DOUBLE MURDER IN LONDON

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27308, 26 March 1954, Page 11

DOUBLE MURDER IN LONDON

CHESNEY BLAMED AT INQUEST

LONDON, March 24. An inquest jury decided tonight that Ronald Chesney, the 45-year-old international smuggler, murdered his wife and mother-in-law in an old folks’ home in Ealing, a London suburb. The inquest—virtually the murder trial of the dead man—was made on Chesney’s wife, Isobel, aged 43, and her mother, the eccentric self-styled “Lady” Mary Menzies, aged 73. Erwin Kuhn, a German police official, told the Coroner that after Chesney shot himself in a wood in Germany, he saw Sonia Winnickes—Chesney’s beautiful German girl friend. She gave him Chesney’s last letter to her.

The Coroner was told that just before he committed suicide Chesney wrote letters to his solicitors asking them to make sure that Miss Winnickes inherited the £lO.OOO fortune he would have gained by his wife’s death. Pleading his innocence of the double murder, Chesney said in the letter: “I realise that though I am innocent, I have not the chance of the proverbial snowball in Hades of getting out of the mess. I have seen so much of prison that I have no wish to return there, even for a day, and the prospects of hanging appeal to me still less.”