Something made me go funny and the next thing I remember was that the woman was outside the van with blood on her face’. This was the explanation given by Reginald Percy Stowe, twenty-nine, of Ashby, after attacking Mrs Norah Wraith of Laughton, with a hammer. P C Dixon recalled the words with disbelief. He told Gainsborough magistrates that he had set about the fortyyear-old woman on Thursday, 23 April, and left her bleeding on the roadside.
Stowe was a man of no character: nothing remarkable. He was a man whose habits and past gave no clue as to any possible source of such atrocious behaviour. The motive was as puzzling as that of Horstead in the black-out terror.
In the modern world, there would be a whole process of enquiry, and there would certainly be some investigation of all the possible factors in the man’s life such as stress or even some kind of mental illness. As it happened, his eventual defence could muster nothing substantial. The incident goes down on record as one of those mysterious aberrations the human mind is subject to.
There is an interesting pattern in what can only be called a crime wave of offences against the person in England in the early to mid-1950s. It was a period in which offences like Stowe’s were not uncommon. It would be possible to look for answers in the nature of the society at the time, and at the particular pressures such as rationing, poverty and the aftermath of the war. But in the end, here is a case in which there was motiveless malignity and a poor woman happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The answer for the culprit was a prison term.
Laughton, a small village and woodland between Scunthorpe and Gainsborough, is a very quiet spot; the last thing anyone would expect to see there would be a violent crime, but it happened, and the statement made, however vacuous, was the only explanation offered at the time. The only news associated with the place in the twentieth century are the sightings of big cats in the forest.