Guilty Innocent

One night in 1943, London police on robbery detail stopped a seedy little man for routine questioning and seemed to have stumbled on the solution of a murder in Portsmouth, 65 miles away. Harold Loughan--a brash habitual criminal--volunteered the information that he had crept into the rooms above the John Barleycorn pub three weeks before and, in committing a robbery, had strangled to death the pub's owner, Rose Robinson. "It's a relief to get it off my mind," he told the police. "I didn't mean to kill the old girl, but you know what it is when a woman screams."

Confession v. Alibi. When the details of the confession checked out in Portsmouth, Loughan was charged with murder. "I felt confident that I could not lose the case even if I conducted it standing on my head," recalls Joshua David Casswell, who was the prosecutor in the court proceedings that followed. But to Casswell's chagrin, Loughan dismissed his confession as the kind of casual lie he enjoyed telling the police, claimed he spent the night of the murder sheltered from the blitz in London's Warren Street subway station--and produced five independent witnesses to prove it. "This is the most extraordinary case I've ever known," said the judge. "On the one hand a full confession, and on the other an unshakable alibi." The jury, equally puzzled, could not reach a verdict.

In a retrial, Loughan was acquitted. He was still gloating when arrested on the steps of Old Bailey for another robbery and, after his 24th conviction, sent to prison for seven years.

That might have been the last anybody heard of little Harold Loughan if The People, a sensational London Sunday newspaper, had not printed the memoirs of Prosecutor Casswell. In one installment, Casswell claimed that Harold Loughan would have been convicted if all the evidence had been heard. Loughan, now 66 and in jail as usual, sued for libel, claiming he had been called a murderer despite his official innocence.

Murder or Libel. The newspaper's lawyer argued that even if the articles did amount to calling Loughan a murderer, truth is a defense against libel, and Casswell had finally shown that Loughan had indeed murdered Rose Robinson 19 years ago. For eleven days the jury heard evidence of the old murder--with Loughan still protesting his innocence. "You are asked to try again a murder in the guise of a libel action," his lawyer complained to the jury. Last week the jury returned its verdict: The People was not guilty of libel because Loughan was guilty of the murder.

Loughan, of course, cannot be tried again for the same crime. If the jury was correct, he had cheated the gallows. But that was little comfort to Harold Loughan. After the trial he was returned to the prison hospital where, after spending 23 of his 66 years behind bars, he awaits death from inoperable cancer.

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