When recently widowed Lillian Eaton, 28, decided to become an old man’s darling she assured her new partner, ex-miner William Dobbing, 52, that age didn’t matter.

It didn’t, either, for the first eight years of their life together at Dobbing’s house in Graham Drive, in the Airedale district of Castleford. But when Dobbing turned 60 he became asthmatic and was hankering after a quiet life, while Lillian, at 36, was full of beans and wanted to go dancing.

Disaffected with her ageing partner, she started having affairs, and Dobbing got to hear about them. He warned her, only to learn that she was planning to marry one of her beaux, a Castleford factory worker.

Dobbing was furious. On APRIL 14th, 1964, they both rose early as usual. When they were together in the living-room he suddenly said, “Look here, lass, I’ve bought you a wedding present.”

Lillian glanced up in surprise and found herself staring down the barrel of a shotgun. She had time only to cry, “Oh, no, Bill!” before Dobbing squeezed the trigger and she fell dead on the floor.


At Leeds Assizes in June the jury decided that he had pulled the trigger intentionally, and he was sentenced to death. He was reprieved by Home Secretary Henry Brooke, and served nine years in prison before his release in 1973.