After being severely wounded on the Western Front in the Great War and invalided out of the army, Ernest Dorsett, 45, found a married woman, whose husband had ill-treated her, wandering about on the streets. Taking pity on her, he took her home to Blyth to live with him as his wife.
But she soon took a fancy to one of his friends, Sergeant Halliday, and Dorsett became vexed. When the woman came home from a visit to the cinema with the sergeant, Dorsett cut her throat in a fit of rage. At Newcastle Assizes on FEBRUARY 23rd, 1917, he was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1930.