Not Proven

Black-bearded, with a gold earring in his pierced right ear and gold bangles jangling at his wrists, the man who called himself Ronald Chesney looked every inch the pirate he claimed to be. He habitually arrayed his strapping, 6-ft. 1-in. frame in the generously sweeping gestures of the quarterdeck, and boasted homerically of his vast appetites for food, drink and women. When asked his profession, "Old Ches" would reply with a huge guffaw: "Smuggling." Men and women in all walks of life fell easy prey to Ches's flamboyant charms, and after failing to see him for long stretches, old friends would frequently renew acquaintance with a happy smile and the affable greeting: "Hello, you old s.o.b. Been in the jug again?" The answer, all too often, was yes.

A Talent for Forgery. Like many a romantic swashbuckler of fiction, Ches began his life in gentler circumstances--as a brilliant, somewhat slack-jawed mother's boy named John Donald Merrett. His doting mother, whose less doting husband had skipped out of the family circle, sent him to a fine public school, and went herself to Scotland to tend his needs when he entered Edinburgh University. Each night in the privacy of their quarters, Donald practiced the talent that led to his first serious trouble--forging his mother's name. He soon became expert enough to drain her meager bank account of some -L-450, most of which he spent on a local music-hall dancer.

Two months after Donald entered col lege, his mother was found shot to death with a .25 automatic which Donald had bought a month before. In a trial which has since become a red-bound volume in the Notable British Trials series, 17-year-old Donald escaped conviction for the murder: the jury's verdict, under a useful Scots law, was "Not Proven." But he went to prison for forgery, and after a year, emerged to elope with 17-year-old Isobel Bonar. The honeymoon was scarcely over when the young couple were indicted for fraud. Isobel was acquitted; Donald got nine more months.

For the next decade the Donald Merretts, or the Ronald Chesneys as they liked to call themselves, lived high, wide & handsome, spending most of their time touring the Mediterranean in a luxury yacht, the Armentieres. They were often joined in their cruising by Mrs. Chesney's mother, who called herself "Lady" Mary Menzies. When Donald's fondness for gay company and Isobel's fondness for gin at last drove them apart in 1937, Lady Mary and her daughter went back to London, bought a large house in Ealing, and opened a boardinghouse for genteel elderly ladies and gentlemen. Donald went on to join the navy, served as a torpedo-boat commander. But he ended up as usual, sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for misappropriation of naval vehicles--for smuggling.

The Two Bodies. From then on, Donald was in jail almost as much as he was out. Betweentimes he lived luxuriously, on the profits of his smuggling operations, in well-appointed establishments all over the Continent. Sometimes he found the opportunity to drop in on his wife and mother-in-law at Ealing, where he was a welcome visitor with his own latchkey and a place to keep a few possessions, including two submachine guns.

One day two weeks ago, Lady Menzies and her daughter were both found dead, the older woman strangled with a nylon stocking, the younger drowned in a bathtub. Donald was supposedly in Germany with his current mistress (who had made him cut off his beard). Police found some blurred fingerprints, listened to tales of a serving maid who said she had heard a man's voice in her mistress' room the night before, and began a search for Donald Merrett, alias Chesney. London newspapers promptly jumped to the conclusion that he was the murderer.

But was he? No one could be sure; nor was anyone ever likely to be. In Cologne last week, Donald Merrett wrote a note to his mistress: "After all that lies behind me, I have no chance." Then he put a bullet through his head.

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