ONLY ONE NEWSPAPER, so far as I know, criticised the
Sunday Pictorial for publishing a series of articles purporting to be the confession of Donald Hume to the murder of Stanley Setty in 1949: the Daily Sketch. Hume was found not guilty of the murder, but sentenced to twelve years as an acces- sory; and when he came out of jail recently he hawked his reminiscences round Fleet Street— unsuccessfully, until eventually he found a suit- able market ('I chose to make my confession to the Sunday Pictorial,' he now writes, 'because I knew this newspaper would demand the real truth from me, and because it has the widest reader- ship'). His is a repulsive story, made even more repulsive by a picture, a photo-reconstruction of the way he threw Setty's torso into the sea from an aeroplane, with his dog in the back seat. How much, I wonder, is the Pictorial paying Hume? Enough, I suppose, to make murder rather more profitable than usual, though since Hume spent eighi years in gaol the title of his shoddy series 'I got away with murder' is, fortunately, far from accurate.
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