A Lovely Afternoon

Ever since All Fools' Day, 1949, when it was taken away from prison authority and given to the Ministry of Health, the big, grim hospital has been known officially as the Broadmoor Institution. Many a Berkshire villager roundabout ardently wishes it would go back to its honest old name: Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Broadmoor's tenants, the villagers feel, are far too dangerous to be treated as mere hospital patients. Take, for example, young John Thomas Straffen.

John, 21, suffered from a childhood predilection for wringing the necks of chickens. Last year when two little Bath girls were found strangled, John, who had already been certified as feebleminded, was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to Broadmoor. There, he behaved so well that he was given the privilege of wearing civilian clothes.

_One day last week, his civilian clothes hidden under his hospital uniform, John dropped in to the Broadmoor infirmary, complaining of illness. An attendant went for a doctor. Left alone in the room, John seized a blanket, made a beeline for an open window, dropped on to a shed roof, threw the blanket over a ten-foot wall and slid down to freedom. A villager spotted his exit and gave chase, but John eluded him. No siren alerted the village to the escape: the Ministry of Health does not believe in such devices. Soon afterward the lunatic, clad in a dapper pinstripe, was happily rubbing elbows with window shoppers in the village of Crowthorne. "It's a lovely afternoon, isn't it?" he said politely to one of them.

Another lady's dogs barked furiously when John stopped in at a bungalow to ask the way to Reading. Their mistress, the wife of a Broadmoor employee, gave the stranger a cheerful cup of tea "for the road." John thanked her and went on his way. Five hours later, hot on his trail, the police spotted him chatting with two children at the edge of a wood near Arbor-field. The children ran away, and so did John. After a hectic chase across a meadow, the police recaptured their fugitive.

For half-witted John Straffen, who had never felt the slightest sense of guilt over any of his crimes, the capture meant simply the end of a lovely afternoon. For the villagers whose homes lie within escaping distance of Broadmoor Institution, it meant something else. Next morning the strangled body of a little girl, six years old, was found in a thicket along Straffen's route from Crowthorne to Arborfield.

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