LONDON MURDER CASE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 69, 6 January 1947, Page 7

LONDON MURDER CASE

PISTOL FAULT WAS CLUE

HOUSEKEEPER FOUND DEAD IN CHAIR

A man who posed as a friend of the King of Greece, and ordered West End stores to send his woman friend a £350 fur coat and a ring worth £175, has been found guilty of slaying her in the house of the King in Chester Square, Westminster.

Small, bespectacled, and insignificant, Arthur Robert Boyce, at 45 a £6-a-weelc painter, shot his mistress, Miss Elizabeth McLindon, 41 year old housekeeper to the Greek King. At the Old Bailey, when he was sentenced to death, Boyce smiled and said: “Thank you.” The week before Miss McLindon’s death on June 8, Boyce was living in Chester Square, and, although a married man, was proposing marriage to her.

She had purchased her trousseau for £BO on a “cheque” given by Boyce, Then a ring, valued at £175, was bi’ought to the house by a firm of jewellers.

They did not part with the ring, as the first cheque Boyce gave them was returned by the bank with the wording “Figures illegible.” The second was marked “R.D.”

Boyce’s extraordinary career has often come under the notice of the police.

He was sentenced at Winchester Assizes to 18 months for bigamy, was courting Miss McLindon, and was known to be carrying on another affair with a young woman in South-West London.

Miss McLindon was last seen alive on Victory Day, June 8. On June 14 Scotland Yard officers broke into her rooms in the Greek King’s house and found her dead in a chair before a table and a telephone. From this moment Boyce, with his incompai’able calm, began to match his cunning against Div. DetInspector Ball, of Scotland Yard. The police found a spent cartridge case by the body—the only clue. The .32 Browning pistol was never found, but a similar pistol had been reported stolen by one of Boyce’s former “roomers,” Signalman John C. Rowlands, of Carnarvon, N. Wales.

: The cartridge case bore marks of a faulty firing pin. Signalman Rowlands tinkered with firearms, and the .32 Browning he once possessed had a similar fault.

One of. his old cartridge cases was found, and the two cases were submitted to a gun expert. Under microscopic examination they were found to have been fired from the identifical weapon. Boyce had covered his tracks by writing a registered letter to Miss McLindon, ’phoning to Chester Square and -to her sister in Liverpool.

But all the time he knew she was dead.