Misfit who idolised Hitler shot policeman in chest and wounded two

Egan Von Bulow, a fantasist who idolised Hitler, told detectives after he had fatally blasted an unarmed colleague in the chest and wounded two others he had hurled the gun into the Solent off Hill Head.

So more than a dozen Surrey officers inched their way, shoulder to shoulder, along the banks where the tide that week was at its lowest for 74 years. They had rejected the notion of using metal detectors because the shingle was so firm a gun would simply have lain on top, though there was the extreme possibility it might have been disturbed by bait and cockle diggers.

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Yards away, eight specialist RN frogmen probed the shallow but murky waters.

Lt Brian Dutton, an officer in charge of the Navy Clearance Diving Unit at HMS Vernon, recognised the chances of its recovery were remote with visibility restricted to just two feet. Moreover, they could only cooperate in the hunt for about two hours in slack water. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he conceded.

“To carry out a proper search of the area would take 30 days, and that’s by covering it foot by foot. It took us three days to find a 12ft by 3ft mine in good conditions off Bournemouth recently, so you can see what we are up against.

Combing the area for the murder weapon. (Image: Echo)

“However, if the police want us, we are only too willing to give it a go.”

However, after two days of fruitless searching, the hunt was called off.

Hampshire-born Von Bulow, 28, was damaged goods personified, the social misfit who idolised the Nazi regime and considered himself so superior that he was invincible, freely discussing the killing of PC John Schofield in the arrogant belief he could outsmart expert police interviewers and psychiatrists.

The loner, who despised police, sparked one of the biggest post-war hunts nationwide after he had shot three officers who had stopped to question him about two holdalls he was carrying along a street in Caterham, Surrey.

PC Ray Fullalove, 21, was just getting out of the police Panda when he was shot in the stomach. The gunman then blasted PC Schofield, 27, who was desperately attempting to undo his safety belt, and injured Sgt Harley Findlay, 31, in the arm as he scrambled from the car.

Von Bulow then fled to Bournemouth where he fired two shots at local resident Adrian Flower, 24, who had challenged the rail worker after finding him sitting in the driver’s seat of his Corsair outside his home in Parkstone.

“It’s a night I’ll never forget,” he recalled of his brush with death in 1974. “It’s the sort of thing that people don’t think can happen in a provincial town. I’m glad it’s all over and I didn’t have to give evidence.”

After his arrest, Von Bulow admitted he had twice fired a sawn-off shotgun in the drama but had not aimed at the car owner.

Instead he had discharged the firearm into the ground.

“Yes, it was me. I didn’t harm anyone. I was trying to take this bloke’s car and he came back. I didn’t shoot him – if I had, I would have killed him.”

He fled by taxi to Southampton where detectives, alerted by the cabbie, raided several guest houses near the Polygon hotel which he trawled to lay low. But unable to find accommodation, he had moved on by the time police swooped on the area.

Von Bulow apparently moved on to Basingstoke not for long, before heading into temporary obscurity in London.

However, the net was closing in and he was eventually cornered running across a garden in Kent with a shotgun when he tried to visit his sister. He eventually surrendered to Chief Inspector William Breslin who had bravely confronted him, saying: “It’s all right. Just give it to me.”

Despite protesting his innocence at his Old Bailey trial in 1975, Von Bulow was convicted of murder and attempted murder.

For 12 other offences, he was jailed for 74 years alongside his life sentence.

Mr Justice Canley told him: “The sentence I give you for murder is mandatory but I would not wish to give you less than life imprisonment.

“I recommend you should be detained for a minimum of 20 years. You are not to suppose from that you will emerge after 20 years. You may never – but that’s what I recommend.”