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shyscyberchamber.com
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THE ATTIC
:
STRANGULATION
:
(Case Study)
Harold Loughans |
Date
Added
FEB 2003 |
The killing of pub landlady Mrs Rose Robinson in
1943 was by no means a 'classic' murder in the true sense of the term - it was
the squalid, not particularly remunerative result of a burglary. However, it was
the one occasion on which an unscrupulous killer was acquitted on the expert
testimony of Sir Bernard Spilsbury.
On the night of Sunday 28 November 1943, Mrs Robinson's cellar man at the John
Barleycorn public house in Portsmouth closed up for the night and left at about
half-past ten. Rose Robinson transferred the evenings takings from the till to
her handbag and went upstairs. On the following morning she was found strangled
in her ransacked bedroom; her handbag was empty. The killer had entered through
a rear window beneath which police officers found a small black button and a
broken thread.
The pathologist was Dr Keith Simpson, who concluded that Mrs Robinson had been
strangled as the killer sat aside her: 'The finger marks told a clear story - a
deep bruise on the right side of her voice box, presumably made by a thumb and
three lighter bruises in a line on the other side. Right-handed, four inches
across. There were no curved fingernail impressions immediately related to these
marks, but there were several scratches on the neck that could have been made by
Mrs Robinson as she struggled to prise away her attacker's hands.'
It was in London a month later that a shabby, suspicious looking man attracted
the attention of a couple of policemen who followed him into a cafe, where the
man tried to sell a pair of new shoes. Taken into custody for questioning Harold
Loughans told his captors: 'I'm wanted for things more serious than this; the
Yard wants me. It's the trap door for me now.' He went on to confess to a string
of burglaries, concluding: 'I want to say I done a murder job.' It was still
unsolved John Barleycorn killing.
There was no shortage of forensic evidence to back up the confession, fibres
linked Loughans to the murder of Rose Robinson, and his coat was missing all its
buttons - pulled off when he discovered he had left one behind at the scene of
the crime.
The one problem as far as the police were concerned was that Harold Loughans had
no fingers on his right hand; a fact which they relay to Dr Simpson with some
anxiety. Simpson was unperturbed, Loughans still had a thumb and four half
fingers, and if he was sitting astride his victim just the weight of his body
pressing down on the hand could of proved fatal. Loughans' condition also
explained why there were no fingernail impressions.
By the time Harold Loughans stood trial at Winchester Assizes in March 1944, he
had the opportunity to ponder his future; the trap door. He had decided to plead
not guilty to murder and swore the police had coerced him into making a
confession. His defense attorney paraded three witnesses before the court who
testified that they had seen Loughans in an air-raid shelter in London on the
night of the crime (remember we are in the middle of the Second World War). The
jury failed to reach agreement, and a retrial was held two weeks later, this
time against the backdrop of the world's most famous criminal court, the Old
Bailey. Loughans again pleaded alibi, but by now had a new weapon. They had
retained the services of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Simpson for one was dumbfounded.
His colleague had not had a change to see the victim's body, had made no
independent post mortem examination, had not even inspected the medical evidence
assembled by Simpson for his own testimony. Apparently Sir Bernard had visited
Loughans in Brixton Prison, and had been impressed by his flabby handshake and
told the court: 'I do not believe he could strangle anyone with that hand.' Nor
would he budge; and it is a tribute to the awe in which his expert testimony was
held that Spilsbury's bald statement was accepted as the undeniable truth and
Harold Loughans was acquitted.
In time the case was forgotten, which is the way of things, and besides Loughans
was swiftly rearrested and put in jail convicted of a charge of aggravated
burglary. Then in December 1960 the People newspaper serialized the memoirs of
Mr J.D. Caswell, the Crown prosecutor in the Loughans case. Caswell intimated
that Loughans was very lucky to have been acquitted, and Loughans responded by
taking out libel proceedings against the paper. The suit failed, and in doing so
presented the uniquely bizarre situation of a jury going against a high court
judgment and, in effect, finding Harold Loughans guilty of the John Barleycorn
murder. Whatever happened he could not be tried twice for the same crime, so
three months after his libel action failed, Loughans wrote his confession - with
the 'bad' hand - for the People: 'I want to say I done that job. I did kill the
woman in the public house in Portsmouth.'.... |
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