Case of the Hooded Man
| R v Williams (John) | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Court | Court of Criminal Appeal |
| Decided | 13 January 1913 |
| Citation(s) | (1913) 8 Cr App R 133 |
| Court membership | |
| Judge(s) sitting | Lord Alverstone CJ, Ridley J and Phillimore J |
| Keywords | |
| Murder | |
R v Williams (1913) 8 Cr App R 133 (known as the Case of the Hooded Man and the Eastbourne Murder) was a 1912 murder in England that took its name from the hood the defendant, John Williams, wore when travelling to and from court. After the murder of a police inspector in Eastbourne, with no witnesses and little forensic evidence, Edgar Power, a former medical student, told the police that his friend John Williams had committed the murder. Power helped the police conduct a sting operation to catch Williams; police also interrogated Williams's girlfriend Florence Seymour, who then confessed to having helped Williams hide the murder weapon.
However, Seymour later recanted her story, and another man came forth claiming to know the identity of the real killer. This new evidence, along with the behaviour of the judge in both the initial case and the appeal, made the case controversial enough that Members of Parliament from the three major political parties directly questioned the Home Secretary on the matter. Despite many requests for clemency, all appeals were denied, and Williams was executed in 1913. The case was one of the first investigations in Britain to use the emerging science of ballistics.
On 9 October 1912, the driver of a horse-drawn carriage noticed a man crouching near the front door of the house of Countess Flora Sztaray, located on South Cliff Avenue in Eastbourne. Sztaray was known to possess large amounts of valuable jewellery and to be married to a rich Hungarian nobleman. The driver, who was Sztaray's coachman, informed Sztaray of the man's presence, whereupon Sztaray telephoned the police.Inspector Arthur Walls was sent to investigate. When Walls arrived on the scene, he observed a man lying on the portico above the front door. Walls called out, "Now then, my man, you just come down." The man fired two shots, the first of which struck and killed Walls.
The police had only two clues: some footprints in the garden, and a hat that they found in a nearby gutter. The police took moulds of the footprints and endeavored to trace the hat, but with no success. However, during routine questioning of local residents, police learned that earlier in the afternoon of the murder, a man had been seen sitting with a heavily-pregnant young woman on a bench at one end of South Cliff Avenue; the man had also been seen wandering the street while the young woman sat on the bench alone, leading police to suspect that the man was assessing the lay of the land.
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