Leaving her husband William in June 1932, Gwendoline Warren went to a rented house in Maidenhead where she set up home with her lover Ernest Hutchinson, the father of the baby daughter she left behind with her husband, together with her 12-year-old son Ronald.

On SEPTEMBER 10th Ronald went to stay with an aunt who lived in East Burnham, Buckinghamshire. The next day he returned home, and the following day he went back to his aunt’s home, taking his baby sister with him. It was arranged that he would go to Maidenhead on September 14th, to call for his mother who would accompany him back to East Burnham to stay a few days with her sister.

But when Ronald arrived at the house in Maidenhead’s Heywood Avenue, Hutchinson answered the door, didn’t let him in and told him to go back to his aunt’s.

Thinking it strange when Ronald arrived without his mother, his aunt went with him to Maidenhead. When there was no response to her knocks on her sister’s door, a neighbour helped Ronald to enter the house, where his mother’s body was found beneath a mattress and a pile of cushions.

There was no sign of Hutchinson, but the publication of his description led to his arrest the next day in Southend where he had gone with a prostitute. He said he and Gwendoline Warren had had a row on the night of September 10th, when she told him she would no longer sleep with him until he found a job. She had then retired to the spare bedroom, where the next morning he found she had suffocated under her bedding. As the house had not been locked overnight, he suspected that her jealous husband had entered and killed her.

Hutchinson went on to say that, too distressed to call the police, he had spent three days in the house with Gwendoline’s corpse, telling anyone who inquired about her that she had gone to Birmingham. Then he had obtained money by selling some of her furniture, and on September 14th he had left for London.

The police didn’t believe him, and neither did the jury at his trial which ended with his conviction for Gwendoline’s murder. Sentenced to death, he went to the gallows at Oxford Prison on November 23rd, 1932.