Many residents thought the noise was a car back-firing. It shattered the peace of Seymour Road, Slough, at 11.40 p.m. on JUNE 21st, 1952, and one witness interpreted the sound differently.
“I seemed to hear four shots, followed by screaming and shouting,” he said later. “Going into the street, I saw a woman lying half-way in the road. She was still alive. A man was lying on the pavement.”
The woman was Eunice Simon, 28, a trainee supervisor at Marks and Spencer’s in Slough’s High Street. The man was Victor Brades, 27. And in the early hours of the following day Eunice’s husband Donald, a 32-year-old machinist, was charged with double-murder. Brades had been killed instantly, and Eunice had died in hospital shortly after midnight.
The police learned that the Simons had been living apart after the husband began drinking heavily. He had assaulted his wife earlier that year, and a court had ordered him not to see her. Eunice had begun going out with Brades, which Simon resented.
At Donald Simon’s trial his counsel sought a verdict of guilty but insane, but the jury found Simon plain guilty, having heard that some weeks before the murders he had told a witness, “I will kill both of them I am under treatment for nerves. I’ll plead insanity.”
No medical evidence was submitted to support the claim that he was insane, his appeal was dismissed, and he was hanged at Shrewsbury Prison on October 23rd, 1952.