Every Saturday Arthur Izzard, 34, a patient at Chatham mental hospital, Kent, used to go shopping in nearby Canterbury, carrying his familiar shiny black bag. After his shopping trip on Saturday, October 22nd, 1938, he was on a footpath on his way back to the hospital when someone hit him over the head with a heavy metal object, stole his bag and the 27 shillings he had left on him, and made off. He died six hours later.
The celebrated pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury said 11 wounds on Izzards head were made by separate blows inflicted with great force using something like a tyre lever.