Murderpedia has thousands of hours of work behind it. To keep creating
new content, we kindly appreciate any donation you can give to help
the Murderpedia project stay alive. We have many
plans and enthusiasm
to keep expanding and making Murderpedia a better site, but we really
need your help for this. Thank you very much in advance.
Harold LOUGHANS
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Robbery
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder:
November 28,
1943
Date of arrest: 1 month after
Date of birth: 1895
Victim profile: Rose Ada Robinson,
63
Method of murder: Strangulation
Location: Portsmouth,
Hampshire, England, United Kingdom
Status: Tried and found not guilty of the
crime but later sold his confession to The People newspaper.
Died in 1965
Mrs Rose Ada Robinson who was 63 was allegedly murdered
by Harold Loughans on 28 November 1943. She was found strangled in her
bedroom the next day. Loughans was tried but found not guilty of the
crime but later sold his confession to the people newspaper.
Harold Loughans
The John
Barleycorn pub in Portsmouth was run by Mrs Rose Ada Robinson. She was a
63-year-old widow who had run the pub for over 40 years.
At 10.35pm on
Sunday 28 November 1943 she emptied the cash registers as usual, the
barman left and she locked up for the night. The next morning her body
was found in her bedroom, she had been strangled.
The place had been
ransacked and there was no sign of previous nights takings. At the rear
of the building a window had been forced and on the ground nearby was a
small black button.
A month
later in Waterloo Road, London, two policemen apprehended a poorly
dressed man trying to sell a new pair of shoes in a cafe. When asked the
man said his name was Harold Loughans.
He confessed to several
burglaries but then surprised the officers by confessing to a murder. He
was taken to the police station where he made a statement admitting the
murder of Mrs Robinson.
When the police looked at his coat which he said
he had been wearing on the night of the murder they found all the
buttons were missing. He said that he had pulled all the buttons off
after finding that one was missing after the murder. Fibres found on the
coat confirmed Loughans' presence at the scene of the murder.
By the
time the case came to trial Loughans had changed his tune and was now
claiming that he was innocent and that the police had put words into his
mouth.
At his trial at Winchester in March 1944 the defence produced
three witnesses that swore they had seen Loughans in London on the night
of the murder. The jury failed to agree a verdict.
A fortnight later his
retrial took place at the Old Bailey. Making a rare appearance for the
defence was Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Loughans had a deformed right hand,
with the ends of the fingers missing.
Spilsbury, who was regarded at
this time by juries as a minor god, gave his opinion that Loughans could
not possibly have enough power and reach in his deformed hand to
strangle the woman. This was enough for the jury and he was found not
guilty.
It did not keep him out of prison though. He was rearrested on a
charge of attempted murder, for a different incident, and sent to
prison.
In 1963
he was freed from prison and brought a libel action against The People
newspaper. In 1960 it had published the memoirs of J.D. Casswell, the
prosecuting counsel at his murder trials. It was virtually a replay of
the two murder trials of almost twenty years before. This time the jury
were not so easily convinced and found for the newspaper.
Three
months later Loughans walked into the offices of The People and
confessed to the killing. He knew that he could not be tried again for
the crime and he had found out that he was dying of cancer.
He died, aged
69, in 1965.
Real-Crime.co.uk
Guilty Innocent
Time.com
Friday, Mar. 01, 1963
One night in 1943, London police on robbery detail stopped a seedy
little man for routine questioning and seemed to have stumbled on the
solution of a murder in Portsmouth, 65 miles away. Harold Loughan—a
brash habitual criminal—volunteered the information that he had crept
into the rooms above the John Barleycorn pub three weeks before and, in
committing a robbery, had strangled to death the pub's owner, Rose
Robinson. "It's a relief to get it off my mind," he told the police. "I
didn't mean to kill the old girl, but you know what it is when a woman
screams."
Confession v. Alibi.
When the details of the confession checked out in Portsmouth, Loughan
was charged with murder. "I felt confident that I could not lose the
case even if I conducted it standing on my head," recalls Joshua David
Casswell, who was the prosecutor in the court proceedings that followed.
But to Casswell's chagrin, Loughan dismissed his confession as the kind
of casual lie he enjoyed telling the police, claimed he spent the night
of the murder sheltered from the blitz in London's Warren Street subway
station—and produced five independent witnesses to prove it. "This is
the most extraordinary case I've ever known," said the judge. "On the
one hand a full confession, and on the other an unshakable alibi." The
jury, equally puzzled, could not reach a verdict.
In a retrial, Loughan was acquitted. He was still
gloating when arrested on the steps of Old Bailey for another robbery
and, after his 24th conviction, sent to prison for seven years.
That might have been the last anybody heard of little
Harold Loughan if The People, a sensational London Sunday newspaper, had
not printed the memoirs of Prosecutor Casswell. In one installment,
Casswell claimed that Harold Loughan would have been convicted if all
the evidence had been heard. Loughan, now 66 and in jail as usual, sued
for libel, claiming he had been called a murderer despite his official
innocence.
Murder or Libel. The newspaper's lawyer argued that
even if the articles did amount to calling Loughan a murderer, truth is
a defense against libel, and Casswell had finally shown that Loughan had
indeed murdered Rose Robinson 19 years ago. For eleven days the jury
heard evidence of the old murder—with Loughan still protesting his
innocence. "You are asked to try again a murder in the guise of a libel
action," his lawyer complained to the jury. Last week the jury returned
its verdict: The People was not guilty of libel because Loughan was
guilty of the murder.
Loughan, of course, cannot be tried again for the
same crime. If the jury was correct, he had cheated the gallows. But
that was little comfort to Harold Loughan. After the trial he was
returned to the prison hospital where, after spending 23 of his 66 years
behind bars, he awaits death from inoperable cancer.
