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Ron Piper who helped exhume the body of Reginald Marsh

THE mud of Benfleet Creek hides a tragic secret to which only one person has ever held the key. She is, or was, Violet Wright, universally known as Vicci Wright.

Only Vicci ever knew for sure the exact sequence of events on Thursday, May 17 1956, when twin three-year-old boys died in the flames of a houseboat fire.

If Vicci remains alive, she will be 87. Yet even now, she retains the power to instil unease.

Some of those who have talked to Memories did so only on the condition of anonymity.

Oddly, the same phrase keeps being repeated. "I don't want Vicci to find me," they say.

One says: "After all these years, she is back." For her, it makes no difference whether Vicci is alive or dead.

"Vicci Wright has returned to haunt my mind," she says.

Vicci was the core figure in one of the most sensational Old Bailey trials of the 1950s.

The south Benfleet creek where the fire took place

The tabloids quickly dubbed the case, the Houseboat Murders, although the trial eventually brought home a verdict of manslaughter.

Crime reporters reflected the opinion held by detectives at Southend police station, were sure they were dealing with preconceived murder.

Benfleet and Canvey locals shared the conviction. For years afterwards, East Creek, Benfleet, was known colloquially as Murder Creek.

Yet while other notorious cases of the era such as Bentley/Craig, or Ruth Ellis, have become legendary enough to become the subject of films, the full story of the Essex case and its aftermath have sunk into near oblivion.

It lay dormant for half a century until it was revived, two months ago, by a chance incident - the discovery of a newspaper cutting about a body exhumed from Benfleet cemetery.

The sequence of events, that was to become known as the Houseboat Murders, began on an April evening in 1956 when Reginald Wright stepped out of his home, the converted landing-craft Buchra, on to the path alongside Benfleet Creek.

"I'm not feeling very well. I'm taking a walk," he told his common-law wife.

A few hours later, his body was discovered by the creek. Official cause of death was given as coronary thrombosis. He was buried, without much ceremony, in Benfleet cemetery. Ownership of the Buchra passed to his common law wife, Vicci.

It seemed to be a cursed vessel. On the night of May 17, the Buchra exploded in flames. Nobody was aboard. Vicci had moved with her twin sons to another houseboat, the Windmill, further down the creek.

Forty-eight hours later, at around 3am on Thursday, May 17, a steam-train driver was hauling empty stock through South Benfleet station. As he passed, he glimpsed a small fire burning on the deck of one of the vessels moored in the creek.

Seconds later, the Windmill became the second house-boat to explode. This time, though, there were people inside.

Somehow Vicci Wright managed to escape across the mud, along with the boat's owner Grace Richardson.

The twins, Colin and Reggie, perished in the fire. Recalling the discovery of their bodies 35 years later, chief fire officer Dave Blackwell still had to fight back the tears.

"It was the saddest case I ever dealt with," he said. "You had to ask yourself, how could any mother abandon her own children in that way?"

Who could have committed such a hideous deed?

Vicci Wright told the police she had been the victim of a series of threatening poison pen letters. Was the writer of these letters responsible for arson leading to murder? Vicci was known euphemistically as "a very friendly" woman. So a string of cuckolded wives quickly made their way on to the list of potential candidates. Any one of them might have been motivated to launch a vendetta against Vicci Wright. But the forensic evidence very quickly started to point closer to home. Most of the fabric in the Windmill had survived.

"The timbers were pretty rotten, so she had blown apart rather than caught fire," recalls Arthur Woodward, of Leigh, who as a master carpenter was called in to retrieve some of the timbers. The fragments of wood showed traces of a fire accelerant and also of a sort of tape, often used as fuse-wire.

A drum of accelerant had also been blown clear of the Windmill, landing intact on the mud 20 yards away.

Scotland Yard's chief scientific officer reported he could "find no indication of any natural origin of the fire".

Southend police discovered another damning piece of evidence.

It was general knowledge, among members of the houseboat community, that Vicci Wright had been planning to leave Reg.

Her dream was to set up home with her "fancy-boy", a Canvey builder and businessman named Bill Smith.

Bill was planning to emigrate to Australia. He wanted Vicci to go too, but he refused to take the twins, one of whom was described as "retarded".

Bill Smith was summoned to South Benfleet police station. When he emerged, the press photographers were waiting. He lashed out at one of them, damaging the camera.

The hint of dark deeds became even stronger after Reg Wright's body was exhumed.

One neighbour of the time recalls: "He had a grown-up daughter from an earlier marriage. She became very suspicious after the death of the twins, and she put pressure on the police to re-examine the corpse."

The body was disinterred early on a June morning, under the instructions of Dr Francis Camps, the Home Office's chief pathologist.

By now, however, it had become too decomposed to offer any useful evidence.

On November 1 1956, Vicci Wright was charged with the murder of Colin and Reggie Wright.

In court she assumed the name Violet Clark, taken from a previous relationship. The circumstances of the charge were almost unprecedented in the annals of British justice.

Mothers had killed their children in despair, or when mentally unsound. But as an inconvenience that got in the way of the mother's love life? One lady, who still lives in Southend, recalls an encounter with Vicci Wright.

The former Wren, who worked in the police records department at Southend, went to watch the early stages of the trial.

"I was sitting with a companion, talking about Vicci, when I experienced this extraordinary sense of evil. My friend suddenly said She's standing behind you.' I'm not a fanciful person, and I'm almost reluctant to talk in this way, but that woman projected evil."

When Vicci Wright stood in the dock at the Old Bailey, the threat of the gallows was still a very real one. Ruth Ellis had been hanged in July the previous year for the murder of her lover.

In fact, Ellis was destined to be the last woman to suffer the death penalty in Britain, although there was no way to know this at the time.

The death penalty remained in force until 1965. The stakes were high, and to outsiders, the evidence that mounted up in the courtroom against Vicci Wright looked powerful.

But at this stage an extraordinary figure enters the story. Her name is Rose Heilbron.

Rose Heilbron (1914-2005) was a shooting star of the English legal profession.

In her lifetime, she broke down a whole series of barriers against women in the English legal profession.

She was the first female QC, the first woman recorder, the first woman criminal-court judge, and only the second British woman to be appointed a judge.

By 1956, she was already a household name, famous for her scintillating performances and her ability to turn around even the most apparently hopeless of cases.

One of her clients was the London gang-leader Jack Spot, not a man easily impressed.

After Rose Heilbron had cleared him of a host of charges, he declared, in awe: "She is the greatest lawyer in history."

This was the woman who took on Vicci Wright's seemingly hopeless case.

She used courtroom techniques that she had honed into a fine art. Instead of blinding the jury with a mass of subtle argument, she sewed doubts in their collective mind with a few carefully chosen points.

Vicci Wright had been wearing curlers at the time of the fire.

Would a woman, who knew in advance that she was about to encounter a group of male firefighters in her night clothes, choose to wear curlers?

It was known that Vicci had been painting the houseboat at the time. The drum of accelerant that figured as a major item of evidence was simply paint-thinner.

Faced with these doubts, the jury felt unable to decide beyond a reasonable doubt.

Vicci Wright escaped a murder conviction. But she had made no attempt to rescue the twins.

That led to a lesser conviction, for manslaughter.

She received two separate sentences of three years each, to run concurrently. Eighteen months later, Vicci Wright was released from jail.

Now began the last, extraordinary episode in the story. Having served her time, Vicci was free to live out her Australian dream.

Taking advantage of the Australian government subsidies available at the time, the pair emigrated and Vicci assumed her lover's name.

The woman who had been through so many changes of identity now became Mrs Violet Smith.

Yet the luck that had held out so long for her now ran out. Aboard the same ship was a Canvey Island resident, who recognised the former Violet Clark and Vicci Wright.

He tipped off the Australian authorities in advance. Vicci was refused admission to the country of her dreams.

She returned to Essex, minus Bill Smith - and disappeared from memory and record.

"I did hear that she was living in Hadleigh," recalls one person who had been her neighbour. "But I never actually set eyes on her again." Another conjectures: "She probably found another man to take up with. She was attractive to a certain type of bloke."

Memory of the Houseboat Murders, once a national cause celebre, likewise slowly seeped away from people's awareness. Half a century passed.

Then, early this year, Ron Piper, 73, was clearing out his house in Hullbridge. He came across an old newspaper cutting.

Taken from the Southend Pictorial, it covered the exhumation of Reg Wright's body from Benfleet cemetery.

A 20-year-old council worker at the time, Ron had been summoned to the graveyard to assist the council's carpenter in the job of opening the lid of the coffin.

"I had to hand him the screwdriver," Ron says. "I was paid an extra penny for the job."

Ron's recollections of that macabre morning, published in Memories, triggered a second exhumation - the story of the houseboat killings.

Thanks to the mostly anonymous witnesses who have come forward, it has now been possible to piece together the bulk of the story.

Yet the woman at the core of the mystery remains as elusive as ever.

Whatever became of her, Vicci Wright did a pretty good job of hiding herself. A handful of people in south Essex still remember her, invariably with a shudder.

But for half a century her whereabouts and final fate has remained as much a mystery as the true course of events on that night of unspeakable tragedy on Benfleet Creek. Some sort of shadowy guardian angel seemed to be protecting Vicci's anonymity.

Yet surely at some stage the memories came back to haunt her, too. Hidden from the world she may have been, but in the end, did Vicci Wright ever find a place to hide from herself?

3:00am Friday 11th July 2008

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