Word: hume
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...Donald Hume first captured the attention of the crime-loving British public in 1949 when he took off in a rented airplane and dropped three packages into the Thames estuary. The packages contained, respectively, the head, legs and torso of a used-car dealer named Stanley Setty, who had quarreled with Hume. A present-day Mack the Knife, Hume was true to his Threepenny Opera code: "If you have an enemy, get rid of him." He had stabbed Setty to death and dismembered...
Arrested, Hume survived three juries at the Old Bailey-the first was dismissed when the judge fell ill, the second could not agree, the third found him not guilty. Finally, for the crime of illegally disposing of Setty's body, Hume pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder, and in 1950 was sentenced to twelve years in prison...
Hefty Barmaid. Freed last spring for good behavior, Hume took bold advantage of the fact that he could not be tried again for the same crime. To the tabloid Sunday Pictorial he brazenly sold for about $10,000 his account of how he murdered Setty (TIME, June 16). He became a freehanded spender in the shadier bars of London's West End, and as before, women proved susceptible to his curly black hair and his blue-eyed, open countenance. A hefty Mayfair barmaid lost her $800 savings to Hume but still loves him; a pretty air hostess at London...
...anonymity's sake, Hume changed his name legally to Brown, thus entitling him to obtain a bona fide passport in that name. But one of anything is scarcely enough for a man like Hume: he soon had a second passport made out to "John Stephen Bird, company director, Liverpool." Thus equipped, Hume began appearing under various aliases in Montreal, Zurich, New York, Frankfort, Los Angeles, without ever being recognized. He spent most of the time in Switzerland, combining petty thievery with his courtship of auburn-haired Divorcee Trudi Sommer, 28, a Zurich beauty-shop owner. To lonely-hearted Trudi...
...trip last August was to London in pursuance of a simple but ingenious scheme for raising money: Hume planned to rob a bank close to the international airport and then return to the Continent on a commercial plane for which he had made a reservation. Hume chose a branch of the Midland Bank in a quiet side street in Brentford, outside London. He shot down a bank clerk, scooped up some $3,000, and was in an airplane and winging his way over the Channel before Scotland Yard had a physical description of the robber. Three months later he duplicated...