Donald Hume biography

When Hume arrived at the Elstree airport, a friendly engineer helped him carry the torso onto the plane. Together with his trusty canine companion, Hume set off again for the English Channel. Only this time the quest to dump the evidence wasn't so easy. At first the torso, which rested in the back seat,

wouldn't budge when he tried to push it out through the door.

Hume even had to hold the joystick between his legs as he wrestled with the body part. After this failed he tilted the small plane at an angle in order to try and get the torso to slide and smash through the door. Finally, after a great deal of drama that nearly involved the dog falling out of the plane, the torso released itself from its position and fell from the aircraft. Moments later Hume was shocked to see the weights and blanket that had covered the body had got caught on a hook in the cabin. Realizing that the torso had fallen out just covered in carpet felt, he knew it was unlikely to sink. He eventually managed to break the weights free leaving them and the carpet to drop into the sea.

Hume was now faced with the worse case scenario, a body that would float. He could see the torso bobbing in the water and realized he had no choice but to return back to land and hope somehow that it wouldn't turn up on the coastline. The small speck he could still see bobbing in the water was evidence that could hang him.

It was not long before various people were looking for Stanley Setty, including his sister and brother-in-law who reported him missing. The papers printed stories with headings such as Dealer With 200 Fivers Vanishes inferring that Setty had been killed because of the 1000 pounds he had on him.

Setty's car was fingerprinted, but Hume felt confident that with so many questions relating to the dead man's background and lifestyle the police would be on a wild goose chase for a long time.

On October 8, the papers revealed that Scotland Yard had issued the numbers of Setty's five-pound notes that he had received from the bank on the morning of his death. Some of this money had been deposited by Hume into his own bank account, and had also been paid to taxi cabs while traveling from London to Elstree Air Field. Hume now became worried that his blind greed, all for a miserly100 pounds could now lead a trail to him.

The police also recovered a notebook belonging to Setty which detailed all of his business associates. Then Hume's nightmare came true when the torso finally turned up on the Essex mudflats on Friday, October 21. The first witness to come forward was a taxi driver who had been given a five pound note with the published serial numbers. He explained that he had taken a customer from Southend Airport to Finchley Rd.

After further investigations which involved all airfields in the area, it was not long before the police discovered that Hume had hired a plane and was also an associate of Setty. They knocked on Hume's door at 7:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 27.

Detectives were posted at both the front and back of the flat.