page_title: August Sangret
section_title: Discovery
hierarchical_section_title: August Sangret / Discovery
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Keith Simpson CBE inscribed as a gift to "friend and colleague Milton Helpern"
context_page_description: August Sangret was a French-Canadian soldier, convicted and subsequently hanged for the September 1942 murder of 19-year-old Joan Pearl Wolfe in Surrey, England. This murder case is also known as the "Wigwam Murder".
  The murder of Joan Pearl Wolfe became known as "the Wigwam Murder" due to the fact the victim had become known among locals as the "Wigwam Girl" through her living in two separate, improvised wigwams upon Hankley Common in the months preceding her murder, and that these devices proved to have been constructed by her murderer.
  This case marked the first occasion in British legal history in which a murder victim's skull was introduced as evidence at trial, and has been described by true crime author Colin Wilson as "The last of the classic cases."
context_section_description: At 10:20 a.m. on 7 October 1942, two Royal Marines named William Moore and Geoffrey Cooke, patrolling a section of Hankley Common known as Houndown Wood on a routine military exercise, passed a high mound of earth which had been purposely bulldozed to simulate training upon rough terrain for tank crews. Protruding through the soil of a freshly dug patch of earth on a slope, Moore observed what appeared to be an exposed human arm. Looking closer at the hand of this exposed limb, he further noted that the flesh upon two of the fingers and the thumb had been gnawed away by rats or other vermin, and that a foot also protruded from the earth.
  Moore and his colleague did not interfere with the body, but immediately returned to base to report their find to their sergeant. Subsequently, Lieutenant Norman McLeod inspected the site of their discovery, and immediately called the police. The first officers at the scene were Superintendents Richard Webb and Thomas Roberts of Surrey Police; both men deduced the experience of Scotland Yard was required, and cordoned off the area until the arrival that afternoon of Detective Chief Inspector Edward Greeno and Detective Sergeant Fred Hodge.
  At the request of Superintendent Webb, Dr. Eric Gardner, pathologist to the Surrey County Coroner, and forensic pathologist Dr. Keith Simpson were both summoned to conduct the excavation of the remains. Both men arrived at the crime scene the following day.
  The victim was dressed in a green-and-white summer frock with a lace collar and woolen ankle-socks. Her underclothes had not been removed, suggesting that she had not been subjected to a sexual assault prior to her murder. She was lying face down in a shallow, makeshift grave which had later been disturbed by a passing military vehicle, possibly a half-track, which had loosened the soil and exposed her arm and foot. The left arm was folded beneath the chest, with the exposed right arm notably outstretched, indicating the victim had likely been dragged to the location where she lay.
  The body itself was badly decomposed, with the head, chest and abdominal cavity described by Simpson as being a "seething mass of maggots", which had eaten much of the soft body tissue, including the head and neck, save for a small section of scalp and hair. A headscarf was found knotted around the victim's neck, but the knot itself was extremely slack, instantly enabling both men to dismiss strangulation as the cause of death; instead, both men strongly speculated the cause of death had been the extensive blunt trauma to the skull, which had "all but collapsed" in the attack. The extent of decomposition indicated that the victim had likely died between five and seven weeks prior to her discovery. Furthermore, the murderer had dragged his victim uphill to the location where he had buried her; this conclusion was further supported by the presence of three parallel scrapes upon the skin of the right ankle, which corresponded with tears in the right sock.
  The body was removed and taken to Guy's Hospital, to await a formal autopsy.
caption: Dr. Keith Simpson, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy of Joan Wolfe's body
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