The brooding Screes were the only witness as the corpse that
became known as the Lady of the Lake was slid into the midnight
black waters of Wastwater. It was October in 1976. It would be
eight years before the corpse re-emerged as amateur divers found
what appeared to be a puzzling carpet bag tied to a concrete slab.
The divers had half expected to find the remains of missing French
hillwalker, Veronique Marre, but her body was in fact found some
years later on the sharp crags that looked down on the lake.
Diver Neil Pritt had
first noticed the odd bundle at 110 feet depth, but thought it
rubbish. Three months later in March 1984 he and friends alerted
police as it became plain it was a body. The features of the corpse
were said to have been “wax-like’’, preserved in
the icy deep waters. Six days later friends of Margaret Hogg recognised
the described lady as Margaret Hogg. Within hours police were
knocking at the door of Peter Hogg’s home in Surrey.
He had worked as the cool headed pilot of 757 jets for Air Europe,
while Margaret had been an air hostess. But their marriage had
come to a stormy end and she had been involved in a three year
relationship with banker, Graham Ryan, before a violent argument
culminated in Peter Hogg strangling his wife. Mrs Hogg has been
described by friends as "friendly and extravert", while
Peter was more intoverted . The couple also had an age difference
of 19 years (56...37 years respectively).Had fate had been kinder
to Peter Hogg, 56, Wastwater lake would probably have kept his
dark secret forever. He was arrested just six days after the discovery
of the body. The police investigation in the Lakes was led by
Chief Inspector Jack Taylor.
There were three things led to Hogg appearing in the dock at the
Old Bailey charged with murder. Firstly he was not to know that
a French student’s disappearance in 1983 would spark off
police and amateur diving searches of the lake’s shore. Neither
was he to know that had he rowed just ten yards further out into
the lake that night before lowering the carpet bag shrouded corpse
of his wife the weighted body would have sunk beyond normal diving
depths. And lastly he had forgotten that the gold ring left on
the corpse had engraved on its hidden inside face both his and
his wife’s initials.
But fate was sometimes smiling on Peter Hogg. After his early
arraignment he was granted £ 20,000 bail, unusual for those
facing a murder charge. And after an Old Bailey jury found him
guilty of manslaughter, and not murder he was jailed for a mere
four years. Serving three years in an open prison. The Wasdale
that he went to that dark October night was well known to Peter
Hogg for between 1941-45 he had been a boarder pupil at Keswick
School and he returned to the Lakes several times from the south
of England.
At the Old Bailey Peter Hogg denied murdering his wife. His
counsel told the jury that Hogg was provoked for years by the
“unfaithful and bad’’ behaviour of his wife. He
claimed Margaret Hogg “flaunted” her affair with another
man. Patrick Back QC said she was “a piece of erring humanity.”
The tabloid press had a field day describing Mrs Hogg as a “cow”
in trial reports. The QC said his client’s main defence was
provocation. “The law recognises that within every human
being lies the fires of emotion and you can provoke a human being
just so far.” He said this provocation had lasted years with
Mrs Hogg flaunting her affair to all and sundry. Graham Ryan,
the other man in Mrs Hogg’s life, told the court they had
been away together in Dorset the week before Mrs Hogg died. Her
return from this rural trip sparked off the fatal row.
Describing that fateful night Hogg was asked: “Had you murdered
your wife?” He replied: “Murder is not the right word.
Certainly she died. I think I strangled her. We had an argument,
she did her usual act, she was always throwing things at me.”
Describing the row he said: “She was scratching my face,
kicking me in the crotch and I belted her. She flew at me hitting
and kicking , then I grabbed her round the neck and squeezed hard.
I realised one of her eyes had glazed and I let go. She fell back
on the floor and I realised she was dead.” Hogg was described
in court as “cool and calculating” in the minutes after
the strangling. He changed his clothes and trussed up the body
before working out how to dispose of it.
Describing his drive north and rowing an inflatable boat out onto
the pitch black lake he said: “It was the longest night of
my life. You don’t realise how difficult it was. I nearly
went in with her.” He told the court: “I was in a perfectly
logical frame of mind once I had recovered from my original horror.
Possibly after my 30 years training I put my mind to dealing with
the current emergency.” Thus he reported his wife as missing
to Surrey police a month later. It took the jury just over an
hour to find Hogg not guilty of murder. He was jailed for three
years for manslaughter and another year was added for obstructing
a coroner and to perjury in divorce proceedings.
Wastwater's
French ConnectionIt was a slightly misty August morning and the Wasdale Youth
Hostel had its usual rush of fellwalkers and visitors packing
up and setting off after breakfast. Among those leaving was a
well built 21 year old French girl, Veronique Mireille Marre.
She had only passable knowledge of English, but years of walking
in the French Alps had made her well able to cope with a walking
tour in the Lake District.
Yet Veronique never reached her planned destination of Coniston
that evening. And within days her anxious parents were telephoning
the authorities in England. Despite an extensive search of the
mountain paths between Wasdale and Grasmere Veronique vanished
without trace. Her disappearance and the subsequent search of
both the hills and the shores of Wastwater somehow came to link
the two deaths with the lake. Police and tracker dogs spread out
over the boulder fields that make the awe inspiring rock slide
of the Screes.
But no trace of the young woman was found. It was a further two
years of soul destroying uncertainty for her parents in Paris
before a 53 year old Sellafield engineer stumbled on the sad resting
place of Veronique. Mike Parkin, who lived in lower Wasdale was
rock scrambling one May afternoon among the boulder field when
he found some clothing. “Most had rotted away but there was
enough to indicate it belonged to a girl and there were some French
marked labels. “I went a little further up a side gully and
saw the rest of her belongings and remains. I realised then what
it was and went for the police.’’ The remains were 1,100
feet above the dark lake waters at the foot of a 300 foot rock
spur known prophetically as Broken Rib Crag. An inquest afterwards
heard that the state of the few remains meant a cause of death
could not be officially given, but the remains were consistent
with a fall from height. Veronique’s discovery came just
two months after the fate of the other body in Wasdale was the
subject of the Old Bailey trial of Peter Hogg.
*In 1998 Mrs Carol Park's body was found at the bottom of Coniston Water after
she too had been killed in a savage attack in 1976 and then disposed of. The
mother-of-three's husband Gordon Park, 54, was later charged with murder but
then freed as police dropped the case against him. Park, a 63-year-old former
teacher, has always protested his innocence and his lawyers say they now have
fresh evidence to support his case.
Convicted in January 2005, Park was jailed after the prosecution argued that he had bludgeoned his wife Carol to death in 1976 and then dumped her body in Coniston Water.
*Sheena Owlitt's body was found in Crummock Water in 1988.
It was weighted down with an engine block and had only been in
the lake for three weeks when discovered by amateur divers. Sheena's
fingerprints helped in tracing her identity. When police interviewed
her husband Kevin they found blood stains in an upstairs room
and their home in Leeds and it was not long before Owlitt confessed
and was jailed for life.
*More about the Wasdale-Eskdale
area.
Copyright: Lakestay.
