Donald Hume discovered what he could not have imagined even in his blackest moments: you could confess to murder in a national newspaper and still walk free. In June 1958, the Sunday Pictorial ran a headline that detonated through Britain’s legal establishment—I KILLED SETI AND GOT AWAY WITH MURDER. Hume, who had been acquitted of the murder of Stanley Seti at the Old Bailey eight years earlier, now admitted in print that he had done it, and that he had done it alone, that the three mysterious men he had blamed at his trial—Mack, Greeny, and the Boy—were pure invention. Under the rule of double jeopardy, there was nothing the authorities could do.
A man had been tried for murder and found not guilty, and no confession published afterward could change that. Hume had outwitted the machinery of British justice, and he knew it. He posed for photographs, collected his fee of two thousand pounds—the equivalent of roughly fifty thousand pounds today—and skipped the country before the story reached the newsstands. The case had begun nine years earlier, in the autumn of 1949, when Stanley Seti’s sister Eva grew worried.
Her brother had not come home on the evening of the fourth of October, and the following morning he failed to appear at his used-car business on Warren Street in north London. Yet his car, a distinctive cream-colored Citroën, sat parked outside his garage at Cambridge Mews. It was unusual for the forty-six-year-old Seti to break from his habits so completely. He had last been seen around half past five, driving his car, and had telephoned his girlfriend Connie at about six to say he would not see her that evening, because he had to go to Watford to look at a Jaguar.
Eva reported him missing, and the police took the disappearance seriously. Seti was a shady character, known to them as a black marketeer—a “spiv” in the vernacular of the postwar years—and a dealer in stolen cars. A search of his apartment turned up his passport, and there were no signs that he had packed for any journey. The police sensed immediately that this was a malign occurrence.
Seti had been carrying a roll of one thousand pounds in five-pound notes, the equivalent of about thirty-five thousand pounds today, and the possibility that he had been robbed and murdered for the money was strong. For the police, one piece of good fortune stood out: the notes had been drawn from the bank that afternoon, and their serial numbers were on record. These were circulated widely in the hope that their appearance would provide a lead. The disappearance was reported extensively in the press, and on the fifteenth of October the Seti family offered a reward of one thousand pounds for information.
But searches of bombed-out sights and buildings from the war, and of London wasteland, came to nothing. Stanley Seti had vanished into thin air. Stanley Seti had been born Sulman Seti in Baghdad in 1903, into a Jewish family that moved to England around 1909, when he was six. They settled in Manchester, and Sulman became Stanley.
As a teenager he worked as a shipping merchant with his brothers, but it was not a success, and after failing to establish a trading business in the 1920s he began raising money by buying goods and selling them at a loss—a short-term measure robbing Peter to pay Paul that inevitably brought him to grief. He was charged under the Debtors and Bankruptcy Acts and sentenced to eighteen months in Manchester prison, serving twelve. By 1939 he was living with his brother Max at Queen Anne’s Mews in London and dealing in motor cars. The war was a gift to Seti.
Of Turkish origin, he was not required to serve in the British forces, and the black market that emerged from war deprivations and rationing gave a kind of quasi-legitimacy to many illegal activities. He prospered in the twilight world of Warren Street’s motor-car trade, operating a cash business that regularly dealt in stolen cars, acquiring log books, respraying vehicles, and reselling them, while acting as a curbside banker cashing checks for commission. He was also rumored to have been involved in gun running, and it is possible he was a police informer, which would explain why his disappearance caused such immediate concern. There was speculation that Seti had been lured by an adversary using the false prospect of a Jaguar deal in Watford and then murdered, but nothing could be learned of any such arrangement, and the investigation stalled.
On the morning of the twenty-first of October, Sydney Tiffin went duck hunting on Dengie Marshes near Tillingham in Essex. From his shallow punt he saw something floating in the water, and when he tugged at the cord binding it, a man’s torso, devoid of head and legs, floated out, the arms tied behind its back. Recovering from the shock, Tiffin drove a stake into the mud flats, secured the body with a rope to prevent it from floating away, and went to inform the police. Initially it was thought the body had been dumped overboard from a boat, for a car could not possibly have reached the shallow marsh waters.
The pathologist Francis Camps examined the torso at autopsy and noted five stab wounds as the probable cause of death. But he was struck by the appearance of trauma to the torso. He had seen this before, during the war, when he had examined the bodies of airmen who had hit the water after their parachutes failed to open. The torso shared many of those characteristics.
Camps thought it possible the body had been dropped into the water from a great height, from an airplane. Fingerprints taken from the hands of the torso were matched to a set on file. They belonged to Stanley Seti. He was no longer a missing person.
The inquiry, led by Superintendent Colin McDougall, then had a stroke of fortune. One of the five-pound notes Seti had been carrying turned up. It was traced to a taxi driver, who recalled being given it by a man he had collected from Southend Airport and taken to Finchley Road in London. Combined with the pathologist’s observations about the torso striking water from a great height, this was suggestive.
Police made inquiries at local airfields. Elstree Airport reported that a man had been seen taking packages to a light Auster aircraft on the fifth of October, and Southend Airport reported that the following day the same man had been seen struggling with a heavy package before taking off in a light aircraft. The man’s name was Donald Hume. Brian Donald Hume was born in Swanage, Dorset, in December 1919, illegitimate, his mother separated from and widowed by her husband Percy Hume, who was not Donald’s father.
Hume was acutely sensitive about this throughout his life. He spent his first years in an orphanage, and whatever embellishments he later introduced, he clearly had an unhappy childhood. At age eight he was adopted by his grandmother, Ada Fitzgerald Whittington, who lived in north London. He was happy with her, but it did not last; after several months he was sent to live with his aunt Judy in Basingstoke, who was headmistress of a local primary school, and it often seemed to Donald that he was singled out for punishment.
Worse, he began to hear rumors that his aunt was actually his mother. It was a great shock, and his estrangement from his mother evolved into a hatred that was probably mutual. He attended Queen Mary’s Grammar School in Basingstoke from age twelve but was not academic and left at fourteen. After a brief stint as a kitchen boy he returned home, felt unwelcome, and ran away to London.
At Somerset House, where records of all births and deaths in the country are held, he obtained a copy of his birth certificate and discovered the chilling truth: Aunt Judy was indeed his mother, and the space for his father’s name was blank. His natural father was not prepared to acknowledge him. Donald’s uncle, the noted physicist Professor Richard Whittington, later claimed that Donald’s uncle John was his father, in which case he too had done little to bond with his son. Angry and feeling unwanted, Donald held a grudge against those who had rejected him for the rest of his life.
He worked initially as an apprentice electrician in London, but it did not last. At seventeen he joined the British Communist Party—doubtfully out of any ideological affinity, but rather because it represented a violent rejection of the society he resented. He took part in clashes with Oswald Mosley’s fascists in London in the 1930s, a natural physical outlet for his anger and shame. In 1939, at the outbreak of war, Donald set aside his political allegiances and joined the RAF.
He had always been fascinated by flying, possibly inspired by his uncle Richard, who had worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Donald had built model airplanes as a boy and was excited by the prospect of becoming a pilot, and by the broad canvas for adventure war offered. But severe illness—cerebral spinal meningitis—forced him out early in the war, to his great chagrin. Out of uniform, he felt rejected, cheated of his chance for glory.
He purchased a uniform and medals from a discharged pilot officer for five pounds and began to impersonate an RAF officer. The uniform gave him respect and admiration, and also trust. It opened doors and enabled him to pass bad checks—everyone trusted an RAF pilot. He was caught, and in 1942 received a suspended prison sentence.
Perhaps it was the shock of that sentence hanging over him, or a new impetus for his talents, but Hume began an electrical business with the help of his uncle Richard, inventing electrical household goods, notably a toaster, manufacturing and selling it successfully. By 1947, prosperous and still only twenty-seven, Donald met Cynthia Mary Wright at the M Club in Welbeck Street. Her marriage was failing, and Donald fell in love with her. They married in 1948, soon after her divorce, toured the Continent in a car, and Hume began to neglect his business.
An attempt to set up a factory in his wife’s hometown of Hay-on-Wye turned out disastrously, and he returned to London with dwindling finances and no clear direction. He did acquire a mongrel dog called Tony, which became his faithful companion; he was so taken with the dog when he came across it in the street that he bought it from its owner on the spot for one pound. He also fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition in 1949, obtaining his Class C pilot’s license. He had his wings at last.
It was in early 1949 that Hume came across Stanley Seti at the Hollywood Club in Marble Arch and was impressed by him—his flashy dress style, his obvious affluence, his cynical outlook. He had met him once before, briefly, in 1947, when he bought a vehicle off him, but the renewal of their acquaintance was to be fateful for both men. Donald began selling forged petrol coupons for Seti and then stealing cars for him. Hume later claimed to have been involved in numerous international smuggling escapades using aircraft, but this was probably fanciful.
The reality was that Donald Hume was a small-time crook. Superintendent McDougall’s inquiries revealed that although Hume was somewhat strapped for cash, he had recently come into money. His possession of banknotes that had been in Seti’s possession, and his reported flights from airports in southeast England, provided a definite line of inquiry. At half past seven on the morning of Thursday the twenty-seventh of October, detectives arrived at 620B Finchley Road and arrested Donald Hume.
He initially denied any knowledge of Seti’s death but quickly adapted as he realized the extent of the detectives’ knowledge. He had a strange story to tell. Three men called Mack, Greeny, and the Boy had asked him if he was “the flying smuggler,” to which he had assented. They then offered him one hundred pounds—about three and a half thousand pounds in today’s terms—to drop two parcels from an aircraft, and he had accepted, hiring a car and a plane for the purpose.
The following day he was asked to drop a further, larger package for fifty pounds. He had asked what was in the packages and was told printing plates for forged petrol coupons. One of the men had a gun, which he toyed with threateningly. Hume agreed to do the drop but became suspicious.
What could he do? He feared going to the police, so he did what he had been asked and kept quiet. The police did not believe him, and on Friday the twenty-eighth of October he was charged with the murder of Stanley Seti. The trial of Donald Hume began at Number One Court of the Old Bailey on the eighteenth of January 1950, after a false start before a judge who became ill and had to be replaced.
It recommenced under Justice Sir Frederick Sellers. The prosecution, led by Christmas Humphreys, contended that Hume had been seen carrying parcels that were undoubtedly parts of the dismembered body of Seti out of his Finchley Road apartment, putting them into a hired car and then aboard an Auster light aircraft, and that he had subsequently disposed of these packages at sea. Five-pound notes known to have been in Seti’s possession were traced to Hume. Traces of blood about the flat were proved to be human and type O, which was Seti’s blood group.
The living-room carpet had been cleaned and dyed a darker shade of green the day after Seti’s disappearance, though it still retained bloodstains. There were also bloodstains found between the floorboards and on the plaster-and-lath structure of the ceiling of the flat below. It was, the prosecution argued, abundantly clear that Hume had murdered Seti in his flat, butchered him, and disposed of his body parts. The characters of Mack, Greeny, and the Boy were pure inventions.
The defense, led by Richard Francis Levy, countered that four out of every ten people had blood group O, so the finding was not significant. The bloodstains on the cleaned carpet had not penetrated to the underfelt, which could not suggest a man had been stabbed to death there. Not a single fingerprint of Seti’s had been found at the flat; there was no proof whatsoever that he had ever been there. Regarding the car and the aircraft, Hume admitted to disposing of the body at the behest of the three men he described.
In addition, Seti could not have been murdered and dismembered in the flat while Hume’s wife was upstairs listening to the radio and sleeping. Dr. Robert Teare, who in later years conducted the autopsy on Beatles manager Brian Epstein, was called as a defense witness and gave his opinion that it would have taken more than one man to kill Seti. Two independent witnesses, neither of whom knew Hume, gave evidence that they had heard of a man called Mack or Max and “the Boy” in connection with Cambridge Mews.
The occupant of the flat below Hume’s, Alfred Spencer, gave evidence that he had been at home on the evening of the fourth of October but had heard nothing. Hume gave evidence on his own behalf, providing further details of the three men: Mack was a thick-set man about five feet ten, fair-haired, in his thirties, wearing a ring with a stone that he constantly polished against his coat; Greeny wore a flashy suit and plain suede shoes, was about five feet seven, and wore a belted overcoat but no hat; the Boy had a receding hairline and wore steel-rimmed glasses. Christmas Humphreys cross-examined Hume about the parcel. “What did you think it was?
” he asked. “I thought it might have been part of the human body,” Hume replied. “It was obviously part of a human body, wasn’t it? ” “No, sir, not obviously.
When Seti was missing I did not connect the two. ” “What else could they have been that spurts with human blood? ” demanded Humphreys. He pressed the point that Hume could have informed the police.
“No, I was scared stiff. ” “Why not, if you are an honest man? ” persisted Humphreys. “I am not saying I am 100 percent honest.
I am saying I am a semi-honest man. But I am not a murderer. ” Humphreys’s suggestion that Hume had dismembered the body in the flat met with the response “absolute baloney. ” When Humphreys accused him of lying, Hume said angrily, “I am the only one who knows whether I killed Seti or not, other than the man who murdered him.
I have a clear conscience regarding the killing of the unfortunate man. ” The judge intervened rather foolishly, saying, “You are adopting this as a personal matter,” to which Hume replied very reasonably, “My life is a personal matter. ”
His wife Cynthia was called, and her quiet, respectable demeanor impressed the court. She said it was quite impossible for her husband to have killed anyone in her flat without her knowledge, still less to have dismembered them.
For the defense, Levy’s final appeal to the jury was simple and effective. There was no evidence to suggest anything Hume had said was untrue. A rogue he might be, a murderer he was not. The three men knew him to be a pilot and wanted him to do something shady for money, and no one—not the man in the flat below, not his wife in the room above—had heard any disturbance to suggest a fight.
There was no evidence, he said, that Seti had ever been at the flat. Christmas Humphreys for the Crown could only reiterate the litany of coincidences: the blood, the cleaned carpet, the five-pound notes linked to Seti, and Hume’s disposal of the body. Mack, Greeny, and the Boy were pure fiction, he said, to disguise the fact that Donald Hume had murdered Stanley Seti. The judge summed up, suggesting that where the jury found Hume’s evidence in conflict with that of another witness, they might prefer the latter, in view of Hume’s unreliable character.
The jury retired and after two and a half hours returned to advise the judge that they could not reach agreement on a verdict and were unlikely to do so. The jury was dismissed, and a second jury was sworn in and instructed by the judge to return a verdict of not guilty, which it did. In anticipation of a possible acquittal, the Director of Public Prosecutions had prepared a second charge, which Christmas Humphreys now submitted: that of being an accessory after the fact to murder. To this Hume pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years in prison.
He was not guilty of murder and would not face the inevitable death penalty, but he was guilty of assisting in concealing a murder. He served eight years, mostly at Dartmoor in Devon, until released on the first of February 1958. In those eight years he had been popular in prison, using his electrical skills to produce radio sets for other prisoners. But his wife had divorced him, and his dog Tony had been put down.
Many people believed Donald Hume guilty of murdering Stanley Seti, and the police had few doubts. But there was an equally large number convinced he was a rogue and an accessory but not a murderer. It was a mystery that would doubtless still divide people today, as the jury had been divided in 1950, had it not been for what came next. Hume’s confession in the Sunday Pictorial was a sensation, and his account ran serialized over five weeks.
He told how he had returned home to 620B Finchley Road on the evening of the fourth of October 1949 to discover Stanley Seti’s Citroën parked outside. This irked Hume for two reasons: he guarded his private life fiercely, and although he was an associate of Seti’s, he disliked him intensely. The reasons he gave were that Seti had kicked his beloved dog Tony because it had scratched one of his cars, and that Seti had boasted of being out with Hume’s wife. When Hume arrived back at the flat, he discovered Seti sitting coolly on the sofa in his living room.
He had let himself in. Hume had not forgotten the incident over Seti kicking his dog; he had not acted on that occasion, and that in itself provided a deep well of anger on which to draw. Here was Seti, his large obtrusive yellow car outside his home, his large intrusive person in his house, while his wife was listening to the radio upstairs in bed. He reacted badly.
“If you come here again, it will be your lot,” he said. “Who’s going to stop me, you and who else? ” Seti sneered. “If I want to come here, I will.
” Hume stepped closer and threatened to throw him down the stairs. “You’ll be the one to get slung down the stairs,” Seti told him. Hume fetched an SS dagger he kept as a surprise possession. “Next time you come here you’ll get this,” he said, brandishing the weapon.
“Go away, you silly little bastard,” Seti replied contemptuously. “What do you think you’re doing, playing soldiers? There’s no place for you. ” A terrible fight ensued, in which Hume stabbed Stanley Seti repeatedly in the chest.
Seti was dead on Donald Hume’s sitting-room floor. He stood and listened. He heard nothing, only the sound of his own heart thumping within and the faint hum of traffic beyond the net-curtained windows. No one had heard, it seemed.
He drew the curtains, dragged Seti’s body to the coal cupboard, and cleaned up as best he could. He was stunned by the rapid escalation of words that had led him to kill, but he also realized he was in a terrible position, standing in the shadow of the noose. He found Seti’s car keys in his pocket, drove the Citroën to Cambridge Mews where it was normally kept, wearing gloves, and then caught a taxi back to Finchley Road. Cynthia had apparently slept through everything.
Donald Hume had a sleepless night, sitting up chain-smoking, and during the night he formulated a plan. The next day, the fifth of October, would be the busiest of Donald Hume’s life. He obtained a hacksaw and a short-bladed linoleum knife. The doctor came that morning to see the baby Alison, and Donald did his best to ensure the place revealed no signs of a struggle, conversing with the doctor normally while the dead body of Stanley Seti lay in the coal cupboard yards from where he discussed his difficulties in sleeping at night.
His wife was to take their daughter Alison to Great Ormond Street Hospital at one o’clock, and the cleaning woman, Mrs. Stride, was to come at half past two. He had a ninety-minute window of opportunity in which to dismember the body of Stanley Seti. He took the sitting-room carpet to be cleaned and dyed a darker shade of green, bought floor stain and stained the floor to conceal the blood that had penetrated the carpet, then cut out the remaining underfelt and stretched it until it compensated for the loss of its original size.
An examination of the roll of five-pound notes Seti had on him revealed most were damaged by Hume’s knife work or too bloody to be salvaged. He retrieved only one hundred pounds and burned nine hundred. As soon as Cynthia left for Great Ormond Street at one o’clock, he got to work. He dragged Seti’s body into the breakfast room and, working on the lino watched by a mildly curious Tony, severed his legs and then his head, using the knife and hacksaw.
He placed these in a box and wrapped the torso and legs in felt and carpet, then cleared the floor of the horrific detritus of the past hour. He hired a Singer saloon car and an airplane, an Auster J1N Alpha, from the United Services Flying Club at Elstree Airport, where he was a member. In the mid-afternoon he and Tony drove to Elstree with two of the packages, containing the head and legs of Stanley Seti, leaving the torso in the coal cupboard. He carried the packages to the plane, placing one behind the seats and the other on the passenger seat.
He took off from Elstree at around half past four with a full tank of fuel and a three-and-a-half-hour flying capability, but visibility problems curtailed the full extent of its use. Sunset at Elstree was 1829, at Southend 1825, his destination; he had no flying capability at night, and visibility would inevitably be sub-optimal long before sunset. Nevertheless, Donald headed out over the English Channel, making a brief feint as if heading for Southend. It was nerve-wracking.
“Sheer desperation was urging me on,” he wrote. “I couldn’t afford to be seen dropping suspicious looking packages near Southend Pier. ” He flew for at least an hour until the French coast was visible, cruising at no more than seventy miles per hour. With no ships in sight, he disposed of the SS dagger, hacksaw, and other objects, and then the two grisly packages he had weighted down with stones from the garden.
He watched the parcels descend and was satisfied to see them disappear into the water. Then he turned back for England, making a poor and conspicuous landing at Southend. He arranged for Tony to stay at Elstree Airport with his car that night, both of which he would collect the next day, and took a taxi back to 620 Finchley Road, paying the driver from a large bankroll in his pocket—courtesy of Stanley Seti. It was now half past eight.
It had been a long day, and Seti’s torso remained in the coal cupboard. In the morning, Thursday the sixth of October, he had a decorator, Joseph Staddon, varnish the floor. He traveled to Elstree and returned with Tony in the Singer, and asked the decorator to help him lift the package from the coal cupboard to the car. He told Mr.
Staddon not to lift the package underneath, as it was moist from blood seepage. By half past two he was at Southend, parking the car near the Auster airplane, where he was observed struggling to get the torso aboard. In answer to an engineer’s inquiry concerning the contents of the package, he replied, “Fish. ” Once again he took the Auster up with the heavy torso of Seti sitting upright beside him.
Soon he was over the Channel, and in poor visibility he tilted his plane and with great difficulty pushed its contents out at around two thousand feet. He then headed for the coast but lost his bearings and had to make his way along the shoreline looking for landmarks, temporarily landing in a field to ask directions of a farmer, who obliged him by turning the propeller to start the engine. Eventually he landed at Gravesend at half past six. Once more he took a taxi home.
But how much of this was true? There are many parts of the story that are suspect. Hume gave other accounts of the killing both publicly and privately in the years that followed, depending on his motivation—once claiming his wife had stabbed Seti, and also that he had caught Seti and Cynthia in the house together and killed him. But both these versions were motivated by spite toward his estranged wife.
What is certain is that Seti drove to 620B Finchley Road that evening, that he had mentioned this intention to no one, and that he had never been there before. It is also certain he informed others of his intention to drive to Watford to see about a Jaguar, and that he was carrying one thousand pounds. Why did he stop at Hume’s on route, as it were, sometime after six? It is absurd to suppose that Seti would have entered the house and simply sat and awaited Hume in the sitting room.
Why did he not ring the apparently very loud doorbell? If the door had been unlocked and he did enter uninvited, he would have heard noise in the house and would in any case have assumed, by the door being open, that someone was home, and he would have made his presence known. Furthermore, how could he have known his wait would be rewarded, that Donald Hume would return to the house soon? If Hume’s story is to be believed, then Stanley Seti let himself into the house through an unlocked front door, uninvited and unannounced, knowing someone was home, to await someone whose arrival could not possibly be known.
It will not do. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that either Hume or his wife admitted Seti to the house that evening. There is a far more obvious and altogether more satisfactory explanation, one that accords with Hume’s description of his emotional responses to the situation. Seti did what anyone else would do: he walked up to the door and rang the bell.
The bell was loud and heard. Mrs. Hume opened the door to Seti and told him her husband was not home but was expected to return shortly. She invited Seti in to wait and showed him into the sitting room.
It is likely she knew Seti, knew of Hume’s association with him, and knew him in any case from the nightclubs where she had worked and in which Seti was a well-known visitor. On Donald’s arrival home, she will have abstracted herself and left the two men alone. From Donald’s perspective, his account to the Sunday Pictorial was essentially correct: he arrived home to find Seti’s car outside and his obtrusive person sitting on his sofa, possibly talking to his wife. This was a particular affront—a man he disliked intensely speaking to his wife, of whom he was jealous, and about whom he had probably heard rumors concerning Seti’s intentions.
Seti regarded Hume as his subordinate and Hume sensed it; Seti’s turning up at Hume’s home was another proof of superiority, and it needled him. But Hume told only half a story. It seems that Seti had come to talk business, and the one thousand pounds was part of this, but the two men quarreled. Hume simplified the account so that the entire episode centered on Seti’s intrusion.
It would certainly have been the key factor to him, but it is also probable that Seti’s visit concerned the Jaguar, possibly that Hume was to have stolen one but failed. Seti was angry. In an already tense atmosphere, an altercation occurred. Hume claimed there was a big fight during which they rolled over and over until he ultimately overcame Seti.
This is not credible for two reasons. First, no one heard anything of a struggle—no shouts, screams, or heavy thuds—yet his wife was upstairs just a few feet above and his neighbor a few feet below. Second, Hume did not appear to have received any injuries or bruises that might indicate a struggle with a large man like Seti fighting for his life. It was also noted that Seti’s hands showed no signs of knife wounds, the characteristic telltale of the defensive instinct to protect oneself from a knife attack.
That is because Seti was taken by surprise. It is likely the conversation was one of mutual contempt and hostility until Hume’s temper suddenly exploded and he rushed and stabbed Seti repeatedly in the chest, perhaps while Seti was still seated or in the process of getting to his feet. This raises the question of how much Cynthia knew of the murder. Her account did not obviously seek to exonerate her husband.
She said, for instance, that she did not see or hear of the visit of Mack, Greeny, and the Boy, when she could easily have done so. She was somewhat agnostic in her evidence. She was not for this reason a co-conspirator, but she certainly must have known more than she ever let on. It is impossible that Cynthia Hume could have been oblivious to the events in the house during the three days from the fourth to the sixth of October 1949—that she should hear no noise when she must surely have known a man other than her husband was in the house, that she saw nothing amiss with her husband not going to bed, saw no blood spatter or attempts to clean the area downstairs, no smell of cleaning fluids and disinfectant pervasive in the house, saw nothing odd about blood on the sofa and attempts to clean it the day after Seti had left, the large stain on the sitting-room carpet, nor found it surprising that Donald decided to get the carpet cleaned that day, or decided to stain the floor beneath with spirit stain, adding to the intense cocktail of cleaning-agent aromas, or bring in a decorator to carry out further remedial work.
And she found nothing strange in him having no money on the fourth of October and an abundance the following day, even giving her eighty pounds—about three thousand pounds today. All this suggests she knew something, probably after the fact, and acted so as not to implicate her husband. Had she been directly involved, she would likely either have reported him or provided corroboration. She did neither.
She claimed not to have known Seti or that he had been at the house that night. That was the extent of her lies; on all else she remained silent. The dismemberment of Seti clearly took place sometime between his death on the evening of the fourth of October and Hume’s leaving the house after three the following day. There is no reason to doubt Hume’s account here, that this was done on the afternoon of the fifth of October after his wife left for the hospital and before the cleaning lady arrived.
Mrs. Stride’s account to the court, of his not wishing to be disturbed for a period in the kitchen early in the afternoon, seems to corroborate his account, as does his acquisition of a hacksaw and knife that morning. Finally, there is Hume’s account of flying from Southend and disposing of the parcels from two thousand feet when the French coast came into sight. This is pure “Biggles,” as is his account of putting down in a field to ask directions and having a farmer swing the prop for him before heading for Gravesend.
Hume’s flying skills were modest and recreational; he had been flying solo for just a few months and had no navigational skills. It is highly probable that Hume flew directly out beyond Southend and over the North Sea, where he disposed of the packages offshore, close enough in fact for the torso, which did not sink, to find its way back to the Essex coast. The impact of the confession was felt throughout the law-and-order establishment in Britain. A man had been tried and acquitted, not only escaping hanging for a crime but now providing a full and detailed confession of his guilt, in defiance of the machinery that had attempted to bring him to justice.
Nothing had ever been known like this before. The two thousand pounds was his chief motive for confessing, but he was also motivated by his hatred of the system. He had succeeded in cocking a giant snook against the world—against his mother, the police, the pompous judges who told him not to take the threat of being hanged personally, the lawyers, the lawmakers, the orphanage women, his teachers, the RAF service board. To add insult to injury, Hume told of his invention of the three men who had paid him to dispose of the parcels.
Mack, Greeny, and the Boy were pure fiction. Mack had been based on Superintendent McDougall himself as “Mac,” and Greeny and the Boy he had lifted from the Graham Greene novel Brighton Rock. It was an act of defiance and mockery. But what could be done?
The rule of double jeopardy applied in 1958 Britain, ensuring that a person could not be tried for a crime after being acquitted of it. This principle had never been tested in this way before. Hume seemed to have had his revenge. He could openly speak of having murdered a man, and no one could do anything about it.
The possibility of perjury arose, but in practical terms it was unrealistic and unlikely to succeed. Hume could simply say he had invented the story he told the Sunday Pictorial, and the Crown would be left in the same position as at the murder trial—without evidence, and with great potential for further embarrassment. Moreover, Hume had thought this through. Having posed for photographs and given a full account, he skipped out of the country before publication with his two thousand pounds.
He embellished his account; parts could easily be brushed off as fictional, but this simply strengthened his defense against possible perjury charges. There can be no doubt that Hume’s story, in its material details, was true. Donald Hume had got away with murder. Here the story should have ended, but it did not.
There was a last chapter still to be written. Donald Hume changed his name by deed poll to Donald Brown in April after his release from Dartmoor, and then, using the same loophole many others used, obtained a passport in the name of Stephen Bird, using a dead man’s identity. It was in this name he flew to Switzerland before the story of his confession broke in the Sunday Pictorial. On arrival he became Johnny Byrd, a debonair Canadian test pilot who soon fell in love with a Swiss hairdresser named Trudy Sommer.
His money was running through; the two thousand pounds dwindled fast, especially in the hands of a spendthrift like him in an expensive place like Zurich. But Hume was nothing if not imaginative and audacious, and he soon formed a plan. Using Switzerland as a base, he decided to become a bank robber. On the first of August 1958, Hume flew to London as Stephen Bird, chemical engineer, and stayed at a hotel in Baker Street.
From here he reconnoitered, selecting the Boston Manor Road Midland Bank branch as his target. He was hoping to net forty thousand pounds—approximately one and a half million pounds today—which would set Trudy and himself up for life. He rose early and spent the morning in Hyde Park with a pocket chess set, working out problems. At noon on the second of August he entered the bank and said, rather theatrically, “This is a stick-up.
” A cashier named Frank Lewis shouted out, and Hume shot him in the stomach before demanding cash. “No one else gets hurt if you do as I say,” he told them. He then tied up the remaining staff and collected fifteen hundred pounds. He was disappointed, though, to be told by the staff that there was no money in the vault, only financial ledgers.
He left at 12:10, phoned a doctor for the injured man—who survived the shooting—and twenty-four hours later was back in Zurich. He told Trudy variously that he was a Canadian test pilot, a spy for the CIA, a United States Air Force test pilot, and later a spy for the Soviet Union, to cover various difficulties such as her suspicions when she saw his passport photograph, which bore no resemblance to him. Hume’s new career had got off to a modest start. His first venture had netted him far less than he hoped, but he was now fifteen hundred pounds better off—about thirty-seven thousand pounds today—and he had got away with it.
London police had not associated the bank robbery with Hume at all, judging from the newspaper reports he read. But he was distinctly annoyed to discover in these reports that the staff had lied to him about there being no money in the vault. In fact, there had been a very large amount. Donald Hume had been tricked, and he did not like to be tricked.
He decided to return to the bank after a decent interval to collect his just deserts and teach the staff a lesson. Three months later, in November 1958, he again flew to England in the guise of Stephen Bird, chemical engineer, only to discover the Midland Bank branch had moved a quarter of a mile down the road. On the afternoon of the twelfth of November, just before the bank closed at three, Hume walked in and again announced, “This is a stick-up. ” The bank had reviewed its procedures following the August stick-up, and the staff promptly ducked beneath the counter and ran out through a back door, locking it behind them and raising the alarm.
Donald had been outwitted and had little choice but to take the cash available on the counter and escape. He netted just three hundred pounds this time—about seven thousand pounds today. The manager, Eric Urs, tried to intercept him, and Donald Hume shot him—again not fatally—and made good his escape. Once again he returned to Zurich.
It had not been a successful trip. He went to Canada and spent most of December 1958 there. He still had seventeen hundred pounds remaining, but he knew it was slipping away. His relationship with Trudy Sommer was failing.
He could find no way of reconciling the reality of his circumstances with the life he had assumed as Johnny Byrd. He tried to give her up several times but found he could not. By late January he was nearly broke. He seemed boxed into a corner.
It was now that he formed a new plan. On the twenty-ninth of January, Hume said goodbye to Trudy Sommer. It had a certain finality about it. He visited the Anglican church in Zurich and spent the night there.
It was a long night. Hume was an intelligent man, a reflective one, a man who understood his own actions and that he was driven by compulsions he was unable to resist. He knew he was facing defeat, yet he could not turn away. Perhaps he spent the night thinking such things.
He prayed, as only devout people and desperate people pray. Friday the thirtieth of January 1959 was a cold, dry day. Hume left the Anglican church and walked forlorn for a while. He spent the early morning in Zurich’s park feeding the ducks.
If he had a redeeming quality, it was that he always loved animals. They never judged, questioned, or admonished; they simply accepted their fellow travelers. At 11:30, Donald Hume walked into the Geber Bank in Zurich. He was exhausted, driven now by nervous energy.
He had a small cardboard box with him, which he placed on the counter with his hand concealed within it holding a pistol. Through a hole in the box he pointed the pistol at a cashier, who vaulted his ankle and was shot. He fell, wounded but not fatally. Hume then jumped over the counter and hit another cashier with the gun.
An alarm was sounded, and Hume hurriedly grabbed some loose cash and ran. Edwin Hoog gave chase, and seeing what was afoot, so did a number of others. The chase was on. Hume turned to fire at them, but his gun jammed.
He arrived at a taxi rank, now hunted, with a crowd snapping like wolves at his heels. A taxi driver, Arthur Mügg, seeing the chase, tried to intercept him. Hume fired again; this time the gun did not jam, and Mügg fell fatally wounded to the ground, where he died. The crowd caught Hume, and the police arrived soon afterward, taking him into custody.
It was now truly over, and he knew it. “This is the end of the line for me,” he told Hans Stolz, the police chief. Hume’s trial began later that year, on the twenty-fourth of September 1959, in Zurich on charges including murder, attempted murder, and armed robbery. He pleaded guilty, but he was provocative and defiant in court.
Yet for all his bluster, his replies to the judge’s questions were revealing. “Why did you need the pistol? ” asked Judge Hans Goot. “I felt lonely,” Hume replied.
A curious, macabre wit pervaded his answers. Hume had known his robbery of the bank was doomed to failure, and he said as much. “Why did you do it anyway? ” asked Goot.
“It’s difficult to say,” Hume replied. “I didn’t want my conscience to brand me a coward. ” A curious, insightful response. He could not live with himself knowing he had backed down from such an enterprise.
Donald Hume was found guilty, and as Switzerland did not have the death penalty, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. He was sent to Regensdorf Prison and spent three months in solitary confinement due to his disruptive and defiant behavior. He stayed in touch with Trudy Sommer for a while, but it inevitably came to an end. He wrote a thriller that was not published, and was allowed a typewriter with which he wrote short stories for a while.
He was a talented artist too. But Hume suffered in prison; his treatment was harsh, and his stay there reflects little credit on the Swiss authorities. The Swiss authorities tried repeatedly to have him repatriated to Britain to serve his sentence. On the twentieth of August 1976, Hume was released from prison at last, having served sixteen years of his sentence.
He was immediately deported to Britain. On arrival at Heathrow Airport, Hume was delighted to be home. He was examined by two psychiatrists, declared criminally insane, and taken to Broadmoor. Was he insane?
By the time of his release from Regensdorf, he was unquestionably a tortured animal; prison does not often improve a man. He was clearly an abnormal man, but there was a certain reckless logic in all his actions. He was constitutionally anti-social, and he acknowledged this. There is a sense of inevitability in his realization that he was doomed to fail.
He believed he would be caught even as he fled the scene in Zurich, recklessly firing his gun as he went. A Swiss psychiatrist who examined him in 1959 said he was incapable of love, only hate. That is incorrect. He had loved his grandmother.
He had loved his dog Tony, of whom he kept a photo in his wallet. He had loved Cynthia and probably would have loved his daughter Alison too, had prison not separated him permanently from her when she was fourteen weeks old. He certainly loved Trudy Sommer. But he was driven by an anger he could not master.
It controlled all his actions. When he was on the verge of success, he sabotaged his own good fortune, as though he distrusted a caprice of fortune that could as easily snatch away what it had given. He was also constitutionally incapable of resisting the compulsion to kick out at those he viewed as tormentors—the children at school who mocked him for his illegitimacy. He tried to reinvent himself in the world.
When his RAF career failed, he took to wearing an officer’s uniform anyway, inventing his own life: a spy in the CIA, a test pilot, a spy for the Soviet Union. All were desperate and ultimately forlorn attempts to create a successful version of Donald Hume, and none could succeed, for the simple reason that the person he most needed to convince was himself, and that he could never do because he knew the truth. He was an unwanted child who had failed to distinguish himself at anything worthwhile and had been rejected by all those who might have provided salvation. He did not mean to kill Stanley Seti.
It was not planned. But Seti regarded Hume as a minnow and himself as a whale; it was an unequal relationship Hume resented. Seti used Hume to steal cars and to fence stolen or forged petrol coupons, and he even humiliated Hume by claiming to others that he was in some sort of relationship with his wife, taking advantage of his servant as he pleased. So it was when he kicked Hume’s beloved dog, it was as good as kicking Hume.
The effect was equal. This was also the effect of visiting Hume’s flat—an invasion of his privacy, the threat of an overture to his wife. There was an element of paranoia in Hume. He had warned Seti.
A game had been engaged, and there was no third person present to restrain either party or de-escalate the dangerous situation. It would be played to the end until someone backed down. There would be a winner and a loser. Seti had pushed Hume too far.
He left Hume with a simple choice: submit or refuse. A game of poker commenced in which each round raised the stakes. It reached the point of no return, when Hume stood with an SS knife in his hand, with all that implied. He could only stand there for so long before he would begin to feel ridiculous.
No one can stand with a weapon drawn and be ridiculed, because the stakes can go no higher. The bluff must be called. The cards must be shown. Donald Hume could only kill or fold.
Seti’s death became an inevitable consequence of the game they played. Donald Hume, reflecting later on his life, wrote: “I often wonder what I could have been if I’d gone on studying like Uncle Richard. Maybe a great scientist or an aerodesigner. I had the brains.
” Yes, he could have been many things, without a doubt—so can we all. But he made choices and was set on a destructive course headed for ruin. An intelligent man whose talents were diverted to a terrible end. Ultimately, Donald Hume was accountable for himself.
He had more gifts than most but squandered them, directing them to catastrophic outcomes for both himself and others. That responsibility lay within him. Hume spent the next twelve years of his life at Broadmoor. He was treated well there and made excellent progress.
He was finally released in 1988, now sixty-eight years old. He lived at 2 Thompson House, Warnington Road, North Kensington, from the early 1990s. He was quiet and unobtrusive, had slowed down with age, and seems to have had no friends. On the ninth of July 1998, a guest staying at the Copper Beeches Hotel in Basingstoke discovered the body of an elderly man lying on the ground.
The body was taken to the mortuary, and as there was no identification on it, it lay there for a week. The fingerprints of the corpse were taken, and a match was found in the fingerprint database. They belonged to Donald Hume. It was determined that he had died of natural causes, probably as a result of heart disease.
His death was hardly noticed in the national press. What was Donald Hume doing thirty miles from home without any means of identification? No one seemed to know how he had got there or why he was there. Perhaps he had simply wished to visit the scenes of his boyhood, to see what Basingstoke looked like sixty years on.
Would he find traces there of his younger self? Perhaps he would wonder where it had all gone so badly wrong. Such a surge of deep emotions, born of distant memories, might well precipitate a heart attack.
Donald Hume was buried in an unmarked grave at Basingstoke Cemetery on the thirtieth of July 1998, in his seventy-ninth year.
