Nearly perfect murder
Sir: May I add a personal recollection to Jeff Bernard's note on the 'gruesome exhibit' in Scotland Yard's Black Museum (Low life, 13 September). The bottled arms in fact belonged to one Ronald John Chesney, 45, and his extraordinary murder case — in 1954 — was the only one I ever covered as a foreign correspondent. It was also very nearly the perfect murder.
Briefly, Chesney, a piratical figure with one gold earring often seen around the British community in Germany, wanted to get rid of his English wife and marry a German girlfriend. He holed up in an Amsterdam hotel for 48 hours, thereby establishing a cast-iron alibi while he went to London, murdered his wife, then re- turned. Unfortunately for Chesney, during the deed he was surprised by his mother-in- law, and strangled her too. Scotland Yard issued a widely publicised call to Interpol with Chesney's description — but in fact, as they later admitted, it was pure bluff. There was not one shred of hard evidence.
Chesney, however, panicked and a short time later was found shot in Cologne. Had he not panicked, he would almost certainly have got away with it, and the subsequent investigation revealed that he had also murdered his own mother, when aged 17, but had been acquitted on a 'not proven' verdict in a Scottish court.
The story about the arms is somewhat
LETTERS
different to what Jeff Bernard was told, and perhaps says something about the more grisly side of police mentality. In fact, it was not 'German efficiency' but the British detectives sent to Germany after Chesney's suicide who removed the arms; notionally to bring them back for forensic study. Fragments of tweed and hair under the nails did prove Chesney conclusively to have been the double murderer.
But why the whole arms, and why were they then bottled up for the benefit of the Yard? I vividly remember being shown them on a visit to the Black Museum some two years after Chesney's death and being thoroughly sickened by the macabre collec- tors' instinct that had installed them there.
Alistair Home
21 St Petersburgh Place, London W2
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