The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE MAN WHO CONTRACTED OUT OF HUMANITY by Rebecca West

In 1949, Donald Hume, misfit and psychopath, stabbed Stanley Setty to death, sliced up the body and ditched it (rolled up in a carpet) from the air over the Essex marshes. That, at least, is the official version: indeed Hume himself eventually made a confession, paid for by a newspaper. But some observers remained sceptical, among them the writer and historian Rebecca West, who attended Hume’s trial and wrote an extensive study of the case. Perhaps the real story of how Stanley Setty met his death has never been told.

During the Second World War, Brian Donald Hume, a failed RAF trainee, posed as a Battle of Britain hero; while not yet twenty-one he became, on his own admission, “an undesirable and unreliable character”. Discharged as unfit for service, Hume opened an electrical shop in Golders Green, north London. He prospered, to the extent that, by 1947, he’d expanded the business, hired extra staff and acquired a luxury car. In 1949, by chance, he ran into an unscrupulous second-hand car dealer called Stanley Setty. It was their second encounter; Hume had met Setty a year or so earlier in Warren Street, doing dubious deals on the pavement, recalling that he had “a voice like broken bottles, and pockets stuffed with cash”. When Setty was last seen alive in October 1949, he was carrying about £1,000 in five pound notes. Not long afterwards, Setty’s dismembered and headless body was found rolled in carpet on the Thames marshes near Southend, where it had been dumped from the sky. Staff at Elstree aerodrome remembered Hume hiring a plane, and tipped off the police.

Hume was arrested at his cramped maisonette near Golders Green station. Rebecca West, who covered Hume’s trial for murder, followed the police trail, toiling up the “dark, steep and narrow staircase with a murderous turn to it” in search of atmospheric detail. In January 1950, Hume entered the dock at the Old Bailey clad in checked sports jacket, pullover and flannels, “all chosen”, Rebecca West reported, “to look raffish, which was then the uniform of the spiv…” Hume pleaded not guilty, blaming the murder on three of Setty’s shady associates, Mac (or Maxie), Greenie and a man known as “The Boy”. There were, in the event, two trials; the first, aborted when the judge was taken ill, lasted only one day. The second began straight away with a new judge, but at the end of a seven day hearing, the jury failed to agree a verdict. A fresh jury was sworn. But when the Crown offered no evidence against Hume on a charge of murder, the new jury was directed by the judge to return a not guilty verdict. Hume did, however, plead guilty to a second charge, of being an accessory after the fact to murder. On this count, he was jailed for twelve years.

When Rebecca West wrote about the case in 1950, Stanley Setty’s killer remained (technically, at least) unconvicted, unknown and unnamed. Rebecca West filed her impression of Donald Hume’s trial for the London Evening Standard.

Every murder trial, like every murderer, has unique fingerprints. It has its own personality. The trial of Brian Donald Hume, who was accused of murdering Stanley Setty, had a personality stronger and stranger than most.

It was great relief when it was over, when the jury disagreed, the prosecuting counsel announced that he was not going to demand a retrial, and brought forward a second indictment on the charge of being an accessory after the fact of murder, to which Hume pleaded guilty.

Much was mentioned at the trial which seemed to me irrelevant. All the expert witnesses, it seemed to me, might just as well have stayed at home. They discussed at length, and with spectacular evidence of conscientious deliberation, whether Mr Setty could have been killed by one assailant or if one or more men must have held him while another assailant stabbed him.

But all this was the purest speculation, as they had not got Mr Setty’s head. It might well have been that a single assailant could first have hit Mr Setty on the head and rendered him unconscious and then stabbed him.

They never mentioned this possibility, which today, when the cosh is more of a feature of urban life than it has been since Victorian times, is more than a possibility-it is a probability.

But it would have been supremely relevant if any clotted blood had been found in Hume’s flat, for blood flowing from the corpse of a man who had just been murdered clots. There was plenty of blood in Hume’s flat, but the impression left was that it was all liquid, as blood is when it flows from a corpse which has been murdered for an hour or two.

I do not remember the prosecution explaining that if there were clotted blood in Hume’s flat there was a strong presumption that he had been murdered there; and as a spectator I was left with the impression that, as the blood in the flat was liquid, it would have been feasible for Mr Setty to be murdered elsewhere and brought to Hume’s flat.

On this, and on several other scores, it could be pronounced improbable that Hume murdered Mr Setty, and the jury could not agree to find him guilty of it.

But if Hume were convicted of a crime less than murder, it was still abominable enough. That was what contributed to the strangeness and horror of the pattern described by this murder, which consisted of patches of crude colour set against a quiet and lovely background. That pleasant background was made up of people who were very nice indeed; the crude colour was laid on by people who were not so nice.

It happened again and again during the trial that one listened to a witness and remembered that the real wealth of Great Britain lies in the number of decent men and women it produces, and that we are not bankrupt yet.

There was the enchanting manageress of the dyeing and cleaning establishment at Golders Green, with her shining yet reserved smile, her comfortable, fussed-over good looks, her perfect manners.

It would have been worthwhile attending the trial if only to see the tender and amused and generous gaze she directed on the learned counsel who did not know that a carpet cannot be dyed without being cleaned.

“Poor dear,” she was evidently saying to herself, “surely common sense ought to have told him that. But, there, he probably knows a great many things I don’t.”

There was the domestic worker, Mrs Stride, who used to turn out Mrs Hume’s flat one afternoon a week, and was not told what to do by Mrs Hume when she arrived. Oh, no. When the learned counsel suggested that might have been the routine, Mrs Stride’s face, which had been round and pleasant under the little plain hat, became stern and marmoreal, as if she were one of the more respectable Roman Empresses among the statues in the British Museum.

She gave learned counsel to understand that she knew her work, and that when she got to the flat she started on that work and went on till she had finished it, and she doubted if Mrs Hume or anyone else could help her in that achievement.

Here was a woman who was obviously on top of her environment, who had made the resources within her reach serve her need to be self-respecting and independent and creative.

There was also Mr Sidney Tiffen, who found Mr Setty’s torso on the Essex marshes and who did not let it go, as you or I might have been tempted to do, but dug a stake in the mud and struggled with the horrid parcel until he had fixed it to that stake.

We saw Hume’s uninhibited quality, for it unfortunately happened that his cross-examination by the prosecuting counsel at times turned into a slanging match.

Bad temper was let loose, so it came about that Hume shouted: “Now it’s you that’s romancing,” and “That’s all boloney.”

Now, Hume did not murder Mr Setty: but when he talked of his dealings with Mr Setty’s corpse, of how he had propped up one parcel when it had fallen askew in his car, of how he had lost his footing when he was carrying another and slithered downstairs with it, he seemed as atrocious as if he had committed the greater crime.

Indeed, many murderers have shown more respect to their victims than he showed to this corpse which he had agreed to dispose of for money.

It was as if he had contracted out of humanity.

Humane instinct withered in him. He had become as full of death as Mrs Stride, Mr Tiffen, the manageress of the dyeing and cleaning establishment, are full of life.

So far as one could see, it is work that makes the difference. Mrs Stride had dedicated herself to the technique of making things clean; you should have seen the light of expertise burning in her eye when she discussed different sorts of noise made by two different types of vacuum-cleaner.

But Hume had been a “wide boy” since the war ended. He described himself as “semi-honest” and it is plain that he spent his life hanging round the neighbourhood of any control to see who would pay him for procuring a breach of it.

There was a time when dishonesty involved a certain degree of craftsmanship: a pickpocket had to pick pockets well if he could hope to make a living: and he will not even have to look for his clients. He can advertise himself as a dishonest dealer by prodigious tailoring and his station on certain notorious sites.

The currency racket is as simple. In both these rackets Hume had been involved.

He was following a way of living which did nothing to develop his own nature, and therefore isolated him from the knowledge and respect of others; so that in the end he could cart about a body that had been a man as if it were a piece of meat, and put his own body in the danger of death, and escaped it only to spend the years of his maturity in prison.

This is the specific criminal problem of our age. We live in a time of shortages, and shortages evoke controls, and the illegal breach of controls leads to quick and easy profits.

This is not merely a political problem. The rule by which a new car cannot be sold till twelve months after its owner has acquired it is not a Government regulation but a condition of sale legally imposed by the British Motor Traders’ Association; and it was instituted with the object of checking wild profiteering and speculation which would have thrown the motor-dealing business into complete and disreputable disorder.

Nevertheless, it has created crime. It is necessary; but some of its effects are pernicious.

The community has never had a much more difficult problem to solve. It can be met only by the coldest scrutiny of all controls and the abolition of all that are unnecessary; by a national determination to end the days of shortages; and by a lively recognition that crime is not funny, but filthy.

That was what gave the Hume case its memorable quality. It showed a poor wretch who, human to start with, had gone past his humanity, not to animalism, for that has its saving instincts, but to callousness; and it showed other people who had kept their humanity and bettered it.

Brian Donald Hume was released from prison in February 1958, having earned full remission. In June of that year, the Sunday Pictorial splashed his confession to the murder of Stanley Setty, Hume having first taken the precaution of fleeing to Switzerland. By August he was back in England, carrying out two raids on banks in west London. In January 1959 Hume staged a third raid, this time on a bank in Zurich, and killed a cabdriver while trying to get away. He was arrested at the scene. Hume was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering the taxi-man. Dame (as she became) Rebecca West said she’d never accepted that Hume was the killer of Stanley Setty. Her lengthy and detailed essay Mr Setty and Mr Hume was published in 1955. “Of course,” she explained in 1974, “I knew that Hume had confessed to the murder of Setty before my essay was published… He started confessing very soon after he got into prison, and continued to produce confessions at intervals for years, but I think there was a definite reason not to take them seriously…” In 1976, Hume was repatriated to Britain as insane and sent to Broadmoor. He was released in 1988, and moved to a hospital for low-risk patients in west London. He died in 1998.