Before Nazis, Revolutionary France Made Leather From Human Skin

Harvard University has decided to remove the leather cover of a French book in its library because it had been made from ‘unethically sourced’ human skin. But history shows ethics and ‘human leather’ have never been on the same page... 

Sometime in the 1860s, a poor woman died unloved at a psychiatric hospital in the French city of Metz. Ludovic Bouland was a young medical student there, and he did what would be criminal and unthinkable today. He stole the skin off her back. 

Young Bouland was also an amateur tanner and he turned the woman’s skin into leather with the extract of a plant called sumac. He was so proud of his handiwork that years later he wrote, “by looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin”.  

Where did Bouland write this note? Inside a copy of Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) that the book’s author and his close friend Arsène Houssaye had gifted him. But before writing the note, he tenderly bound the book in that same old skin he had been saving for years. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” he reasoned.

There was at least one other book that Bouland wrapped in a piece of the unfortunate woman’s skin, a compilation of essays on gynaecology, published in Amsterdam in 1663. “This curious little book on virginity and the female generative functions seemed to me to merit a binding congruent to the subject,” he wrote in it.

Embarrassment For Harvard

Dr Bouland’s ‘reasoned’ choice of a cover for Des Destinées de l’Ame recently caused much embarrassment to Harvard University, which had housed his copy of the human leather-covered book in its Houghton Library since 1934. Last week, Harvard announced it had removed the cover because of “the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”.

That’s ironic because the nature of the cover material was never a secret. As Bouland declared in the book: “I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman”. And 10 years ago, a new technique called peptide mass fingerprinting had confirmed the leather’s human origin (tanning destroys DNA, so that technique was not used). Back then, the university had described it as “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike”.

To make amends, Harvard is now trying to find out who the mystery woman was and “consulting with appropriate authorities at the University and in France to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains”. 

Better Late Than Never

These memorial services for centuries-old victims of abuse are important because what’s a leather cover or lab skeleton to you is almost certainly somebody else’s kin or ancestor. As antiquarian bookseller Tim Bryars told The Guardian in 2014: “It is a sensitive issue, there are sometimes surviving descendants to consider…”

That’s what happened on April 13, 2011, the 190th anniversary of the public hanging of 18-year-old murder accused John Horwood. John’s father Thomas was a sailor whose last voyage had been to India in 1786. Young Horwood loved a girl named Eliza Balsum. Eliza went out with another boy on Jan 26, 1821. John got angry and flung a stone at her that hit her on the temple, and she died three weeks later, on Feb 15, resulting in John’s hanging on April 13.

But then, John was denied a decent burial. His body was used for dissection at Bristol Royal Infirmary, and his skin was tanned and turned into a cover for a ledger “containing the account of the murder he carried out, the trial and his execution,” a BBC article says. John’s skeleton stood in a lab cupboard for almost two centuries until it was found by Mary Halliwell, his brother’s great-great-great granddaughter who arranged the 2011 funeral.

Revolutionary Excess

Mostly, though, men and women whose skins were turned into leather have been denied all dignity. Revolutionary France was perhaps the first to make human leather on an ‘industrial scale’ while the guillotine worked overtime. In fact, a copy of the Republic’s 1794 Constitution, bound in human skin, was auctioned in Paris in 1872.

There’s a story about a tanner who made a proposal to the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ – equivalent to the home ministry – to let him use the castle of Meudon as a tannery for human skins. “In return for the concession, the members of the Committee were privileged to be among the first to wear top boots made of human skin,” an article in the July-Dec 1894 issue of ‘Current Literature’ magazine says.

Another book published in 1808 says, “as Paris supplied the (French) armies with shoes, it is possible that more than one defender of their country may have worn shoes made of the skin of his friends and relations”.

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a leading light of the Revolution and notorious as ‘archangel of terror’, allegedly “caused a young and beautiful girl, who had refused his advances, to be arrested and sent to the scaffold. After the execution he obtained possession of the body, flayed it himself, and had the skin tanned and made into a waistcoat which he wore till the day of his death.”

Mrs Koch’s Grim Appetite

But nobody desecrated the human body quite like the Nazis, who turned human bones into fertiliser, fat into soap, and skin, of course, into leather.

Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, was among the worst offenders when it came to sourcing human leather. And she seemingly had a thing for tattooed skins. At her war crimes trial, the prosecution said: “A witness testified that accused No 15 (Ilse)... had a photo album, a briefcase and a pair of gloves made from tattooed human skin.”

In the summer of 1940, a man with “very excellent tattoos from the head to the toes, including a coloured cobra winding all the way up his left arm and an exceptionally cleanly tattooed sailboat with four masts on his chest” arrived at the camp. Ilse allegedly saw him working shirtless. “This inmate was called to the gate at evening formation. He was not seen again but about six months later a skin with the same sailboat was seen in the pathological department. In the summer of 1941 the same skin was seen on a photo album belonging to accused No 15.”

The pathological department was the hub of leather-making: “camp personnel worked on tattooed human skins… The skins were cleaned, dried and stretched on frames… They were shown in the course of inspections and exhibitions.”

Dr Kurt Sitte, a detenu at Buchenwald who started working in the department in 1942, also reported seeing “skins tanned in such a way that they could be used for lampshades, and similar things”. In other words, the skins had been processed to let light pass. Sitte said guards came to him and asked for tattooed skins to use as “a book cover, or for a knife sheath or purse – for all kinds of ‘souvenirs’.”

Dr Franz Blaha, a Czech national who survived the Dachau concentration camp, testified that “soft human skin was so prized for leather and bindings that victims would be shot in the back of the neck or knocked in the head so that the surface would be unmarred”.

These horrors seem unreal today, but ‘civilised’ Europe would have also considered itself incapable of such barbarity in the 1930s and 40s. Let’s hope human leather’s history won’t repeat itself. 

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Brig Gen John Nicholson's statue left India in 1958, but it's still listed as a protected monument!

John Nicholson's statue in Delhi, in 1911

On Sep 13, 1958*, a large wooden crate arrived in Dungannon, a town in Northern Ireland. Inside it was a 10-foot-tall, 2-tonne bronze statue that had stood in Delhi for 51 years. John Nicholson, who lives in the village of Loughgall, 17km outside the town, was a student at Royal School Dungannon (RSD) at the time. He remembers the crate lay in the school grounds “for a couple of years before the statue was erected”.

For weeks, the people of Dungannon didn’t know the statue was of RSD’s most famous pupil, Brigadier General John Nicholson who also happened to be young John Nicholson’s distant ancestor. “We belong to the same family of Nicholsons that the General was descended from,” says John, who’s touching 80.

The statue had been moved out of Delhi under a veil of secrecy, but in the half-century it spent on a pedestal outside Kashmere Gate, it had been a ‘protected monument’, like Taj Mahal and Ellora Caves. Travel Guides like ‘Delhi in Two Days’ recommended it to visitors. 

Now placed 7,000km away as the crow flies, the statue in the crate was still on India’s list of protected monuments. Surely, someone in the culture ministry would have noticed the mistake and struck it off the list in the weeks afterwards? 

No, 66 years have gone by but ‘Nicholson statue and its platform and the surrounding garden paths and enclosure wall’ are item 358 on Archaeological Survey of India’s list. Nicholson Garden, where the statue stood, has been renamed Maharaja Agrasen Park and a statue of the Maharaja presides over it, but someone has updated the missing Nicholson statue’s address to ‘Kashmere Gate, near Metro station’. Which is very odd because the metro came to Delhi only 20 years ago. 

Nicholson, Alias Nikal Seyn

Gen Nicholson’s statue was installed and then removed from Delhi for the same reason: he was a British colonial hero who saved the Raj in its biggest crisis. A 6’2” tall, bearded administrator and soldier, he orchestrated the British recapture of Delhi in 1857. As soon as Kashmere Gate blew up on Sep 14, 1857, he led his troops into the city through the breach and was shot in street fighting.

On the Indian side, he was understandably less popular, and these days even White writers have started calling him ‘sadistic’. William Dalrymple labelled him “great imperial psychopath” in The White Mughal. Modern historians are especially horrified by Nicholson’s decision to hang his regimental cooks, without trial, for poisoning the officers’ soup on the march to Delhi in 1857.

Yet, Nicholson’s gruff reputation had won him many local admirers in the newly annexed Punjab while he lived. Some even worshipped him as Nikal Seyn, a god, and called themselves Nikalsenis. Kipling mentions them in Kim: “wail by long-drawn wail he unfolded the story of Nikal Seyn – the song that men sing in the Punjab to this day”.

Almost 50-Year Wait For Statue

When Kipling wrote Kim in 1901, there was no Nicholson statue in Delhi. Some of the veterans of 1857 had been thinking about installing one, and in 1902 Viceroy Lord Curzon allowed them to set up a fund for it. 

The Daily Sun, an American newspaper, reported on Sep 6, 1902: “A fund has been started in England for the purpose of erecting a monument to one of the great heroes of the Indian mutiny… It is now proposed that a bronze statue of Nicholson shall be erected in the Nicholson Garden at Delhi.”

When the contributions added up to Rs 47,000, London’s famous sculptor Thomas Brock was commissioned to make the statue. Brock is known for his Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace, and the Victoria statue inside Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial. As he had no portrait from Nicholson’s final years, he relied on a marble bust that had been sculpted soon after Nicholson’s death on Sep 23, 1857. 

The Builder magazine of June 18, 1904 assessed the statue’s plaster cast: “Nicholson is represented as holding his sword in one hand and the sheath with the other; the head is fine but perhaps rather too gentle in expression for one who was such a determined fighter…” Brock was able to recreate the General’s khaki coat and sword more realistically as the originals had been preserved by a Mr J Angelo and Lord Magheramorne, respectively.

The statue was finally inaugurated opposite Kashmere Gate on Friday, April 6, 1906, “at the spot where Nicholson had stood on Sept 14, 1857,” waiting for a bugle call that would have signalled the gate had been blown in.

At the unveiling ceremony, Viceroy Lord Minto said, “British and Indian troops stand here together as they have stood side by side on many a hard-fought field to do honour to the memory not only of a British officer of the Indian Army, the John Nicholson of his British comrades, but to the memory of the beloved and worshipped Nikal Seyn Sahib, the revered leader of Pathan and Punjabi warriors.”

This event was reported far and wide. “The unveiling of an heroic statue of John Nicholson before the Cashmere Gate of Delhi is a worthy, though belated, tribute to one of the world’s most gallant soldiers and to one of the greatest figures of the Mutiny,” New York Daily Tribune of April 20, 1906 wrote.

A year later, in December 1907, a ‘miscreant’ snuck up to the statue and defaced it.

Time To Pack Up And Leave

Despite occasional displays of local animus, the Nicholson statue stood relatively unmolested in Delhi for the next 50 years. Chester Bowles, US ambassador to India during 1951-53 remarked in his memoir that while newly independent Indonesians were busy toppling Dutch colonial statues, Indians were cool with British statues and streets named after viceroys and generals.

“I have never heard an Indian suggest that they (the names of streets) be changed… Even a statue of Nicholson, who led the British against Indians during the ‘Mutiny’, still stands, sword in hand,” Bowles wrote.

But the mood in India was already changing. As the centenary of the 1857 Uprising neared, a clamour arose for removing all British statues. Nicholson’s statue was at the top of the hit list, and word reached Ireland through Mrs Edith Wilson, a missionary in India. Her nephew, Major TCH Dickson, was on the board of RSD, where Nicholson had studied from 1834 to 1838. So the school’s old boys started a campaign to rescue the statue.

From Pedestal To Crate

The centenary of the Uprising started on May 10, 1957, and Nicholson’s statue was the first to be toppled in Delhi, followed by that of his comrade Alexander Taylor near Mori Gate in the first week of June. Six months later, they were still “lying crated in the exhibition grounds here, pending a decision on their fate,” Reuters reported in December.

Meanwhile, backroom negotiations were on to get them out. A 1998 article in Chowkidar, magazine of British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA), says permission to transfer the Nicholson statue was obtained through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, “and it left Delhi on 17 July 1958”. A housing ministry note of July 16, 1958 confirms that Central Public Works Department had moved the statue to the British High Commission “only recently”.

Old Boy Comes Home

The crate reached Dungannon in September but the press didn’t know about it for almost a month, until “pupils got hold of the secret and soon the whole town knew about it”. Glasgow Herald wrote about it on Oct 8. Belfast Telegraph did a bigger report, saying the statue “had been rescued from certain destruction”.

As RSD was being expanded at the time, the statue lay in its crate for two more years before it was installed on a pedestal and unveiled by India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, on April 13, 1960.

John Nicholson of Loughgall village was present in the grounds along with some 200 other people that day. “The inauguration ceremony seemed to be a rather reserved and low-key event, probably for security reasons, I suspect,” he told TOI. “None of the other pupils were involved in any form of celebration. I think that at the time there was little awareness of the historical significance of the whole event.”

A few years after John left RSD, the school added a fourth house: Nicholson House. Ivor Edgar, who taught history at the school 1969 onwards, says Nicholson House was added in 1967: “I am not sure if there was a campaign to commemorate Nicholson in this way, or whether growing school numbers necessitated the addition of a fourth house, and Nicholson was seen as a suitable name, but I suspect the latter version to be the more likely.”

But Nicholson didn’t become a topic of discussion or teaching at the school. “Nicholson never featured on the history syllabus. Nor, I imagine, is he much remembered, let alone commemorated, in the town, except as another distinguished Old Boy and soldier,” says Edgar.

Prof Noel Purdy, RSD pupil from 1983 to 1990 and director of research & scholarship at Belfast’s Stranmillis University College now, says, “There was little or no mention of Nicholson and his career in India” at school. “I walked past the statue every day for seven days, on my way in and out of school. It is right in front of the headmaster’s house (and out of bounds for playing).”

Edgar, who was Purdy’s history teacher, agrees: “The Dungannon statue’s main use in recent years is as a picturesque backdrop for photographs, set as it is among sweet chestnut trees.”

But Purdy thinks it’s a mistake for the school to brush Nicholson’s “distinguished military career in India” under the carpet. “While his career would undoubtedly be judged very differently by today’s standards, nonetheless I believe that there is enormous potential in using his story as a stimulus for discussion and debate among today’s pupils,” he says.

Edgar recalls that even before he joined RSD as a teacher, pupils had started treating Nicholson’s statue with some irreverence: “I learned that it had become something of an annual tradition to festoon Nicholson in an RSD scarf and a silly hat, or something similar. This took place, probably, on the last day of the school year or some other significant date. On occasion, the sword was removed as well. It was always returned though.”

The sword, yes, what became of it? In all recent photos, the General is bereft of it. Edgar says, “I am glad to report that it is safe and well, and securely locked away. In this day and age the school, fearful of losing the sword altogether, and given the ease with which it can be removed, decided to keep it safe from future pranks. I am sure that, if the occasion demanded, it could be replaced on a temporary basis.”

In 1998, the then RSD headmaster, PD Hewitt, had also told BACSA: “Nicholson’s ceremonial sword has occasionally been stolen, so is now only put up for major school events.”

Will It Stay At RSD? 

John, his wife Jane, and some cousins visited Delhi in 2007 to commemorate the General’s 150th death anniversary. John told TOI: “We visited his tomb in the British graveyard (Nicholson Cemetery) which had all been beautifully restored and cared for by the Indian authorities. It was a very special and historic visit for us.”

But while India has put the statue and its controversy behind, Jane, who helped in writing this article by sharing old news clippings from her mother-in-law’s scrapbook, seemed concerned about its future at RSD. While it has a high heritage status (B+) in Northern Island, in an age of revisionist histories, how secure is it on its pedestal? 

“We’re waiting for the day when the statue is removed. A sad state of affairs…” Jane let slip in one email, but quickly added: “Please don’t be alarmed! We have had absolutely no inkling of any impending removal.” Nonetheless, her concern stems from “liberals in the UK who have been tearing down/removing statues/renaming schoolhouses”. 

Well, it isn’t a good time to be an icon from the past. Forget Clive and Rhodes, even Mahatma Gandhi was labelled a racist and his statue removed from University of Ghana in 2018. Will it be a crate again for Nicholson? Time will tell.

*Reported in Belfast Telegraph in Oct 1958. BACSA article from 1998 gives Sep 5 as date of arrival

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A Young Poet’s Prophecy

In 1930, WF Marshall was an RSD student with a flair for writing, and like all bright schoolboys of the pre-digital era, he aspired to be published in the school magazine. He wrote a piece in which a boy dreams he’s visiting RSD in 1960, and “The buildings were still, in the main, as of old, but near the entrance there was a life-size statue on a rough granite pedestal… ‘The Brigadier!’ he said to himself. And going nearer he read on the bronze plate: ‘Brigadier-General John Nicholson…’”

In 1930, the Raj was still strong and the Nicholson statue in Delhi was only 24 years old. Nobody could have imagined it would be moved to RSD one day. Nobody but the child poet Marshall, who “became a distinguished churchman and writer of Tyrone dialect verses, which are still popular,” says Ivor Edgar, who taught history at RSD 1969 onwards, adding, “Astonishingly, he even gets the date right!”

Photo shared by Ivor Edgar

More photos: 

Nicholson Cemetery in Delhi

John Nicholson's grave at Nicholson Cemetery

Indian government file from 1858

Glasgow Herald, Oct 8, 1958

Marina Koppel: How man who stabbed her 140 times was caught after 30 years

When it was found on the victim’s ring in 2008, DNA technology wasn’t good enough to extract a profile, but London police didn’t give up. They saved the hair for 14 more years till the tech improved. Then, they nailed Sandip Patel, the culprit in 1994’s Marina Koppel murder case

Marina Koppel in May 1994

August 7, 1994 was a Sunday, and Marina Koppel went out in the evening. Just 5 feet tall, she was still very attractive at 39, with a firm jaw and a head of blonde-streaked curls. She also liked designer things, like her black Moschino shoulder bag.

Marina’s first stop was a poker tournament at London’s famous Victoria Sporting Club casino, about a kilometre from home. Then she saw a client at a hotel in Heathrow, and returned late to her flat on posh Chiltern Street. 

The two-bedroom flat, set two blocks behind Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street, had been newly repainted and redecorated for Marina, who had moved into it less than a fortnight earlier, on July 26. 

Alone In A Big City

Although she was married, Marina lived alone in London through the week. She visited her husband David Koppel at his Northampton home, about 110km to the north, every weekend. This particular Sunday she had stayed back because of a “trivial” argument with David last time. They had been married 11 years and were still very much in love, but there was one recurring source of tension between them: the nature of her work.

When she had arrived in Britain from Colombia, Luz-Marina Gomez de Rubio had found a cleaning job in a hotel. She was a hotel chambermaid when she and David met at a casino and married in 1983. But later, Marina had started working as a masseuse, and then as an upmarket prostitute.

Working without an intermediary, she sometimes used the pseudonym Luz-Marina Angarita and had a regular clientele of about 100, including “successful people, businessmen, a doctor, and even a politician”. 

Bear in mind that Marina had two children and other family members back in Colombia to whom she regularly sent money. And while David “did not necessarily approve” of her work, he had “accepted” it.

Monday, Her Last Day

Although David and Marina had parted in a huff on July 31, they had made up over the phone and kept in touch through the week. On August 8, Monday, they again spoke several times, “mainly about television programmes”, before 1pm.

Then Marina went out with the Moschino bag on her shoulder. She visited Midland Bank on Baker Street, where she was seen on camera at 1.42pm. It was her last recorded movement outside home.

David called her again in the afternoon but she didn’t reply. He tried her mobile too, again and again through the evening. By 9pm, he was extremely worried, and decided to drive down to London. He reached Chiltern Street “shortly before 11.30 that night”, entered the flat and without turning on a light went to the second bedroom that Marina kept for clients.

“I pushed the door open and I could see by the ambient light something was wrong. The mattress was askew and there was a dark stain on the carpet and the mattress,” he told police in 1994.

It was Marina’s blood. Floor, bedclothes, furniture and walls were all bloody. Marina’s body, clad only in “black lacy lingerie”, was on the floor. The killer had thrown a cover over it. 

“I pulled back the cover and I could immediately see Marina’s head and shoulder, with her lying on her right side facing the bed,” David said. Her body was stiff, her face “was in a tight, fixed grimace and I believe her eyes were shut”. Investigators placed the time of Marina’s death between 5pm and 10.30pm.

Brutal, Vicious, Merciless

While sentencing Marina’s murderer Sandip Patel on Feb 16 this year, Justice Cavanagh described the killing as “brutal, vicious and merciless”.

Sandip Patel in 1994

Patel stabbed Marina 140 times with a “single-sided blade”, probably a kitchen knife. To drive the knife harder, he pressed his left foot against the skirting board of the room and stabbed her on her face, neck, chest and back, rupturing her subclavian artery and almost severing her left jugular vein.

“The blows on Ms Koppel’s neck, on their own, would almost certainly have been sufficient to kill her,” Justice Cavanagh said.

Although Marina tried to defend herself – her hands and arms had stab wounds – she was dead before Patel’s frenzy ebbed. “You continued to inflict blows on Ms Koppel even after her heart had stopped beating,” Justice Cavanagh said.

Forensic pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton, who gave evidence at Patel’s trial, said, “It would have taken well over two minutes to inflict all of the injuries on Ms Koppel.” 

Cold Case For 28 Years

After painting the room with blood, Patel slipped out of Marina’s flat unnoticed and went scot-free for years. At his trial, it was said that a neighbour “had heard screams at about the time that the murder took place”, which makes his escape even more remarkable.

Born on August 26, 1972, Patel was almost 22 years old on the day of the crime. He worked at his father’s newsagency, Sherlock Holmes News, on Baker Street. As he didn’t have an income, it’s unlikely he could have afforded Marina’s “£80” fee – a substantial amount in 1994. So, why was he at her flat, and why did he butcher her? More importantly, why wasn’t he caught sooner?

Patel’s fingerprints were in fact found on a plastic bag in Marina’s kitchen during the initial investigation, but they weren’t considered “significant evidence” because the bag had come from his father’s shop and could have passed through his hands.

Besides, as his lawyer David Sheridan told court, DNA from “84 individuals” was identified in Marina’s flat. “That flat is full of evidence of the attendance of unknown males whether that is marks, fingerprints, DNA, semen, condoms.” A plastic bag from a nearby shop was possibly the least suspicious article on police’s inventory.

A Costly Mistake

Fourteen years went by, and in 2008 London police reexamined the case evidence. That’s when a police scientist found a small hair on the ring that Marina had been wearing. DNA technology at that time was not sensitive enough to get a reliable profile from a single hair, so the ring and the hair were “bagged and preserved” again.

Even with a hair DNA profile, police couldn’t have caught Patel because his DNA was not on their record. But five years later he made a mistake which would cost him dear. On Sep 14, 2013, Patel punched his girlfriend, causing cuts and bruising. Police were called, he was convicted of causing bodily harm, and his DNA became part of their database.

In 2022, the Marina Koppel file was reviewed again, and this time DNA techniques were sharp enough to extract a profile from a single hair. Luckily, as London police’s media and communications manager Rebecca Lowson told TOI, the hair attached to Marina’s ring had its root on it, which is crucial for DNA analysis.

Police now had a profile, and when they tallied it with their database, they got a suspect – Sandip Patel. It seems that Marina had grabbed Patel’s hair while defending herself. It didn’t save her life but ensured he was brought to justice eventually.

Patel was arrested on Jan 19, 2023 as a suspect. The DNA match was a starter but police needed more evidence to seal the case. They took his footprints, and sure enough, the mark on the skirting board of Marina’s room had been made by his left foot.

It seemed like a watertight case after that. As prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones told the jury: “If those footprints were made in Marina’s wet blood, then that can only be because they were left by her killer – someone who was in that room, barefoot, at the time of her blood being on the skirting board.”

Why Did He Kill Her?

After the hearings, the jury spent more than three hours to arrive at a verdict, and it held Patel guilty unanimously. But as London police’s detective superintendent Katherine Goodwin later said, “we may never know the reasons for his actions on that day”.

The first question is, if Patel couldn’t afford Marina’s services, why was he at her flat? Was he there to rob her? The possibility arises because, a day after the murder, Marina’s ATM card was used to withdraw altogether £100 from two machines, one of them near Patel’s Finchley Road home. But why would he murder her for an ATM card, and so brutally at that?

Justice Cavanagh concluded that Patel must have come for sex. “This is the obvious inference from the fact that you were barefoot in her bedroom at the time of the murder. I have no doubt that you had taken your clothes off in the bedroom…Also, when she was found, Ms Koppel was wearing lace underwear and stockings and nothing else.”

But while pronouncing a sentence of at least 19 years, he said Patel had not initially planned to kill Marina. Rather, something happened in the room to stoke his fury. Justice Cavanagh said he had “a strong suspicion” that Patel killed Marina because he could not perform sexually: “There was no evidence of sexual activity having taken place between you, even though that is what you went there to do…after booking an appointment with a sex worker, you found yourself unable to perform sexually and in your humiliation and embarrassment you lost your temper and killed Ms Koppel.”

But nobody knows for sure because Patel refuses to speak. He told police he had no recollection of Marina, her address or the murder: “I have no idea how my fingerprint came to be on this carrier bag or how a hair of mine was present.”

*****

Plastic bag found in Marina's flat

Patel's footprint on the skirting board

Sandip Patel at age 51

In this MP town, Ram has been Raja for 450 years

Mural of Ram Durbar in Orchha Fort's Raja Mahal

A queen of Orchha brought a Ram idol from Ayodhya in the 1570s and established it as the town’s perpetual king in her palace. Locals believe Ram resides in Orchha during the day and returns to Ayodhya at night 

As vedic rituals breathed life into Ayodhya’s Ram Lalla idol (Ram depicted as a child) on January 22, 2024, the little town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh watched agog. For almost 450 years now it has claimed a special bond with Ram’s birthplace. A Ram idol discovered in the Saryu half a century after Mir Baqi built Babri Masjid has presided over Orchha as its Raja ever since. It resides in a grand palace and gets a daily guard of honour. But how this low-lying place deep in Bundelkhand’s woods became a second ‘Ram nagari’ (Ram’s city) is quite a story.

Descendants Of Ram’s Elder Son

Like most Rajput dynasties, the Bundelas of Orchha are wrapped in fantastic legends. Captain CE Luard’s Gazetteer of Orchha says the Bundelas claim to be Suryavanshis like Ram, descended from his elder son Lav. 

They got the name Bundela after an 11th-century ancestor, Hem Karan, propitiated the goddess Vindhyavasini Devi by offering her five human heads. She granted him the boon of greatness and the title of Pancham Vindhyela (panch means five). Time changed Vindhyela to Bundela, and the region ruled by the Bundelas became famous as Bundelkhand.

As for Orchha, it was just a patch of woods beside the Betwa river until Bundela king Rudra Pratap went hunting there in the year 1530. He liked it enough to make it his capital, but one of his chiefs, according to the gazetteer, was less impressed and scoffed, “Ondo chhe (it’s low-lying)”. The name stuck.

Ram Comes To Orchha  

Rudra Pratap was mauled to death by a tiger within a year, and when his elder son Bharti Chand died childless in 1554, the crown of Orchha passed to the younger prince, Madhukar Shah – “by nature a religious recluse...His Rani (Ganesh Kunwari) was of much the same temperament,” says the gazetteer.

Raja and Rani were both pious Vaishnavites, but historian Meenakshi Jain in her book ‘Flight of Deities And Rebirth Of Temples’ says they differed on one key point: “Madhukar Shah was a worshipper of Krishn while his queen was a Ram devotee”. This created tension between them, and became the cause of Ram’s residence in Orchha.

Art critic Narmada Prasad Upadhyaya’s book ‘Paintings of Bundelkhand’ has an interesting account of the rift between Madhukar and Ganesh Kunwari. It says the Raja went on a pilgrimage to Vrindavan and the Rani to Ayodhya. At their parting, Madhukar challenged Ganesh Kunwari to not return unless she brought Ram with her.

Accounts of what happened in Ayodhya differ. Upadhyaya says the Rani tried to take ‘jal samadhi’ (drown herself) in the Saryu; the gazetteer says she dreamt of a Ram idol hidden in the river, but all agree that she returned to Orchha with an idol. Ramesh Yadav, archaeological officer, ASI Bhopal, says the deity from Ayodhya arrived between 1575 and 1578.

Madhukar and Ganesh Kunwari seem to have been reconciled after this, with the Raja becoming an ardent Ram bhakt himself. Upadhyaya says when Ram’s arrival was celebrated on the banks of the Betwa in Orchha, “Madhukar Shah tied ankle bells and danced”. He also started building a massive temple to house the idol, but Ganesh Kunwari decided to keep it in her palace instead. “She seated him in the kitchen of her palace while converting it into a temple, which exists till date. It resembles Ayodhya’s Kanak Bhawan,” Yadav told TOI.

A Tale Of Two Temples

Chaturbhuj Temple with the white Ram Raja Temple on the right

Local lore has it that the Ram idol refused to budge from the Rani’s palace, which therefore became famous as Ram Raja Temple. It’s the only temple in the country where Ram is worshiped as a king. Jain writes in her book: “He wore the turban of royalty, carried a sword in his right hand, and a shield in the left. A guard of honour was held for him every day. Sita wore a crown, and Lakshman was dressed as a prince.” The tradition has been kept alive with police personnel now designated as temple guards. The locals believe Ram rules from Orchha in the daytime and goes back to Ayodhya to sleep at night.

As for Madhukar’s temple project, Yadav says it was finished by his younger son Bir Singh Deo, a contemporary of Mughal emperor Jahangir. An idol of Vishnu was placed inside it so it became famous as Chaturbhuj Temple. Its pine cone-shaped main spire rises to a height of 344 feet and is one of the tallest among Hindu temples.

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Chaturbhuj Temple has the tallest vimana or spire among Hindu temples

Chaturbhuj Temple

Doorway of Ram Raja Temple

Ram Raja Temple

There’s more to Shambhu than protesting farmers and toll plaza

Emperor Jahangir's serai at Shambhu

Shambhu, a mere toll point on the Ambala-Amritsar stretch of NH44, is suddenly famous. First, cops blocked the border here to stop farmers from marching on Delhi. Then, the anticipated clash between farmers and police happened, and a place that thousands whizz past daily without a thought became a dateline.

But Shambhu has watched travellers come and go for at least 500 years. It lay on Sher Shah Suri’s highway five centuries ago. About 400 years ago – the exact date is not known – Emperor Jahangir built a Mughal serai here, and it’s still standing. If you’re driving from Ambala towards Amritsar, look out for a fort-like building on your right shortly after paying toll at Shambhu and crossing the Ghaggar.

Intact After 400 Years

Oddly, there’s no inscription on the serai to fix its date of construction, but art historian Subhash Parihar dated it to Jahangir’s reign – “first quarter of the 17th century” – based on certain design similarities between it and the more famous Nurmahal serai near Jalandhar. 

It’s a large serai, 121m long and 101m wide, with gateways that rise to a height of 11.2m. There are dozens of cells for travellers, and a mosque in the middle of the lawns. From the long roof over the cells, you can see and hear the traffic on the highway.

A Curious Name 

Shambhu is a curious name for a Mughal outpost, but in his paper, ‘Mughal Sarai at Shambhu’, Parihar points out this name does not appear in “any mediaeval chronicle or account of travel”. What did the Mughals call it then?

Parihar says there’s mention of a ‘sarai Nun’ 4 kos (10km) from Ambala. Shambhu serai is 11km from Ambala, so they must be the same. But why would it be called ‘nun’, which means ‘fish’? “The river Ghaggar flows nearby. Perhaps, ample supply of fish was available here.”

However, the name Shambhu is also old. Parihar says, in the mid-1700s French missionary Tieffenthaler mentioned a serai ‘built by Nilkanth’ as the next stage on the road after Ambala. As Nilkanth is another name for Shiva/Shambhu, Parihar thinks an old Shiva temple might have stood nearby, lending its name to the area. 

Maratha-Sikh Battle

So, the Shambhu serai is not just a pile of stones and bricks. Emperors, traders, soldiers, invaders and other travellers stayed in it as they moved between Delhi/Agra and Lahore or Kashmir. It was a permanent village with a changing population.

Sometimes, battles were fought around it, as happened in 1794 when a large Maratha army demanded Patiala’s submission. The Sikhs led by Bibi Sahib Kaur were outnumbered, but they made a surprise night attack at the Maratha camp in Mardan Pur, south of Shambhu, and forced them to clear out. 

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Serai gate from outside

Serai gate from inside

Mosque inside serai

Cells for travellers

Kullu Dussehra: An Introduction

Imagine a Dussehra where nobody tries to prove “my Ravan is bigger than yours”. There’s no staging of the Ramlila; children do not play with swords, maces, bows and arrows, and the victory of good over evil does not translate into noise and smoke.

You can see this Dussehra in Kullu.

The Kullu Dussehra is deservedly famous, but few know that it is nothing like the festival most of us celebrate. For one, it does not end on Vijay Dashami, but only starts on that day to go on for a week.

It is certainly connected to the legend of Lord Ram’s victory over Ravan, but that event is not central to it. Rather, local lore has shaped the celebration of Dussehra in the Kullu Valley for the last few centuries.

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The Kullu valley’s history goes back thousands of years. In ancient times this region was called Kulanta, which means the end of the habitable world. Of course, it was not the end of the habitable world. Lahaul-Spiti lies beyond it, and after that there’s Tibet. But the people of the plains thought Kullu was too inaccessible and their kings didn’t bother to invade and annex it.

And so, as is the case across most of Himachal Pradesh, the tribes and villages had their own local devtas or gods.

(Watch this video to see more Kullu Dussehra photos)

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Even a thousand years ago, the organised Hindu religion had not made much of an impression in Kullu. But things started changing slowly as Muslim invaders uprooted the Rajput kings in the plains. The Rajputs then tried to win new kingdoms in the hills and so brought the Hinduism of the plains to them.

One of these conquering princes came from the Haridwar region. His name was Behangmani Pal, and he founded the dynasty that ruled Kullu till the Independence of India.

Now, Behangmani did not start the Kullu Dussehra. That honour goes to one of his successors named Raja Jagat Singh, a contemporary of the Mughal emperors Jahangir and Aurangzeb.

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Behangmani Pal used to worship the goddess Kali, and she is the family deity of the Kullu royals to this day. But since he was an outsider in the hills, Behangmani needed to win over the people, for which the best strategy was to win over their gods to his side. And Behangmani did this with a clever story.

If you’ve been to Manali, you would have seen the Hidimba temple there. Now this goddess was widely revered in the hills, and legend says she approached Behangmani in the guise of an old woman while he was walking to attend a fair. She requested him to carry her to the fair, and the young prince agreed to do so happily. He even promised to carry her back from the fair.

Pleased with his kindness, Hidimba assumed her giant form, and told Behangmani to climb on to her back. Then she said all the land as far as he could see from her back was his to rule. This legend sounds like just another myth, but it gave legitimacy to Behangmani’s rule, and his descendants have always revered Hidimba as Dadi or grandmother.

When the raja of Kullu sends out invitations to the village gods on Dussehra, Hidimba’s is worded as a request while the others are like polite royal orders. When Hidimba reaches Kullu from Manali, the raja himself or one of his family representatives receives her on the river bank. After that she goes straight to the palace that the royal family vacates for her stay.

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Coming to Raja Jagat Singh, who started Kullu Dussehra, he ruled during the years 1637 to 1672. This (2022) is the 350th year of his passing.

When Jagat Singh became king, Vaishnavism or the worship of Vishnu and his avatars Ram and Krishna was not common in the hills. The king himself worshipped Kali while his people had their own multitude of gods. But then something happened that deeply impacted the state religion of Kullu.

There are two versions of this story. In one, the raja coveted a string of rare pearls belonging to a Brahmin. In the other, he coveted the Brahmin’s daughter. In both stories the Brahmin kills himself after cursing the raja that every time he sat down to eat, he would see worms in his food and blood in his drink.

The raja was leading a tortured existence because of the curse when a Vaishnav saint named Bairagi Krishnadas Payahari, arrived in Naggar, which used to be Kullu’s old capital. He told Raja Jagat Singh he would be cured if he could arrange to bring idols of Ram and Sita from Ayodhya’s Tretanath Temple to Kullu.

The Raja sent off Pandit Damodardas Gosain on this mission, and after waiting for a year the Pandit was able to steal the idols. When the idols arrived in the Kullu hills, the raja washed their feet and drank the water or charnamrit, and he was cured.

After this miracle, Raja Jagat Singh became a Vaishnavite, and declared Vaishnavism would be the state religion. He declared that Lord Ram or Raghunathji would be the king of Kullu from then on while he would serve the god as wazir or minister.

Twelve years before his death, Jagat Singh built the Raghunathji Temple in Kullu. And shortly thereafter he started the annual Dussehra festival in Lord Ram’s honour.

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Just like the Hidimba legend had been Behangmani Pal’s masterstroke, the Raghunathji legend enabled Raja Jagat Singh to tighten his grip over Kullu.

We know that the hill people lived far away from each other in small, independent communities. They honoured nobody more than their local gods. When Jagat Singh declared Lord Ram would be the state god, the position of the village devtas became secondary. It became their duty to come to Kullu and pay homage to Raghunathji on Dussehra. And when the gods bowed before Lord Ram in Kullu, the people who carried them automatically had to bow before Lord Ram’s chief servant, the raja.

So, the Dussehra of Kullu is not just about religion and culture but also politics. It is a stroke of political genius. People of a more independent spirit, such as the natives of Malana, did not want to bow to the king, so their god, Jamlu Devta, refuses to accept the Dussehra invitation to this day.

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When Raja Jagat Singh built the Raghunathji Temple at its present site, Kullu town was called Sultanpur. It had been important since ancient times as a market. The Dhalpur Maidan, where the Dussehra rath yatra is held, was a meeting ground for traders from Tibet and the plains.

Later, the rajas shifted the capital from Naggar to Sultanpur and built their palace beside the temple. A day before Dussehra, when north India celebrates Ram Navami, the village gods start arriving in Kullu, and head straight for Dhalpur Maidan where they have their allotted camps.

But the day’s most important event takes place at the Raghunathji Temple in Sultanpur. Late in the evening, the idols of Lord Ram and Sita are taken out of the sanctum and placed in a swing for devotees to worship.

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The next day, Dussehra, begins with the devtas making a beeline for the Raghunathji Temple. While the temple is their first stop, they spend more time at the Rupi Palace nearby, where they are greeted by members of the royal family. The reception at the palace goes on for hours and it is very loud and colourful.

In the afternoon, the idols of Lord Ram and Sita are carried in a palanquin to Dhalpur Maidan for the rath yatra. Not only the ground but also the buildings around it are covered with people eager to catch a glimpse of the event.

But though the wooden chariot in the ground seems ready to move any minute, the rituals and the unruly devtas ensure that the yatra does not begin till almost 5 pm. But when it does, it’s over in the twinkling of an eye.

The police cordon falls apart as the devtas make a mad dash after the chariot, and suddenly the quiet ground becomes a sea of bobbing heads. This is an adrenaline moment, which explains why it has become the abiding image of Kullu Dussehra.

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For the next four days, there isn’t much to see, unless you care for the cultural events organised every evening in the fairground. The fair itself is mainly an opportunity for the villagers to buy whatever they need, from bangles to automobiles, but it’s unlikely to enthuse big-city dwellers.

The sixth day is again important because that’s when the devtas have their annual meeting with Lord Ram. And on the seventh and last day, the chariot is drawn to the banks of the Beas river, where dry bushes are set ablaze to signify the burning of Ravan’s Lanka. Then the chariot is brought back to Dhalpur Maidan, and Lord Ram and Sita are taken back to their temple in Sultanpur.

The Devtas disperse and the villagers follow in their wake.

Kullu’s week of glory is over.

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The American nurse who became maharani of Indore

Indore was a quiet little city in the Raj days. But on March 28, 1939, its young king gave it a surprise. His highness, the Maharajadhiraj Raj Rajeshwar Sawai Shree Yeshwant Rao Holkar Bahadur, told an assembly of his nobles, officials and subjects that he had remarried.

Yeshwant’s wife Sanyogita had fallen ill in Honolulu and died in Switzerland two years earlier, leaving behind their only child, princess Usha. So, Yeshwant’s marriage should have been joyful news, but there was more than one hitch in it.

For one, he had married an American woman. An ordinary American woman who had been his nurse at a Los Angeles hospital a year earlier.

Now, Yeshwant wasn’t the first Indore royal to marry a foreigner. Ten years earlier his father Tukoji had done the same. But Tukoji had already given up the crown to Yeshwant before tying the knot with his American bride, Nancy Ann Miller. And Nancy had at least made a show of converting to Hinduism. Her marriage to Tukoji had been solemnised the Hindu way in the presence of his subjects.

But Yeshwant had married away from home. He said he had married in Europe, but the truth was his marriage to Marguerite Lawler Branyen had taken place at Taxco city in Mexico six months earlier – in September 1938.

Why wasn’t he being truthful? What did he have to hide?

The truth was that Marguerite had been married before. Her double surname was a giveaway, but the Indore state’s publicity office insisted Branyen was her maiden name. She had been Ms Branyen before her marriage to Yeshwant, it said. And that was a lie. Her name was Marguerite Lawler. She had been a stewardess on the Union Pacific Railroad before she did a nursing course and married John Paul Branyen, a jeweller.

Marguerite was working at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles when Yeshwant suffered a severe attack of asthma and was admitted there in 1938. Marguerite nursed him to health and won his heart in the bargain. It was enough for him to describe her as “the lady I love from the heart”.

When he announced his marriage in March 1939 Yeshwant said he had married Marguerite for mental peace. In his own words: “Without mental peace I cannot properly discharge my duties as ruler.”

So Yeshwant left the hospital with love in his heart, and Marguerite on his arm. He hired her to be princess Usha’s nurse and they travelled together to Europe and India. Reports said she used to call him ‘Junior’, and the Oxford-educated maharaja of Indore was cool with that.

But the British government was not cool about Marguerite’s status. They weren’t sure whether she was legally divorced, and to avoid a scandal they refused to address her as Her Highness. At first, they even opposed her presence at official functions.

But Yeshwant and Marguerite got along well enough. Unlike Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala and Nina Grosup, whose wide age gap led to tragedy, Yeshwant and Marguerite were the same age. She arrived in Indore and forgot her American working class life for a while.

There was not a quiet moment in their life. There were daily parties, and they seldom went to bed before 2am. The day started at noon with breakfast at 2pm, followed by more parties and games. Yeshwant, who was known as ‘Indore Sport’, was an avid hunter and bridge player. He once boasted about shooting 154 tigers. Marguerite also notched up 30 tigers, 8 panthers and 1 bear in the three years she spent in India

But eventually, this aimless life got on her nerves. By some accounts the strain in their married life arose from her inability to produce an heir. Whatever the cause, Marguerite flew back to the US in 1942, never to return.

In California, she lived in a mansion that Yeshwant had built at Laguna Beach just before the second World War started. It was more fortress than home, and it was said he had built it as a shelter against the war for his family. The house had thick walls, windows barred with iron grilles, double doors and burglar alarms. It’s a heritage property now.

Yeshwant stayed on in India for about a year, during which he managed to lose his heart to another American married woman named Euphemia Watts Crane, also known as Fay Stevenson. Her husband Frank Arthur Crane worked as an American aviation employee in India. But Yeshwant was smitten and decided to marry Euphemia. However, he could not do that without divorcing Marguerite, so he flew to Nevada in May 1943.

Why Nevada? To obtain the infamous Reno divorce, of course. In Reno, Nevada, getting a divorce was as easy as ordering fries. All you needed was proof of residence in the state, and that was easy too. A six weeks’ stay in Nevada made you a bona fide resident for the purpose of divorce. Special resorts called dude ranches provided accommodation for this purpose, and Yeshwant stayed at the Palomino Ranch.

He checked in on May 23 and had to kill time till July 4 when his six weeks got over. The Detroit Evening Times of July 11, 1943 said Yeshwant rode around on a horse wearing Levis jeans and a chef’s cap but no shirt. He carried a fishing rod with him all the time and often fished catfish in the ranch’s private lake.

The 4th of July was a Sunday in 1943 so the Monday after was a national holiday. Poor Yeshwant had to wait two extra days to file his divorce suit. He alleged extreme cruelty by Marguerite and became a free man in the morning of July 6.

But he wasn’t the only one seeking a divorce that morning. Euphemia also ended her marriage with Frank Arthur Crane in the same court, and 10 hours later they were married and off on their honeymoon in Yeshwant’s car. They had planned to drive from Reno to South California but the car broke down one hour later in Carson City, forcing the newlywed royal couple to spend the night in the honeymoon cottage of a motel. Not quite a drive into the sunset.

It’s funny they had started on a long drive in the middle of petrol rationing due to the world war. Yeshwant had a gas quota for driving in Los Angeles city only. So, two weeks later when he made another trip from Hollywood to Las Vegas, the office of price administration suspended his gas ration for 6 months.

What became of Marguerite after the divorce? Although Yeshwant had accused her of cruelty, he left princess Usha in her care, along with the fortress mansion. Usha and Marguerite had become very fond of each other and Marguerite, although childless, was a good mother.

Marguerite lived in the mansion for some time but felt lonely. She said she wanted to become a part of America again. It wasn’t long before she met Charles Masters, six years younger than her, and a member of the US coast guard. Marguerite fell in love with him and decided to do her bit for her country. She volunteered for the navy’s emergency services training at Hunter College in New York, where she had to be up by 5.45am every day, have breakfast by 6.15, wash her own clothes and live with 10 others in a barracks

She had found the simple life she missed and was enjoying it. But Usha had to be sent back to Indore. Marguerite had brought a picture of Usha with her to Hunter College, and she told the press: “I was lonely, so I knew Usha would be too. But I am going to bring her back after the war.”

That didn’t happen but she married Masters to start the plain ordinary family she had always wanted. “I have never been so happy before,” Marguerite told reporters in 1945, adding: “We just want the same right to privacy and the same right to happiness that is the privilege of every other American couple.”

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