IT was a senseless killing and two British soldiers thousands of miles from home faced the death penalty.
A seven-man jury featured one Englishmen, three with Portuguese names and three with Chinese.
It would also have included a woman but she strenously objected to capital punishment and New Zealand-born judge T J Gould said in the exceptional circumstances he would allow her to stand down and a another male juror deputised.
The panel was sitting in Hong Kong where soldiers Trooper Douglas Dalton, 19, from Totton, and Lance Corporal George Douthwaite, 24, from Scarborough, were accused of murdering a Chinese woman employed in the Army canteen.
The victim, Ho Sze Mui, 33, had been found dead with a fractured skull in the Hong Kong New Territories close to the Chinese border on December 23, 1952.
Dalton had only been in Hong Kong since July, having sailed there from Liverpool onboard the Empress of Australia. He was due to be demobbed on his return to England the following June.
The five-day trial opened on April 26 with the prosecution led by Arthur Holton QC, the colony’s Solicitor General.
The case against the men was simple. It was alleged they had pulled the woman from a taxi cycle on which she had been riding as a pillion passenger on a lonely military road in the mainland territory. They subsequently struck her on the head several times with a pair of handcuffs and then dumped her unconscious in a ditch. She died three days later.
Beside the body lay a bunch of flower seedlings, which she had been detailed by the canteen manager to collect.
Medical evidence, said Mr Holton, was a key issue.
“A police surgeon will say he has experimented by striking the base of a pair of handcuffs against skulls covered with moulding clay and has produced marks similar to those on the girl’s head.”
Trooper Douglas Dalton, from Totton
However, their case did not appear so sound when the Chinese cyclist could not identify the attackers.
The ‘cabbie’, Liu To Leung, told the hearing how two European soldiers had approached them from the opposite direction.
“They were singing. The taller soldier grabbed the handlebars of my cycle while the shorter one grabbed the girl and took her to the side of the road. I ran off.”
However, he was to admit he could not identify either man when they took part in an identification parade.
The court heard from Trooper John Honeyman, from the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, how he had been using a hired bike to go to a dance hall in Fanling. There Douthwaite took handcuffs from his inside pocket and shook them at Chinese people.
He later remembered a taxi-cyclist attending an identification parade a few days later.
“He picked out two soldiers but they were not the accused.”
Neither Dalton, nor Douthwaite gave evidence or called witnesses.
Empress of Australia, on which Trooper Dalton had travelled
Summing up for the Crown, Mr Holton accepted the murder had not been planned but was sudden and if they were satisfied it was an “individual act” by Douthwaite, who had been the only one seen with the handcuffs, Dalton must be acquitted.
However, both men were convicted by the jury. They made no recommendation for mercy and the judge immediately sentenced the pair to death.
Looking pale but composed, both men stood rigidly to attention as their fate was announced.
Douthwaite, who had served in Korea for seven months with the British Commonwealth Division, wore the uniform of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. Dalton wore those of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment.
Counsel representing the accused appealed.
Back at their Totton home, Dalton’s parents could not understand why they had not received any information from the War Office since he had been arrested and charged. Mrs Dalton told the Echo: “They only letters I have received were a few from a major at the headquarters of the 30th Infantry Regiment, to which my son was attached in Hong Kong, and one from the chaplain. It meant waiting day after day to see what was going to happen.
“He had been looking forward to coming home and helping his father in the garden.”
Their first appeal was rejected, the second succeded and Douthwaite and Dalton were instead jailed for 20 years and 12 years respectively.
Had they failed they would have become the first Euopeans to be hanged in the colony.
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