Flesh and Blood by Simon Cheshire Page B

in local politics. Between them, Byron, Caroline and Ken Greenhill had notched up hundreds of mentions in local and overseas newspapers, official documents, academic and medical journals, scientific blogs, political diaries and expert testimonies, plus a smattering of interviews and entries in various high-society calendars, even a few appearances in gossip columns.
    Assembled from many sources, my research into the Greenhills could be summarized like this:
    Emma’s parents, Byron and Caroline, were both born in 1972 and met as undergraduates at Oxford University. Caroline’s family were very wealthy, one step away from aristocracy, but by the time she married Byron in 1993 her only surviving relative was her elder brother Vincent, who is now a parliamentary undersecretary in the Home Office.
    Byron’s father, Ken Greenhill, was originally called Kurt Hugelgrun. The Hugelgruns were a dynasty of industrialists from Austria. (Many of these details came from a German public archive, whichJo managed to translate bits of for me – she was taking German at school.) The Hugelgrun fortune was created by two things: munitions manufacture for the German army during World War I, and a patented medicine produced by a pharmaceutical company they owned, which was used extensively during the flu pandemic of 1918/19, an outbreak that killed well over fifty million people.
    The Hugelgruns kept out of politics, playing no part in the formation of the Third Reich or the horrors that followed. However, they left Austria in 1938, eleven months before the outbreak of World War II. Upon their arrival in Britain, official records list them as being refugees from the Nazis, escaping persecution. However, there was no record of them doing anything in Austria that could have got them persecuted. Their reason for leaving the country might have centred around a series of murders that took place in the suburbs of Vienna in the mid 30s. Over a period of two and a half years, the bodies of seven women and three men were found dumped in the city’s narrow, twisting alleyways. All had been sliced open with surgical precision, and internal organs removed, including eyes, brains and lungs.Comparisons were inevitably drawn with the Ripper murders in Whitechapel in 1888.
    Suspicion fell on Gottfried Hugelgrun, Ken/Kurt’s father. Three of the victims had worked for Hugelgrun companies and Gottfried, then aged thirty-six, had twice been seen by other employees at locations that tied in with crime scenes. Gottfried was a biochemist, but was known to have an extensive laboratory at his home, where numerous preserved organs – human and animal – were openly on display for guests. There was no actual evidence to link him to any of the killings so charges were never brought.
    Nothing relating to these murders appears in any UK information source, and there are no mentions of them in any true crime books I’ve been able to find. This is probably because the original investigation appears to have been patchy, and there’s very little documentation beyond the initial autopsy reports.
    Gottfried sold up and arrived in England with his wife, Marta, his mother, Helga, and his infant son, Kurt. Almost the first thing he did was to become a British citizen, translating his name from German to become Godfrey Greenhill, his son becoming Kenneth, his wife becoming Martha. Some mysterysurrounds the fate of Helga. She vanishes from official county records during World War II, and it’s not known how she died. Ken was only four years old when the family left Austria, and claimed in later years to have no recollection of his original home. Gottfried bought Bierce Priory less than a month after landing at Dover.
    The house was built in 1812, on what was then open land. The area where Priory Mews was added in the 1920s was originally stables. There exist several poorly preserved photographs of liveried footmen standing beside the low, shed-like stable buildings. It seems