The Hooded Man: The Murder of Inspector Arthur Walls, 1912

Who was Inspector Arthur Walls?

Arthur Walls was 44 years old and had served for around a quarter of a century. He held the post of Parade Inspector for the Eastbourne force, working from an office on Grand Parade — a role that put him at the centre of the town’s public face, the seafront. He was married with three children.

The local press described him as genial and kind towards colleagues and public alike, and the response to his death suggests that was more than an obituary formula. When he was buried, thousands of people lined the streets of Eastbourne.

The evening of 9 October 1912

Number 6 South Cliff Avenue was the home of Countess Flora Sztaray, in the well-to-do Meads district close to the Grand Hotel. The Countess was married to a wealthy Hungarian nobleman and was known locally to keep a considerable quantity of jewellery in the house — the sort of detail that circulates in a resort town, and the sort that attracts professional attention.

That evening she was leaving for a dinner engagement. As she got into her carriage, her coachman noticed movement on the ivy-covered balcony above the front door. Looking again, he made out the shape of a man’s head and shoulders.

The Countess went back inside and telephoned the police station, reporting a man breaking in at the bedroom window above the front door. The call was taken by PC John Luck and logged at around ten to seven. It was passed to Inspector Walls at his Grand Parade office, and his reply was recorded: he would go at once.

He went alone. Arriving at the house, he saw the man lying on the portico above the door and called up to him — telling him, in the words later given in court, to come down.

The man fired twice. The first bullet struck Walls in the chest and he staggered back into the road, mortally wounded. The medical evidence was that the shot had been fired from above and to his left, that it had caused a wound to the heart, and that death would have come very quickly. The gunman got down and escaped into the dark.

The police were left with almost nothing: a set of footprints in the garden, which they preserved in plaster casts, and a felt trilby hat found in a nearby gutter. Attempts to trace the hat led nowhere. There was no witness who had seen the gunman’s face.

House-to-house enquiries did turn up one thread. Earlier that afternoon, a man had been seen sitting on a bench at one end of South Cliff Avenue with a heavily pregnant young woman, and had later been noticed walking the street alone while she waited. To the investigating officers, that looked like someone assessing the ground.

The informant: Edgar Power

The following day a former medical student named Edgar Power walked into the police station and said he knew who the killer was.

The man, he said, was George McKay, living in Eastbourne under the name John Williams with his pregnant girlfriend, Florence Seymour. Power knew him through Williams’s brother, who was Power’s closest friend. That morning the brother had received an urgent note from Williams begging for help and money at an address in Tideswell Road, and had passed it to Power. Power handed it to the police.

His account was that Williams had tried to burgle the Countess’s house, had shot Inspector Walls, and had afterwards met Seymour and buried the gun on the beach before writing to his brother for the fare back to London.

Power’s motive was not public spirit. He was in love with Florence Seymour.

He then made himself useful. He arranged to meet Williams at Moorgate Street Station in London; police were waiting and arrested both men. Power was released immediately.

Why he became “the hooded man”

When Williams was taken into custody, officers covered his head with an apron so that he could not be photographed — the concern being that published pictures might contaminate the recollection of any witness later asked to identify him. The same covering was used when he travelled to and from the magistrates’ court in Eastbourne.

The press seized on the image and christened him the hooded man. The name stuck to the whole case.

The precaution turned out to be beside the point. Nobody had seen the gunman’s face, and nobody picked Williams out of an identity parade. From beginning to end, no witness ever identified him as the man on the portico.

Florence Seymour and the buried revolver

With no identification, the case needed the gun. Power supplied it.

He went to Florence Seymour and told her the police knew everything, and that the only way to save Williams was to dig the revolver up and move it somewhere safer. On 15 October the two of them retrieved it from the beach. Officers were waiting. Both were arrested; Power was let go within hours.

Seymour was kept for questioning. She was heavily pregnant and in poor physical and mental condition. After some hours she wrote and signed a statement incriminating Williams: that on the night of the murder he had left her near the Countess’s house for about half an hour and come back without his trilby; that he had thrown away a burglar’s rope with a hook on the end; and that they had buried a revolver, broken in two, on the beach.

The police were conscious that this statement was the case, and that she might withdraw it. They moved to get her into the witness box quickly. At the four-day magistrates’ hearing she was taken through her statement line by line and fainted four times while giving evidence.

Williams, meanwhile, denied everything, offering the theory that whoever broke into the house had been after the Countess’s papers for political reasons.

The trial at Lewes, December 1912

The trial opened at Lewes Assizes on 12 December 1912 before Mr Justice Channell. Williams was by now represented by Patrick Hastings — later one of the most celebrated advocates of his generation — with C. F. Baker. The Crown was led by Sir Frederick Low with Cecil Whiteley. Crowds gathered outside the courthouse, and a local paper called it the most sensational murder trial within living memory.

The prosecution opened by making plain that its case rested principally on Florence Seymour.

She was the first witness called. She told the court that her statement had been false, and that she had made it only because Power had told her she would be charged with murder if she did not. The Crown obtained permission to treat her as hostile. She would still say nothing against Williams. Hastings barely cross-examined her: he asked whether what she had just told the court was the truth, she said it was, and she broke down.

The prosecution’s central plank had gone in its first hour.

Power was called. He testified that Williams had boasted about the shooting when Power teased him for being a poor shot, answering that it had been “a good shot anyhow.” Hastings used the cross-examination to lay out Power’s betrayal of the two people closest to him, and later wrote that Power was the most contemptible human being he had ever met.

Williams gave evidence himself. He admitted he was a burglar, admitted he had been in Eastbourne that evening, and admitted burying the revolver — but said the package containing the gun and rope had been left with him by another thief he called “Freddy Mike,” to hold until it was collected. He had hidden it, he said, because he knew that a man with his record and a gun in his room would be suspected.

One of Britain’s first ballistics cases

With the witness evidence in ruins, the Crown fell back on physical proof — and in doing so the case became a small landmark. Among Williams’s possessions was an empty holster showing signs that a revolver had recently been kept in it. To go further, police turned to Robert Churchill, an expert in the very new field of forensic ballistics. It was one of the first times British police had used ballistics evidence in a murder case.

Churchill fired a second gun of the same design and established that the fatal bullet had come from a revolver of the same make and calibre as the one dug from the beach. But matching a class of weapon is not the same as matching the weapon. On Chief Inspector Bower’s suggestion, photographers tried to capture the inside of the barrel; the attempts failed. Churchill instead took a cast of the barrel’s interior using dental wax.

The technique has since been described as far from satisfactory. It was, nonetheless, enough for the jury.

In summing up, Channell observed that hiding the gun and leaving Eastbourne were “acts which a guilty man would be very likely to do.” He acknowledged there was no direct evidence tying Williams to the shooting, and added that convictions had been returned in many cases on less.

The jury was out for roughly fifteen minutes. Williams was convicted and sentenced to death.

The appeal, the petition and the Commons

Hastings took the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal, which sat on 13 January 1913 — Lord Alverstone CJ with Ridley and Phillimore JJ. The reported citation is R v Williams (1913) 8 Cr App R 133. Hastings argued that Channell had misdirected the jury and that the verdict could not stand.

Alverstone dismissed the appeal without hearing the Crown’s response, finding no misdirection. Hastings wrote afterwards that Alverstone had appeared satisfied of the prisoner’s guilt from the opening of the hearing, and that no legal argument had made any impression on him.

Then came a twist. Williams received a letter from the same “Freddy Mike,” claiming not only to know the real killer but that the killer was his own twin brother, who had fled to France. Williams’s solicitor took it to Scotland Yard, and visited Freddy Mike with Chief Inspector Bower; the man repeated the story. A copy went to the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, together with a statement from Florence Seymour saying her confession had followed threats.

When the story reached the public, campaigns sprang up across the country. A petition for reprieve carrying 35,000 signatures was sent to the Home Secretary.

On 23 January 1913, as soon as the Commons sat, McKenna was questioned by MPs from all three main parties. Robert Munro, member for Wick Burghs, asked him to weigh the conflicting accounts, the absence of direct evidence and the judge’s direction to the jury, and to grant a pardon. He was supported by Will Crooks, the Marquess of Tullibardine and Ian Macpherson.

McKenna’s reply acknowledged that no part of a Home Secretary’s duty weighed heavier, and that any man would be glad to find a reason to save a life. But he had traced Freddy Mike’s family history and found “not a shred or shadow of foundation” for the story. There was no twin brother. Nobody of the kind described had been in Eastbourne that night. The man had invented it, McKenna concluded, because he had known Williams and could not bear the thought of him hanging.

The law would take its course. Williams twice asked permission to marry Florence Seymour and was twice refused. He was executed at Lewes Prison on 30 January 1913.

Was it a safe conviction?

This is where the case still divides people, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a comfortable one. Both sides are stronger than the partisans of either usually admit.

What pointed to Williams: he admitted being a burglar with previous convictions, admitted being in Eastbourne that evening, and admitted burying a revolver on the beach after the shooting. A holster among his possessions had recently held a gun. He had lost a hat, and a hat was found near the scene. The ballistics tied the fatal bullet to a weapon of the same make and calibre. He fled the town, then wrote urgently for money to get away. And the “Freddy Mike” story that underpinned the reprieve campaign was investigated at Home Office level and comprehensively demolished — that particular ground for doubt collapsed entirely, and it is only fair to say so.

What troubles the conviction: nobody ever identified him. The prosecution’s own stated foundation was a statement obtained over several hours from a heavily pregnant woman in poor physical and mental condition, who was manipulated into recovering the weapon by a man in love with her and who repudiated her statement at the first opportunity in open court. The chief remaining witness was that same informant, whose motive was to remove his rival. The ballistics method used to link the specific gun was crude even by the standards of the day. The judge told the jury that flight and concealment were what a guilty man would do, and that others had been convicted on less. The jury deliberated for about a quarter of an hour. The appeal was refused without the Crown being asked to argue.

What can be said fairly is this. A modern court would very probably not permit the case to be presented as it was in 1912, and a modern appellate court would have a great deal to examine. That is not the same as saying an innocent man was hanged. Williams may well have been the man on the portico — a good deal of the circumstantial evidence suggests he was. The uncomfortable point is that the process which sent him to the gallows would not satisfy anybody today, and it was carried out at a speed that left no room for the doubt to be resolved either way.

No court has ever revisited the verdict. He remains convicted, and no other person has ever been charged.

How Arthur Walls is remembered

Inspector Walls was buried at Ocklynge Cemetery on 16 October 1912, a week after his death. Officers led the procession and thousands of townspeople turned out along the route.

More than a century on, his headstone had deteriorated badly. In 2025 it was restored and formally unveiled at a ceremony at Ocklynge on 18 July, attended by representatives of the Chief Constable of Sussex, the Sussex Police Federation, the monumental masons who carried out the work, and volunteers from the Friends of Ocklynge Cemetery, who organised the restoration. It marked 113 years since his death.

It is a detail worth holding on to. The case is remembered for the hood, the informant, the recanting witness and the wax cast of a gun barrel. The reason any of it happened is that a 44-year-old man with a wife and three children was told there was an intruder on a roof in Meads, said he would go at once, and went on his own.

Please note: John Williams was convicted at trial and his conviction has never been overturned. Where this account sets out concerns about the evidence and the conduct of the case, those concerns are drawn from the contemporary appeal, the parliamentary debate and later legal commentary. We express no view on whether he was guilty, and we make no allegation against any other named person.

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