Private Brian Chandler, 20, was the last person to be executed at Durham, after he killed an 83-year-old woman in Darlington – for £4.
Chandler had hooked up with two teenage girls after going AWOL from Catterick. They stole a bike and shoplifted, and then one of the girls mentioned that she had done some cleaning for Martha Dodd who always kept £200 in her home at No. 4, Victoria Road.
On 11 June, Chandler subjected Mrs Dodd to ‘a savage and prolonged attack’, killing her with nineteen hammer blows to the head. In court, he at first claimed that he had acted in self-defence; then he claimed that one of the girls – ‘a strapping young woman’ who could have appeared in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, said his barrister – had done it.
On 27 October, the jury took little more than an hour to find him guilty, and he died twenty-one days later. ‘The execution attracted little public interest in Durham,’ reported The Northern Echo. ‘The walls surrounding the gardens outside the prison were bare of the normal gathering of onlookers, and as the hands of the clock on the prison tower reached 9am, the hour fixed for the execution, the scene outside remained deserted except for a group of reporters standing in the rain.’
The death penalty was abolished in December 1964.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 1995)