listed as someone who might be interested. Looking at the financial aspects it definitely seemed that more money was going out than was coming in.

Also of interest were royalties being paid to Olga. PI fees noted as ‘cover for Olga’, were these for Olga or watching Olga? Lastly ‘everything is going to be ok now that you are coming back’ was noted next to the section at the start of October. I would be interested in who this was referring to but alas there is nothing further noted.

Additionally we have a delivery note of the lockbox that Viola no doubt found herself in and a receipt from the flowers Joe Sampson went to retrieve. Again looking back at the first bundle of evidence this was noted on his rehearsal notes and having read the police report below we know the timeline and reason why they felt the need to get Viola flowers following her mothers entrance.

Finally I moved on to the newspaper article and the police report. The article detailed that Viola would be leaving the play and her understudy, Evelyn Kitteridge would be taking over. I have to note here as well that she and Director Ira Adler were later married and are the grand parents of our client Julia. I hope I don’t end up with bad news for her but this does point to Evelyn having little motive if she was going to be getting the leading role anyway.

I read through the police report twice and decided that instead of trying to pull the threads out from the statements made that putting a time line together would be far more useful.
This can be found here

Olga’s statement shows us that she was the one to put in the missing person’s report, she also didn’t return home to the place she shared with her daughter so it wasn’t until that morning that she realised Viola was missing.

The timeline confirms the time of death from Viola’s broken watch as being 5.57pm. There is also more confirmation around this from Ira’s statement in that he heard a lot of commotion and the lift starting up. It is obvious that this is how Viola, in her trunk ended up in the attic, and also how the lift ended up broken – the repair listed in the account book a few days later attests to this. I also included other notable timeline additions that I feel may become relevant, or at least help to paint a bigger picture further into the case.

Other things that came to light are, as mentioned above, the way that Olga came in and accosted her daughter mid-rehearsal. Joe took her cane away from her as she looked to do damage with it. It is very likely this cane is the one that was used against Viola later in the afternoon, and we even see that it was taken, by Evelyn, to Viola in her dressing room before the murder took place. Putting the weapon at the scene.

Sadly the police interview report lacked any real depth, they did not interview Ruth Erikson and only a few days later they closed the missing person case, deciding that Viola had left on her own accord. There seemed to be very little investigation and no real belief that something might have happened to her.

From working through the time line and the evidence, I concluded that the only person we can eliminate from suspicion right now is Joseph Sampson. He was not in the theatre at the time of death. In fact we have pretty good evidence to say that from just after Olga left around 5.15 until 6.30 he was out getting the flowers. The receipt from Once and Floral even states that her was there at 6pm and that there was a delay in getting the flowers arranged. All in all Joe has a pretty solid alibi.

After having made my conclusion, I handed over to Jay to work through and let me know if he came to similar conclusions on both the murder weapon and on who the most obvious person to eliminate right now were. Unsurprisingly, he thought the same as I, so we crossed off Joe and let Julia know so she could see about getting more evidence for us to sort though.

While waiting I went back over the files and created a murder board and drew up the timeline proper as linked above. I think it will be easier to work through with a better outline for myself and might help aid Jay while we try to work on this from opposite ends of the UK.