This is a famous, and in many ways unique, case from 1949.
The Background
Stanley Setty was born as Salman Seti or Salik in Baghdad in 1903. The family moved to Manchester in 1908 where his father was a cloth merchant. Stanley worked in the business until 1920 when his father abandoned his wife and children and went to live in Italy. To earn a living, Stanley set up a shipping business with his brother David and when that failed, worked on his own account as a cloth dealer. Unfortunately, he lost a great deal of money gambling and was declared bankrupt in 1927. To avoid his creditors, Stanley left the country in December 1927 to stay with his father in Milan. He returned in April 1928 and at his bankruptcy hearing it was said Stanley bought cloth on credit, selling it cut price on the same day, and not paying the suppliers. That August he pleaded guilty to multiple offences under the Bankruptcy and Debtors Acts. When the judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison, Setty’s mother had to be carried out of the court by four police officers while struggling and screaming out: ‘Oh my innocent little boy. Take me with him’.
Stanley was released from Manchester Prison four months early on 31 October 1929.
In 1939 he had moved to London where another brother Max ran a motorcar business and the fashionable Blue Angel Club in Berkeley Street. During the War, Stanley reputedly was involved in the petrol coupon racket when he used high-quality printing plates to forge coupons.
Warren Street
By 1947 Stanley was buying and selling cars from a café in Warren Street, off Tottenham Court Road. He dealt in cash only, because as an undischarged bankrupt, he was not allowed to open a bank account.
Writing about the case in 1953, the reporter Duncan Webb said: ‘No street in London is more aptly named than Warren Street, for it is a veritable warren of crooks, spivs, wasters waiting for the fool to turn up to part with their money easily. It is a warren of cafes, motor-car garages and sales rooms, strange places inhabited by strange people’.
Setty did very well and made over £30,000 in two years (equivalent to about £1.2M today). He lived with his sister Eva and her husband Ali Ouri in Bayswater, at 53 Maitland Court Lancaster Terrace, overlooking Hyde Park.
On 4 October 1949 Stanley Setty told people at his lock-up garage in Cambridge Terrace Mews, half a mile from Warren Street, that he was going to Watford to buy a Jaguar. He was carrying £1,005 in consecutively numbered £5 notes from a car sale earlier that day.
He was never seen again. Eva and Ali Ouri were very concerned when Stanley did not return home. They went to the police and then put up a £1,000 reward. His girlfriend Connie Palfreyman had not heard from Stanley and was very worried. Scotland Yard made numerous inquiries about a possible black-market gang killing but did not get any definite leads. The police took the disappearance seriously and issued the numbers of the £5 notes, urging people to look out for them. It became headline news in the press as the search for the ‘Man with the Fivers’.
Setty is found
On 21 October, Sidney Tiffin, a farm labourer, was in a punt hunting wild fowl on the Dengie mudflats near Tillingham Essex, about 15 miles from Southend. He saw a bundle wrapped in carpet felt and was horrified to find it contained a body, without a head or legs. The police were called, and Superintendent Fred Cherrill of the Scotland Yard fingerprint department, managed to remove the wrinkled skin from the fingers and by stretching it over the fingers of his assistant Detective Bill Turpie, identified them as those of Stanley Setty.
When Francis Camps the Home Office pathologist examined the body, he recognized marks he had seen from wartime injuries of pilots whose parachutes had failed to open and they had hit the ground. Camps concluded the body had been dropped from a plane, and the cause of death was five stab wounds in the chest. He later said this was the first case where the body of a murder victim had been disposed of this way.
Donald Hume, ‘The Flying Smuggler’
Superintendent Colin MacDougall of the murder squad was in charge of the case, assisted by CI Jamieson, and DS Neil Sutherland. The story quickly became headline news, and the police were contacted by John Simpson, a director of the United Flying Club at Elstree. He told them that on 5 October, a member of the club called Donald Hume, had rented an Auster light aircraft to fly to Southend with some large parcels. One of the £5 notes was traced to a Southend taxi firm who said Hume had used it to pay for a journey from Southend Airport back to North West London.
At 7.45am on 26 October, the police went to Donald Hume’s flat at 620b Finchley Road, near the Memorial Clock Tower roundabout at Golders Green: (today this is above a Dixy Chicken outlet). He lived here with his wife Cynthia and a three month old baby daughter.
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Hume was taken to Albany Street police station for questioning where he made a long statement and spun an elaborate story. He said about two years ago he had sold a car to some dealers in Warren Street. Hume’s abilty to fly a small plane was useful to traders in black market goods, who called him ‘The Flying Smuggler’. Because of this, he said he had recently met a gang of three men called ‘Greeny’, ‘Mac or Max’ and ‘Boy’ and gave the police a detailed description of the men. They had asked Hume to hire a plane to dispose of what they said were printing plates used to forge petrol coupons. Hume accused the gang of killing Setty and that Boy had paid him £150 from a roll of £5 notes to dump the packages containing his body into the sea. He had flown from Elstree, dropped the packages in the English Channel and then landed at Southend. In fact, he was a poor navigator and was not far from the shore when he made the drop, so the body was washed up on the Essex marshes.
Trial at the Old Bailey
Donald Hume appeared at the Old Bailey on 18 January 1950 charged with the murder of Stanley Setty at Golders Green, where the police had found incriminating blood stains at the flat. He was very good in the witness box and told the story of the gang of three. The defense produced witnesses who claimed they knew Greeny, Maxie, and Boy. One said he had met people in Paris called Greeny and Max who were members of a car smuggling gang.
When Cynthia was called to give evidence, she said she was feeding baby Alison five times a day in the bedroom upstairs and had never met Setty. She also said she had not heard the three men arriving at the flat. Alfred Spencer, the teacher who lived in the flat below, said had not heard anything unusual. But when cross examined, admitted that it was noisy with three bus routes just outside. Dr Teare, a pathologist for the defense, thought there was evidence for more than one assailant, and that the sound of cutting up the body would have been heard in the flat below.
The defense case was that all the evidence was circumstantial, and the prosecution could not prove Setty was ever at the Finchley Road flat. They argued the group O-blood found there was of a very common type. The jury were out for two and a half hours and came back saying they could not all agree. Clearly, some of the jury believed Hume’s account about the mysterious gang of three, but it is not known how many of the jury thought he was innocent.
The judge was forced to dismiss the jury as at the time only a unanimous verdict was acceptable. The prosecution counsel, Christmas Humphries, said that after advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions, there would be no re-trial. So, Hume was found ‘not guilty of murder’. But a new charge of ‘accessory after the fact’, for disposing of the body in the sea, was brought against Hume. A new jury was sworn in, and Hume knowing he had avoided the death sentence, pleaded guilty as he had admitted this in his police statement. Although the maximum sentence for the accessory charge was life imprisonment, the judge gave him 12 years.
People were shocked that Hume had been found not guilty of murder, and one paper called it the most surprising case in a century.
After his conviction, while Hume was in Brixton, he asked to see Superintendent Colin MacDonald and claimed that his wife Cynthia had murdered Stanley Setty and that he had helped her to dispose of the remains.
He said: ‘I want to tell you some facts, but I want some further time to think things over. I will put my story in writing and send it to you, I mentioned this to the solicitor when he saw me about my appeal. … I didn’t actually do the knifing, I have been shielding my wife, she hasn’t played the game. I did the cutting up of Setty’s body in the flat and worked all night on it. I came home unexpectedly. Setty was a bastard with women. I hope you bear me no ill will for telling lies. I was fighting for my life. The judge saw through me from the start, but my wife seemed so nice, coy and demure in the witness box that they all fell for her. She is a wicked woman. ... My wife is a bitch, I know of five different men who have been associating with her since we married. I am not even sure that the child is mine. She will not stand by me as she promised’.
The solicitor said that when he asked Hume whether he killed Stanley Setty, he replied, ‘No, I came home unexpectedly and found him with my wife, I laid him out and she stabbed him four or five times. She knew him before I did and in fact introduced us’.
In prison Hume wrote abusive letters to Cynthia, telling her not to divorce him or he would implicate her in Setty’s murder. Despite this, in June 1951 she issued divorce proceedings. Cynthia and ‘Tommy’ Duncan Webb, the famous reporter for The People, became lovers. They did not live together, but when Webb knew he was terminally ill, they secretly married in Bala North Wales in 1958. His probate said, Thomas Duncan Webb of 26 Brunswick Square, died on 8 September 1958 in Charing Cross Hospital. He left Cyntha £3,559.
After Hume’s release
Donald served eight of his 12-year sentence and was released from Dartmoor on 1 February 1958. He changed his name by deed poll to Donald Brown. Knowing he could not be charged twice under the double jeopardy rule, he offered to sell his story to the press. Two papers turned it down, but the Sunday Pictorial bought it, and Fred Redman, who had frequently visited Hume in goal, took him to a Southend hotel where reporter Victor Simms wrote down his account. Hume lay on a bed, stared up at the ceiling, and calmly described how he killed and chopped up Setty. Sims who did not like Hume and thought he was a psychopath, recalled: ‘It was the most terrifyingly bloody day of my life’.
Hume said he had met Setty in December 1947 in Warren Street. There were further meetings at the Hollywood Club, 10 Clifford Street, near Marble Arch where Setty told him he was part of a syndicate suppling war surplus trucks to the Iraqi Army. Setty was also buying wrecked cars for the logbooks and asked Hume to steal cars of the same type so they could be passed off as originals with a re-spray. Hume said he got six cars, including two Jaguars and Setty paid him £300 for each car. In August 1949 Hume and his dog Tony, were at Setty’s garage when Setty kicked Tony for scratching a car. He said he quite liked Setty until then, and it was the worst thing he could have done, because Hume loved Tony who was half Alsatian and half Husky.
On the night of 4 October Hume returned home and saw Setty’s cream Citroen parked outside his flat. He suspected that Setty was having an affair with Cynthia: a row broke out and in the fight that followed, Donald stabbed Stanley with a Nazi SS dagger. He hid the body in a coal cupboard and drove the Citroen along the Finchley Road to Swiss Cottage, down Avenue Road into Regent’s Park, and on to Setty’s garage in the Mews. The next day he cut up the body and wrapped it in carpet felt. The £5 notes were heavily bloodstained, and Hume was only able to rescue £90 which he used to pay off his £70 overdraft. The rest he burned. He put the packages in a rented car parked at the rear of the Golders Green house and drove to Elstree intending to drop the packages in the Channel. To begin with, all went to plan: Hume flew the Auster plane over the water and dropped the package containing the head and legs. But then bad visibility forced him to land at Southend where he had to hire a taxi to drive back to London.
On 6 October he took the parcel containing the torso and drove to Southend where he had left the plane. Then with Tony in the back seat of the plane, he took off for the second flight to dispose of the body. Struggling to keep the aircraft steady and holding the joy stick between his legs, with considerable difficulty, he managed to push the heavy parcel out of the cockpit.
Hume said he had invented the gang of three from the film ‘Brighton Rock’ which he had seen at the end of January 1948. Pinky played by a young Richard Attenborough, was ‘the Boy’. Graham Greene who wrote the book was ‘Greeny’. The detailed descriptions were based on the three detectives who interviewed him at Albany Street. ‘Mac’ was Colin MacDonald.
The Sunday Pictorial paid Hume £2,000 and gave him a week to leave the country before they published the story in five parts in June 1958 with the headline: ‘I murdered Setty and got away with murder’. The first article began, ‘I, Donald Hume, do hereby confess to the Sunday Pictorial that on the night of October 4, 1949, I murdered Stanley Setty in my flat in Finchley-road, London. I stabbed him to death while we were fighting’. The sensational story boosted the newspaper’s sales considerably.
A new life in Switzerland
On 28 May Douglas Hume flew to Switzerland. He had gone to Somerset House and obtained a birth certificate for a John Stephen Bird and used it to get a new passport. In Zurich he met a divorced young woman called Trudi Sommer. He told her he was John Bird, a test pilot from Canada. He made trips to New York and Canada and lived with Trudi in Zurich. But with his extravagant lifestyle his money soon run out.
On 2 August 1958 Hume returned to England and robbed the Midland Bank on Boston Manor Road in Brentford. He thought he would get a large amount of money because the bank handled the wages of local factories. Hume entered the bank at noon and threatened the staff with a gun. He fired, wounding cashier Frank Lewis as he tried to set off the alarm. Hume got away with £1,300 and flew back to Zurich. When he read the story in a English newspaper saying he had missed £40,000 which was in the safe, he was furious. On 12 November he returned to the bank for a second time. Again, the raid failed: in a struggle he shot the manager who fortunately recovered, and Hume got away with just £350.
He and Trudi had arranged to marry, and he needed more money. When Trudi saw Donald with a pistol, always the actor and storyteller, he burst out crying and told her he was a Russian spy.
Now desperate for money, on 30 January 1959 Hume raided a bank in Zurich. Once again this was a failure and he snatched the equivalent of about £17. He shot a bank clerk and was followed through the streets by Ulrich Fitze, a very brave 16 year old bank apprentice. When Arthur Maag, a taxi driver, tried to stop him, Hume shot and killed him. After he fired all his bullets, the pursuing crowd caught Hume and beat him up. He was arrested, tried in court, found guilty of murder, and imprisoned in Switzerland which did not have capital punishment.
Hume was a very difficult and aggressive prisoner. After attacking the governor and guards, he was held in solitary confinement in a special underground cell in Regensdorf prison for several years. He asked to be deported to Britain, but his extradition was refused by the Home Office. Eventually, on 20 August 1976 after being diagnosed with severe mental problems, he was returned to London and sent to Broadmoor. There he was much better behaved and was eventually released on 19 April 1988. As Donald Brown, he lived at various addresses, and by 1993 he was at No.2 Thompson House, a basement flat at 200 Wormington Road in North Kensington.
A strange ending
On 9 July 1998 a body was found on the grass behind Copper Beeches, a large house at 107 Cliddesden Road in Basingstoke. The police could not initially identify the corpse until they received Donald Hume’s dental records from Broadmoor. He had died of natural causes from heart disease, and no one knew why he had gone to Basingstoke. He was buried locally in Worting Road Cemetery.
This extraordinary story shows that Hume was an attention seeker, fantasist, and a psychopath. It may be partially, but only partially explained, by the fact that he had a very difficult childhood and a medical condition. Donald joined the RAF not long after War broke out. But after a few months, he developed cerebrospinal meningitis which affected his brain, and he was declared unfit for service on 7 September 1941. The medical report said he had a psychopathic personality.
Beryl Bainbridge and the actor Timothy Ackroyd wrote a play called ‘The Fuse’ based on the Hume trial. This was made into a short film in 2015.
Hume gave several different versions of the murder in the Golders Green flat. We are left questioning the role Cynthia played, and we will never really know what happened.
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