Murder for Profit

"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."

With these boldfaced, blaring lines on its front page, the London Sunday Pictorial last week splashed the gaudy tale of a murderer who could talk freely about his crime. In 1950 Donald Hume was tried for the murder of a tinhorn used-car dealer named Stanley Setty. After his first trial produced a hung jury, the judge presiding at his second trial directed the jurors to find Hume not guilty of murder. Hume pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of being an accessory after the fact--he had dumped Setty's dismembered body from an airplane over the Thames estuary.

Serving time in Dartmoor Prison, Hume was frequently visited by Pic Assistant Editor Fred Redman, who suspected there was a bigger story still untold?" Redman was right. After leaving Dartmoor in February, Hume agreed to give the Pic a full confession. Pic Reporter Victor Sims took Hume to a country hotel overlooking the Thames estuary where the body was dropped. Hume lay on a bed, stared up at the ceiling, and calmly described how he killed and chopped up Setty. Recalls Sims: "It was the most terrifyingly bloody day of my life."

As Hume told it in last week's Pic: "I was born with a chip on my shoulder as big as an elephant." The "aunt" who raised him turned out to be his mother, who apparently refused to accept him as her son because he had no legal father. As a lad, Hume soon developed the ethic: "If you have an enemy, GET RID OF HIM."

Hume gave Communism a whirl, masqueraded as an R.A.F. officer ("It was a great thrill to have everyone saluting a bastard like me"), got married. Then he met Setty. "He had a voice like broken bottles and pockets stuffed with cash." When he heard reports that Setty was hanging around his wife, Hume suddenly felt a twinge of jealousy, grabbed a dagger and--"continued next week."

This week's installment gave the Pic's 5,677,000 readers an even wilder fourpence worth: "I was wielding the dagger just like our savage ancestors wielded their weapons 20,000 years ago . . . We rolled over and over and my sweating hand plunged the weapon frenziedly and repeatedly into his chest and legs . . . I plunged the blade into his ribs. I know; I heard them crack."

Hume is getting an estimated -L-3,600 from the Pic, with nothing to fear from British justice in all probability. He cannot be tried again for murder. If tried for perjury, he need only say that the Pic's story is a lie committed for money and reaffirm the testimony he gave at his trial.

The prospect of a murderer--and a story--getting away has set Fleet Street to trampling out a foaming vintage of sour grapes. Cried the Daily Sketch: "Arrest this man." Huffed the Star: "It is bad for a nation when a man can get away with murder and show a profit."

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