DOUBLE MURDER IN LONDON

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27307, 25 March 1954, Page 11

DOUBLE MURDER IN LONDON

OFFER OF BRIBE TO KILL WIFE LONDON, March 23. Two men, one a former convict, and one a Royal Air Force officer, told an inquest jury in London today that Ronald Chesney, the international smuggler, had offered them money to get rid of his wife so that Chesney could marry his German girl friend. Chesney shot himself in a German wood last month as the police sought him for the murders of his wife and mother-in-law in the old folks’ home they ran in a London suburb. The former convict, Herbert Boyd, said that Chesney offered him money to run down Mrs Chesney with a car. The Royal Air Force officer, Irwin Maling, said that Chesney gave him a cheque for £lOOO in 1951 to give him an alibi if he got rid of his wife. He tore up the cheque. Chesney said it would be easy to get into the old folks’ home and turn on the gas “because his wife was probably drunk every night,” said Maling. Other witnesses today told how Chesney’s eccentric mother-in-law, the self-styled •‘Lady” Menzies, slept in a makeshift bed in a downstairs room. She did not undress, even at night, in case any of her aged guests needed her. Her niece, Miss Phyllis McNeish, said: “There were times when she was not particularly capable, because she had drunk to excess.” The inquest into the death of Mrs Chesney and “Lady” Menzies is, in effect, the murder trial of a dead man —Chesney. Detective-Superintendent E. Daws, of Scotland Yard, said he found the body of Mrs Chesney, wearing a black nightdress, drowned in a first-floor bathroom. He found the body of “Lady” Menzies strangled and battered on the head in a lounge. Dr. Lewis Nickolls, Scotland Yard’s famous scientific detective, said he found two hairs similar to Chesney’s hair on a carpet slipper belonging to “Lady” Menzies. He found similar hair on Mrs Chesney’s cardigan.