A Mix of Murders by Grahame Farrell

Author:Grahame Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Leonard Mills was not the first murderer to whom Norman Rae found himself playing Father Confessor. Twelve years previously another murderer had unburdened himself to the reporter.

Wealthy retired garage-owner Walter Dinivan, a widower, shared his flat with his granddaughter. On the night of 21 st May, 1939, she and her brother came home after a night out dancing to find the old man severely injured. During a vicious beating, he had received multiple head-wounds, and there had also been an attempt to strangle him. Money and jewellery were missing. Mr. Dinivan died in hospital the following morning without being able to name his attacker. The absence of any sign of a break-in, and the presence of a beer-bottle, a whisky-glass and a tumbler, suggested that the killer was sufficiently friendly with him to have been invited in for a drink.

His friend of forty years standing, 69-year-old Joseph Williams, was known to be in severe financial difficulties. Williams, whose bedsit was only ten minutes away, was a frequent visitor to Dinivan’s flat and had recently borrowed £5 from the murdered man. A hair-curler belonging to Williams’s daughter was found at the murder scene; possibly he had tried to persuade Mr. Dinivan to buy it. Paper bags found in Williams’s bedsit were similar to a bag left in the Dinivan flat. He was charged with murder.

In spite of both evidence and motive, and to everyone’s surprise, including Williams’s, the jury at his trial in Dorchester acquitted him.

Within a matter of hours, he had made contact with Norman Rae, who was in Dorchester to cover the crime for the ‘News of the World’. Williams proceeded to make a written confession, while Rae sat and watched. “The jury were wrong. I did it,” Williams wrote, adding rather exaggeratedly, “So now I claim to be the second John Lee of Babbacombe, the man they couldn’t hang.” He was right only insofar as the law of double jeopardy meant that he could not face a second trial for the murder.

Early the following morning, after a night spent touring the town’s drinking-establishments to capitalise on the celebrity status which his acquittal had conferred on him, Williams came to Rae’s hotel and woke him up by hammering on his hotel-room door. Drunk, and with his nerves in turmoil, he wept in front of the reporter and repeated his admission of guilt. Perhaps there was something of the Father Confessor in Norman Rae.

The confession was not made public until after Williams’s death at the age of 80 in March 1951, nine months before Leonard Mills’s execution. It was published in the ‘News of the World’ the following Sunday – a genuine exclusive.

Following in this tradition, on 28 th November, 1976, Brighton Trunk Murderer Tony Mancini likewise confessed – again to the ‘News of the World’ – that he killed prostitute Violette Kaye in May, 1934, a crime for which he too had been found not guilty at his trial later that year.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.