Pieces of Black Marketeer Washed up in Essex - Time Machine Case from 1950

 

Brian Donald Hume was acquitted in a London court of murdering fellow racketeer, Stanley Setty. But, as an accessory after the fact he got twelve years in Dartmoor.

 Levantine "car dealer" Setty's headless, legless torso was washed up on Tilligham marshes in October 1949. A stab wound in the chest showed how he died. Fingerprints showed who he was. 

 Trained pilot Hume was one of Setty's known associates, handling stolen cars. Police found that Hume had hired light aircraft on October 5th 1949 and boarded it with two parcels. The shady crook claimed that the parcels contained parts of a printing press for counterfeiting ration books.

 He then said that three powerful gangsters, known to him only as "Greenie", "Mac" and "the Boy" forced him to dump the parcels at sea for them. He concedes that a "gurgling noise" from one of them suggested that he was perhaps disposing of a dismembered Stanley Setty, whose disappearance was the subject of intense speculation in the underworld.

 The jury at Hume's trial in January 1950 could not agree. With a new jury empanelled, the judge ordered a verdict of Not Guilty to the murder charge, and accepted Hume's plea of Guilty to the accessory charge, 

 It became clear, however, that the police did not make any particular efforts to trace "Greenie", "Mac" or "the Boy", who were more than likely the creation of Hume's fertile imagination than genuine denizens of his slimy spiv world.