Simcox, a maintenance fitter by trade, lived in
Smethwick in the West Midlands of England. He was divorced by his
first wife for cruelty.
Simcox murdered his second wife in 1948, and
was sentenced to death at Stafford Assizes. However, in April 1948
the House of Commons had passed Sidney Silverman's amendment to
the then current Criminal Justice Bill to suspend capital
punishment for murder for five years. The House of Lords
overturned the amendment later in the year, but in the intervening
period the Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede had announced that he
would reprieve all condemned prisoners until the law was settled.
Between March and October 1948 26 persons, including Simcox, were
thereby reprieved. Simcox served 10 years in jail, before being
released on licence.
He was married, for the third time, in 1962 to
Ruby Irene. In 1963 he threatened his wife with an air-pistol, but
was put on probation. His wife subsequently left him, with the
help of relatives. On 11 November 1963 Simcox, armed with a rifle,
went in search of his wife. He shot her sister, Mrs Hilda Payton,
fatally through the head, before pursuing his wife to her
brother's house. There he shot them both, but they survived.
Simcox then turned the gun on himself, shooting himself twice
through the body, but he also survived.
In February 1964 Simcox was again tried at
Stafford Assizes, and sentenced to death by Mr Justice Finnemore.
The Homicide Act 1957 had restricted capital murder to a limited
class of crimes, including murder with a firearm, and a second
murder committed on a different occasion from the first. Simcox
was eligible to be hanged on both grounds.
The wording of Simcox's sentences of death was
slightly different on the two occasions. In 1948 he was sentenced
"to be hanged by the neck until you are dead", while in 1964 he
was sentenced "to suffer death in the manner authorised by law".
This change in language was provided in the 1957 Act; the old
language was considered anachronistic, as since the 1870s Britain
had employed the "long-drop" method of hanging, which was held to
cause near-instantaneous death.
Simcox's date of execution was set for Tuesday
17 March 1964 at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham. However, his
lawyers petitioned the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, on the
grounds that Simcox was still severely injured from his
self-inflicted wounds, could not walk, and would probably have to
be hanged in a wheelchair. There was no precedent for postponing
an execution until a prisoner was fit enough to be hanged, and
there was a history of reprieving prisoners whose executions might
result in an unseemly spectacle owing to existing injuries or
infirmity.
On 14 March 1964 Brooke announced that Simcox
had been reprieved, the sentence of death automatically being
replaced by life imprisonment; at that time there was no provision
for attaching special conditions to such a sentence, meaning that
one day Simcox might be released again, albeit on licence.
Five months later, the last-ever hangings in
Britain took place, and in 1965 the death penalty was in practice
abolished for murder.
In 1969 Simcox's wife divorced him, and the
civil judge in that case took the unusual step of recommending
that Simcox never be released.
Simcox died in Portsmouth in early 1981, aged
71. It is currently not known whether he was still a prisoner at
the time of his death.
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