Dorothy Barbara Rawlinson, who went by Barbara, was twenty-nine, English, and new to Bermuda. She had visited the island a few months earlier, liked it enough to stay, found work as a secretary, and on Thursdays and Sundays went to Southlands Beach in Warwick Parish, where the owner, a friend, had given her permission to swim. On the afternoon of September 27, 1959, she packed two library books and her cosmetics into a bag and went to the beach. Her body was found in the surf the next day. Sharks had mauled it, and for a time that hid the fact that she had been savagely beaten. Bloodstained clothing was found buried in the sand nearby.
Her death was the third killing of a woman in Warwick Parish that year. Gertrude Robinson, seventy-two, had been found beaten outside her cottage on March 7 and died in hospital; Dorothy Pearse, fifty-nine, was raped and beaten to death in the same area in May. Both were Englishwomen living alone. In July 1958 an Irishwoman, Florence Flood, had fought off a man who broke into her house on Cobbs Hill. The island's newspapers had begun calling the stretch the Murder Mile, and a week after the Rawlinson killing, on October 3, two detectives from the Scotland Yard murder squad, Superintendent Richard Lewis and Sergeant Frederick Taylor, flew in to take over. They came looking, the press said, for the man with the wet clothes: a shopkeeper had told the police that a Black man had come into his store on the day of the killing soaked through and paid with wet money.
The man was Wendell Willis Lightbourne, nineteen, a golf caddie from Spring Hill, Warwick. Detective Milton Marsh of the Bermuda police, who arrested him, knew him already; the year before, Marsh had arrested him for an offense that earned him ten lashes. Lightbourne confessed to the Scotland Yard officers. "Yeah, I bashed her," he is reported to have said. He was charged with the murder of Barbara Rawlinson and with the attempted murder of Florence Flood.
The trial opened in December 1959 before Chief Justice Sir Newnham Worley and was over within the month. The Attorney General, John Hooton, prosecuted. Lightbourne was defended by Lois Browne-Evans, later Dame Lois, the first Black woman called to the Bermuda bar, who argued diminished responsibility from brain damage. The picture of him that came out at trial was of a boy badly shaken by his father's death when he was nine, bullied at school, written off by his teachers as unteachable, violent when drunk, and suicidal before he was a teenager; he told police at one point that he could not spell his mother's or his sister's name. On the stand he told the Attorney General that he had met Rawlinson on the beach, that they had talked, and that they had had sex. The jury convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to hang on December 30, 1959.
The execution was put off to January 20, then to February 3, while doctors examined him. Three psychiatrists reported that he was mentally unfit, and on January 31, 1960, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, to be served in England. Bermuda was still a Crown colony governed from the Colonial Secretariat, and sending him abroad was a simple matter. He was flown to Britain under escort.
He was never charged with the deaths of Gertrude Robinson or Dorothy Pearse, though he was questioned about them and about other cases, and it was widely rumored on the island that he had killed them. Detective Marsh, the man who arrested him, said long afterward that he did not believe the other murders were connected to the Rawlinson case. Both remain unsolved. The label of three victims that has followed Lightbourne through the popular literature rests on that rumor. The record holds one conviction, for Barbara Rawlinson, who was buried in St. John's Churchyard in Pembroke with four policemen carrying her coffin.