Stowe, who lived at Ashby in Parker’s Lane, was sent to trial for robbery with violence. He was not exactly careful and had made no attempt to conceal weapons: the hammer and some items belonging to Mrs Wraith were found in the hedges along the Laughton road. She picked Stowe out of an identity parade, and also easily identified the hammer he had used. Stowe was undoubtedly an inept and bungling criminal. He was married, and with a child, and the case then went to trial. He was a man with other offences in his past, such as larceny, but this was a step up on the scale of heinous crime.

He was far too dangerous to be allowed to walk the streets around Scunthorpe, and it is perhaps more worrying that the attack was done not in the streets but in a lonely stretch of road in North Lincolnshire where people were accustomed to being safe if they walked alone.