Case of the Eaton Brothers

For the first time in its history, Scotland Yard opens its official files to bring you the true stories of some of its most baffling cases. Research for Whitehall 1212 is prepared by Percy Hoskins, Chief Crime Reporter of the London Daily Express.

The stories for Radio are written and directed by Willis Cooper. The next voice you will hear is out of Chief Superintendent John Davidson, who is in charge of Scotland Yard's famous Black Museum. Good afternoon.

We keep this document in an ordinary, let-a-size filing cabinet, the kind you've surely seen many times. Oh, yes, here it is. It is typed on the official stationery of a London evening, never mind, it's the stationery of a London newspaper.

It's titled Confession in Big Black Letters, and it is a confession, the signed and attested confession of a murderer. Now it didn't hang him. Mr. Justice Anderson, who tried the case, castigated the man in the newspaper severely when he hauled him a trial. But that's not all the story. Here is Chief Inspector Hubert Allen Scott. He was telling the whole thing. Would you

speak up Herbert? Yes, it was in September 1931, wasn't it? This was Jan? September 1931, yes. September 1931, the 17th, that's right. But an empty shop at U Compton Street, Soho, I suppose you call them wine merchants, the people who had occupied the place.

They'd moved out in a hurry and the place was littered with the things that had been peculiar to their business. Empty wine bottles, broken casts, a few crates that had once contained rather other inferior carrots.

Although the places stood vacant for some two months, it was still a poorly-miff filthy and showed signs of someone having lived in the place during that time. A pair of brothers named Eaton had recently taken the place to house their sign painting professional business or whatever sign painting is. It was the elder Eaton Oswald, a man who wore a most impressive beard who