After I had felt this woman feeling in my pockets, I felt my trousers cash pocket and found that a ten shilling note, which I was certain I had put in that pocket, had gone.’

As Leslie Hale wrote in his book, Hanged in Error (see bibliography), ‘This was not a statement to be lightly dismissed.’ No one had reported that fact to the papers. How could Ware have known? After all, his first note to the prison governor at Walton had been bold, simple and powerful:

I wish to confess that I killed Olive Balshaw with a hammer on a bombed-site in the Deansgate, Manchester, on Saturday, 19 October, about 10 p.m. We had been to a picture house near the Belle Vue Stadium earlier in the evening.

Somehow, the detection team decided that the register at the boarding house where Rowland said he had been was said to have been tampered with, and that the man who ran the place had made a false statement. Ware had said that he had been to a pub in Oxford Street, Manchester on the fateful night. He described customers with telling detail; one man may even have been Rowland. Most important, he talked about buying a hammer (the murder weapon, according to Forensics) and then going to the pictures with Balchin. But Detective Hannam took Ware back to the cinema and jogged his memory. The conclusion was that the two apparently astounding facts that Ware seemed to know could have been easily available to anyone passing by. He had said:

I then went to a posh cinema which was about five minutes’ walk away from Piccadilly … The cinema I went to … I paid 2s. 9d. for my seat which was well down the ground floor …

The statement was crumbling and Rowland’s fate was looking dismal. Rowland had no reprieve and there was no acquittal. He was hanged on 27 February 1947 by Albert Pierrepoint.

But in August 1951, David Ware told the police in Bristol that he had killed a woman. He added, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I keep on having an urge to hit women on the head.’ He was found guilty of attempted murder and, of course, he was quite insane. His favourite weapon was a hammer. Had the real killer of Olive Balchin been that ‘madman’ in Walton Gaol after all?