“I, Donald Hume, do hereby confess to the Sunday Pictorial that on the night of October 4th, 1949, I murdered Stanley Setty in my flat in Finchley-road, London. I stabbed him to death while we were fighting.”
In its pages he admitted that, after an argument at his flat, he had murdered Setty with a Nazi SS dagger and the same day had dropped his victim’s head and legs into the English Channel from an aeroplane.
Having denied the courts the truth he provided ample detail for the newspaper readers: “I was wielding the dagger just like our savage ancestors wielded their weapons 20,000 years ago…
“We rolled over and over and my sweating hand plunged the weapon frenziedly and repeatedly into his chest and legs…
“I plunged the blade into his ribs. I know; I heard them crack.”
The following day he managed to keep both his wife and the cleaning lady at arm’s length until he had engaged a decorator to paint over the bloodstains on the wall and, with either remarkable sang-froid or chilling sociopathic detachment, asked the tradesman to help him carry his parcel – containing the butchered torso – downstairs and into his car.
True, his inexperience as a pilot and lack of navigational skills had cost him eight years but Hume made a profit of telling how he killed a man…