Donald Hume's record sits in two courts, ten years apart, and the two outcomes differ in kind. In January 1950 a jury at the Old Bailey in London could not agree whether he had murdered Stanley Setty, and at a second hearing a verdict of not guilty of murder was directed. He pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and received a sentence of twelve years. In 1958, after his release, he sold a signed confession to a Sunday newspaper in which he said he had killed Setty. He could not be tried again for it. In 1959 a court at Winterthur, in Switzerland, convicted him on five counts, among them the murder of a taxi driver in Zurich, and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Legally, then, Hume is a man convicted of one murder, in Switzerland in 1959. The death of Stanley Setty in 1949 ended in an acquittal on the murder charge, followed by a conviction as an accessory after the fact. The account of how Setty died comes from Hume's own paid statement, made eight years later, and not from any verdict.
Hume was born in England about 1919 or 1920; he was 78 when he died in 1998.
Before the war's end he had been convicted of impersonating an RAF officer and had claimed to have been a Battle of Britain pilot. He sold counterfeit gin to London bars and passed forged checks at air force stations while posing as an officer.
By 1949 Hume was married, and his wife had given birth to a daughter that summer. He ran an electrician's business in Golders Green, in north London. Alongside it he worked for Stanley Setty on illegal ventures that involved cars and petrol coupons.
Stanley Setty was the man Hume worked for. His original name is given as Sulman Seti. Setty had served a prison term some twenty years earlier for fraud. The two men's arrangement ended in a quarrel, and Hume later gave more than one reason for it.
Setty died on the night of October 4, 1949, in Golders Green; the date and the place are those of Hume's own confession of 1958. The courts did not find, at that stage, that Hume had murdered him.
Police traced banknotes that had belonged to Setty and linked Hume to him through witnesses. Hume was arrested in London that month. He said that three men he knew only by nicknames had paid him for work they had asked him to do for them. The officers did not accept this account.
Hume denied being the person who had caused Setty's death, and the case against him on the murder charge was circumstantial. His account of three men who had paid him in banknotes that had been Setty's was the center of his defense.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey in January 1950. At that time a conviction for murder carried a sentence of death. The jury could not agree.
Accounts of what followed differ in detail. One has the judge at a second hearing direct the jury to return a verdict of not guilty of murder; another has the prosecution offer no evidence at the retrial, so that Hume was formally acquitted of murder; a third counts three juries, the first discharged when the judge fell ill, the second unable to agree and the third returning a verdict of not guilty. All agree on the result: Hume was found not guilty of murder.
He then pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder. The sentence was twelve years' imprisonment, of which he served eight.
Rebecca West attended the trial and wrote about it for The New Yorker under the title "Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume." She concluded that Hume was innocent of the murder.
Hume left Dartmoor Prison in 1958, freed early for good behavior. By mid-June 1958 the London Sunday Pictorial was publishing his confession in installments. The newspaper's assistant editor, Fred Redman, had visited him in prison, a reporter, Victor Sims, had interviewed him at a hotel on the Thames estuary, and the paper was believed to have paid him about 3,600 pounds. The statement opened with the words: "I, Donald Hume, do hereby confess to the Sunday Pictorial."
In it Hume said he had killed Setty. He said that he felt "a twinge of jealousy" after hearing reports that Setty was "hanging around his wife," and that his creed was, "If you have an enemy, GET RID OF HIM." He also offered a different motive at another time, a grudge because Setty had kicked his dog. The essayist Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal in 2021, called the account unlikely in several respects and Hume a habitual liar.
The installments reached an audience of about 5,677,000. The Daily Sketch demanded, "Arrest this man." Another paper, the Star, wrote that it was bad for a nation when a man could get away with murder and show a profit. Hume could not be tried again for the murder of Setty.
Hume changed his name by deed to Brown and obtained a second passport as John Stephen Bird, a company director from Liverpool. He spent much of his time in Switzerland, where he courted a Zurich woman who owned a beauty shop and who knew him as a Canadian test pilot. He also traveled under other names to Montreal, New York and Los Angeles without being recognized.
Later in 1958 Scotland Yard named him as the man it wanted for two bank robberies in Britain, at Brentford in west London in August and at a second branch about three months later, in which members of the staff were wounded. By early 1959 he was the force's most wanted man. No trial for either robbery is on record.
In January 1959, in Zurich, a taxi driver was killed in the course of a bank robbery, and a bank employee was wounded. Hume was arrested in Zurich the same day. He first gave police a false identity; his fingerprints established who he was. The taxi driver's name is not on record.
The trial was held at Winterthur, in the Canton of Zurich, with Dr. Hans Gut presiding as court president. Hume confessed to the crimes with which he was charged. The court found him guilty on five counts, ranging from murder to violating Swiss rules on resident aliens. He received the maximum penalty, life imprisonment, with the right to apply for conditional release after 15 years of good behavior. Switzerland had no death penalty, and life imprisonment was the heaviest sentence open to the court.
Gut said that part of the second payment Hume had received from the Sunday Pictorial would go to the taxi driver's relatives and the rest to Hume for use in prison. Hume was taken to the cantonal penitentiary at Regensdorf. He told reporters that he meant to finish a novel, The Tin of Tomatoes, and to play trumpet in the prison jazz band. The verdict was reported in the first half of October 1959; its exact date is not on record.
Hume served seventeen years in a Swiss maximum-security prison before being sent back to Britain. He was transferred to Broadmoor, the secure hospital in England, in 1976, on grounds of insanity. He spent twelve years at Broadmoor and was then moved, at the age of 69, to an ordinary psychiatric hospital for another year or two, after which he lived quietly in London.
In 1962 the journal Encounter published "International Psychopath: The Case of Donald Hume," by Giles Playfair and Derrick Sington, which argued that his years in prison had driven him mad.
Hume died in 1998, aged 78. The cause was probably a heart attack. The historian Jonathan Oates wrote a book-length study of the case, published by Pen & Sword in 2020.
The central question in the case is how Stanley Setty died. The courts did not decide it against Hume on the murder charge: he was acquitted of murder in January 1950. His guilty plea was to being an accessory after the fact to murder, which concerned what he did afterward and not the death itself. The account that he killed Setty rests on his own statement to the Sunday Pictorial in 1958, given when he could not be prosecuted again, and for which he was paid. The evidence at the 1950 trial was circumstantial, and Dalrymple called Hume a habitual liar; West, who sat through the trial, thought him innocent of the murder. Hume himself gave different reasons for the quarrel. Hume at one point also accused his wife of the crime, and she later divorced him.
Several points of detail remain unsettled: whether three juries or two heard the 1950 case; whether the second hearing ended on a direction from the judge or because the prosecution offered no evidence; whether he left prison in February or in the spring of 1958; and how much the newspaper paid him (figures of about 3,600 pounds, about $10,000 and $5,600 are given). The dates of his death and of his release from hospital are not on record.
About 1919 or 1920: Brian Donald Hume is born in England.
Summer 1949: his daughter is born.
October 4, 1949: Stanley Setty dies in Golders Green, London; Hume later says he killed him.
October 1949: Hume is arrested in London.
January 1950: his trial opens at the Old Bailey; the jury cannot agree.
January 1950: at the second hearing a verdict of not guilty of murder is directed; he pleads guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and is sentenced to twelve years.
February 1958: he leaves Dartmoor Prison.
June 1958: the Sunday Pictorial publishes his confession in installments.
Late 1958: Scotland Yard names him as wanted for two bank robberies in Britain.
January 1959: a taxi driver is killed in Zurich; Hume is arrested the same day.
1959: a court at Winterthur finds him guilty on five counts, including murder, and sentences him to life imprisonment.
1962: Encounter publishes an essay arguing that prison drove him mad.
1976: he is transferred to Broadmoor on grounds of insanity.
1998: Hume dies, aged 78.