SWITZERLAND: The Slippery One

As the blue police Volkswagen bus pulled up in front of the courthouse in Winterthur, Switzerland one day last week, a ripple of anticipation ran through the waiting crowd. “Here he comes,” yelled a photographer—and out stepped a curly-haired Englishman, bound for the most sensational trial Switzerland had seen in years. But the prisoner’s names —Donald Hume alias Donald Brown alias John Stephen Bird—were not on the tips of Swiss tongues alone. In Britain, Hume is Scotland Yard’s most notorious enemy —and just about the slipperiest the Yard has ever had.

Only 16 months ago, Britain was rocked by a Sunday Pictorial story that began with the words, “I, Donald Hume, do here by confess . . .” The lurid confession was that Hume had hacked to pieces a car dealer named Stanley Setty —a murder that in two separate trials the Crown had never been able to prove. Convicted only of dumping Setty’s dismembered body from a hired airplane, Hume got off with a mere eight years as an accessory. Upon his release, secure in the knowledge that he could never be retried for the murder, he sold his gaudy story to the Pic for $5,600. When this nest egg began to run low, he replenished it by means of a couple of bank robberies. But each time police got enough evidence to go after him, he darted across the Channel to safety.

“A Spot of Cash.” In time, he set up headquarters in Zurich, where an auburn-haired beauty-shop owner named Trudi Sommer, 29. was only too happy to have him share her apartment. She thought he was a Canadian test pilot named Johnny Bird. Then, one night last January, for reasons he was never quite able to explain, Hume wandered off to a church, where he drank up all the communion wine. Next morning, armed with a pistol, he turned up at a small branch of Zurich’s Gewerbebank to help himself to “a spot of cash.”

When a teller balked. Hume shot and critically wounded him. Scooping up a meager $45, he ran out into the street just as the assistant teller rang the alarm. He killed a taxi driver who tried to stop him, was finally brought down by a 24-year-old pastry cook after his pistol jammed.

“Tell That Bum.” In court last week, Hume put on the performance of his life. He yawned, hummed, shouted abuse, and tossed his black curls as witness after witness told what had happened that fatal morning. When the president of the court, mild-mannered Dr. Hans Gut, began with the formality of asking the prisoner his name, Hume snarled at the interpreter: “Tell that bum that he should know who I am!”

With endless patience, the court listened as Hume went over the story of his life—the mother whom he had to call “Auntie,” because she did not want him (the feeling was mutual); his dismissal from the R.A.F., “after I had meningitis”; his history of crime, from the hacking up of the unfortunate Mr. Setty to the shooting of a British bank manager who “was crazy enough to tackle me.” When the court finally got around to the case at hand, Hume blithely confessed all, grandly announced that he had refrained from shooting a 16-year-old bank apprentice who had chased him all the way “from the bank to where I was captured” only because the apprentice had the same color hair as Trudi Sommer. At last, found guilty on five counts, ranging from murder to violation of Swiss regulations on resident aliens. Hume got the maximum penalty: life imprisonment, with the right to apply for “conditional release” after 15 years of good behavior.

Ubiquitous Pic. But there was something strangely familiar about the latest trial of Donald Hume: kindly Court President Gut had seen fit to let a man from the ubiquitous Sunday Pictorial pay Hume another reported $5,600 for the second installment of the Hume saga. To astonished reporters. Gut explained that part of the money would go to the relatives of the cab driver Hume murdered —”The rest Hume can use to buy cigarettes or something in jail.” As police hustled him off toward Regensdorf cantonal penitentiary, Hume idly launched a kick at a photographer. Then, all smiles, he began to review his plans for the future—to finish his novel, The Tin of Tomatoes, join the prison jazz band as a trumpeter, and then “get the hell out of there, one way or another.”