On 19 August 1912, a house on Enys Road in Eastbourne was found burning with five bodies inside. A woman with two bullet wounds in her neck had escaped into the street. The man responsible had married two sisters, neither of whom knew of the other’s marriage — and he turned out to be the brother of the victim in one of Edwardian England’s most famous unsolved railway mysteries.
A note on sources before we start. This case is unusually badly documented for something so serious. The bare facts appear in British police records and in the archives of the force that investigated the related 1905 case. But most of the vivid detail that circulates online — and there is a great deal of it — traces back to American syndicated newspapers of September 1912 running headlines about a “modern Bluebeard.” We have separated what is on the record from what is press embroidery, and said so as we go. Where we cannot verify something, we have left it out or labelled it.
What is firmly established
On 19 August 1912, fire broke out at a house on Enys Road, in the Upperton area north of Eastbourne town centre. Firemen arrived quickly and put the flames out before they had consumed the interior.
Inside they found five bodies: a man, his wife, and three children. All had been shot. The man had shot the others and then killed himself.
A sixth person survived. A woman — the mother of two of the children — had been shot twice in the neck and had managed to get out of the house and call for help in the street. She was taken to the Princess Alice Hospital in Eastbourne, where she was still being treated weeks later.
The man was known locally as Robert Hicks Murray. As the investigation developed, an extraordinary fact emerged: he had married both women, and they were sisters. Neither had known that the other was married to him. All the children were his.
That much is on the record. Almost everything else about this case requires qualification.
The two sisters
The women were Florence and Edith, daughters of a railway official. The man presented himself to their family as an army captain. It was a persona he maintained across several identities — he used a number of names during his life, and made claims about military service in India, China and the Philippines that investigators later could not support. There is no evidence he was ever an officer.
He married Florence first, in a private ceremony, and a son followed. Some months later he married her younger sister Edith at a church in London, and set up a second household. Between 1910 and 1911, each sister gave birth to a daughter.
He maintained the two families in separate homes and divided his weeks between them, explaining his absences by his supposed regimental duties. According to an account Florence later gave, she eventually learned of the second marriage from another sister, confronted him, and was told bluntly that it changed nothing between them. He promised to break off the other relationship. She stayed.
Whatever the private arithmetic of that arrangement, it held for roughly two years.
August 1912
In the summer of 1912 he told both families they were going to Eastbourne on holiday, and took the house on Enys Road on 17 August.
What happened over the following two days is not something this article will set out in detail. Three children died, the eldest of them a small boy, along with one of the sisters. The mechanics were reported at exhausting length by the press of the day, and reproducing them here would add nothing to the historical record and a good deal to the distress of anyone connected to the family.
The essentials are these. Edith and one child were killed first. Two days later, on the morning of 19 August, he shot Florence and then her two children. Believing Florence dead, he gathered the bodies together, poured petrol over them and set the house alight. Florence was not dead. She got out and raised the alarm, which is why the fire was caught early and why any of this is known in the detail it is.
He left money and a note outside the house before shooting himself. The note, as reported, said he was ruined, that he intended to take with him everybody who depended on him, and asked God’s forgiveness.
Investigators also recovered a badly burned Victoria Cross from the house. Given everything since established about his fabricated military career, it was almost certainly not his.
Press reports at the time offered a motive: that he had become involved with a wealthy young woman and had come to see his two families as an obstacle. That explanation appears consistently in contemporary newspapers but we have not been able to trace it to any official source, and it should be treated as what the papers said rather than as a finding.
Who was he? The identification problem
The man had no verifiable past. He had used at least four names and his birthplace and date of birth were unknown to the police.
On 12 September 1912, Scotland Yard wrote to the investigating inspector at Eastbourne to say that the dead man had been identified as Robert Henry Money, formerly of Kingston Hill in London — one of ten siblings, a builder and later a dairy farmer who had sold his business the previous year and largely dropped out of contact with his family. Shown a photograph in her hospital bed, Florence identified him as her husband.
Here is where the case becomes genuinely uncertain, and where most accounts go wrong in one direction or the other.
British Transport Police — whose predecessor force has direct archival reason to care about the answer — records the identification as settled: Robert Hicks Murray was an alias of Robert Money. Other accounts note that the identification was contested at the time, not least by one of Money’s own brothers, and that it was never conclusively proved.
Both positions are defensible on the surviving material. The honest summary is that the police treated the identification as made, a member of the family disputed it, and the standard of proof applied in 1912 to identifying a dead man with no documented history was not what would be required now.
The Merstham Tunnel: the connection nobody expects
If the identification is right, it produces one of the strangest coincidences in Edwardian criminal history.
Robert Henry Money’s sister was Mary Sophia Money. In September 1905, Mary — who worked at a dairy — left her workplace saying she was going for a short walk. Her body was found that night in the Merstham Tunnel in Surrey, having gone under a train. A scarf had been forced into her mouth. The case became one of the most discussed unsolved deaths of the decade and has never been resolved.
Robert Money was interviewed during that investigation. The police files record that he told a number of lies in his interviews and was regarded, at minimum, as an unreliable witness. He also attempted, around the time of the funeral, to persuade other family members to adopt a particular account of his sister’s movements in the fortnight before she died. He was not, at the time, considered a strong suspect.
Seven years later, the same man — if it was the same man — shot four members of his own family in Eastbourne and set fire to the house.
In 1912 police also released material they had withheld from the original inquest to spare the family: that Mary had been gambling heavily, that stock was missing from the dairy where she worked, and that she may have feared exposure. That pointed towards suicide. It does not obviously account for the scarf.
Crime historians have divided over what to make of it. Some treat the Eastbourne killings as simply establishing that the Money family was visited by more than its share of tragedy. Others think the coincidence is too pointed to dismiss. What can be said with certainty is only this: Robert Money was interviewed in his sister’s death, was found to have lied, and was never charged with anything in connection with it. Nobody ever was. We are not in a position to say who killed Mary Money, and neither is anybody else.
The “seven murdered wives” claim
One assertion about this case circulates very widely and deserves dismantling directly, because it appears in reference works that ought to know better.
The claim is that Scotland Yard detectives concluded he had murdered at least seven previous wives before the Eastbourne killings.
The origin of that claim is a run of American newspaper stories in September 1912, published under headlines announcing the discovery of a modern Bluebeard who had murdered seven wives. This was syndicated sensation journalism of a very recognisable kind, written thousands of miles from Eastbourne, and in one report the detectives are said to have declined to give any further details at all.
No such wives were ever named. No bodies were identified. No inquests followed. No charges were possible, the man being dead, but nor was any subsequent official account of the case ever built on the idea. A man who had used four aliases and invented a military career was an obvious magnet for this sort of story, and it fitted the Bluebeard template the papers were already reaching for.
The verified death toll at Enys Road is four victims. Anything beyond that is a newspaper claim from 1912 that has been recycled ever since without evidence, and we do not repeat it as fact.
Eastbourne’s worst year
There is a detail of local chronology that rarely gets noticed.
The Enys Road killings happened on 19 August 1912. Seven weeks later, on 9 October 1912, Inspector Arthur Walls was shot dead on a doorstep in South Cliff Avenue — a case that would go to the Commons and end on the gallows.
Within two months, a town whose entire commercial proposition was gentility, safety and restorative sea air had produced a quadruple murder-suicide in a rented villa and the killing of a police inspector on duty. For a resort that sold itself on being the most respectable place on the south coast, 1912 was a catastrophe of reputation as well as of life.
It is also why the Enys Road case faded so much faster than the other. The Walls murder had a suspect, a trial, an appeal and a national campaign. Enys Road had a perpetrator who was already dead, no trial, no verdict, and nothing for the public to argue about. The story ran for a few weeks, got absorbed into the Bluebeard genre in the foreign press, and then largely disappeared.
Enys Road today
Enys Road remains a residential street of substantial late-Victorian and Edwardian villas, many now converted into flats. It is an ordinary, pleasant Eastbourne road.
We have deliberately not published a house number. Contemporary reports are inconsistent, the property was a short-term rental, the street has been extensively subdivided since 1912, and people live there now. The road is a matter of record; the address is not something we are prepared to put in front of readers.
Please note: This account concerns the killing of three children and their mother. We have set out the facts as recorded and no further. We have not applied psychiatric or diagnostic labels to the perpetrator, because no such assessment was ever made by anyone qualified to make it, and we make no allegation that he was responsible for any death other than those at Enys Road.
The Eastbourne Tragedy: FAQs
What was the Eastbourne Tragedy of 1912?
A murder-suicide at a rented house on Enys Road, Eastbourne, on 19 August 1912. A man shot his wife and three children and set the house on fire before shooting himself. A second woman — his other wife, and the sister of the first — was shot twice in the neck but escaped and survived.
He was married to two sisters?
Yes. He married both, in separate ceremonies, and kept two households in different towns, dividing his week between them and explaining his absences as army duties. Neither sister knew of the other’s marriage until shortly before the killings.
Did he really murder seven previous wives?
There is no evidence that he did. The claim comes from American newspaper reports of September 1912 written to a “Bluebeard” formula. No such wives were ever named or found, and no official account of the case rests on it. The established death toll is four.
What is the connection to the Merstham Tunnel mystery?
The man was identified as Robert Henry Money, whose sister Mary Money died in the Merstham Tunnel in Surrey in 1905 in circumstances never explained. He was interviewed during that investigation, was found to have lied, and was never charged. The case remains unsolved and no link has ever been proved.
Was the identification certain?
Not entirely. Scotland Yard identified him as Robert Money in September 1912 and the surviving sister confirmed it from a photograph, but one of Money’s brothers disputed it and it was never conclusively proved. Official police history treats the identification as made.
Where exactly on Enys Road did it happen?
We have chosen not to publish a house number. Contemporary reports are inconsistent, the property was rented briefly, and the street is occupied by residents today.
More from Eastbourne’s darker past: the murder of Inspector Arthur Walls seven weeks later, the Crumbles murders of the 1920s, the 1860 Eastbourne manslaughter, and the wider history of Eastbourne.