Mystery killing with an incompetent villain

Sixty years ago this month, Bristolians were gripped by a sensational murder trial with shades of a famous novel and film. Eugene Byrne tells the story of the Talentless Mr Bamber.

- Eugene Byrne

IN 1965, 21-year-old salesman Graham Driscoll was renting one of the recently-built garages that run along much of one side of Springfield Road in Cotham.

He had sublet it to someone else who was using it as a lockup and on Monday January 25, he decided to go and check if everything was all right.

He unlocked the up-and-over door and inside found a glass-fronted wardrobe.

In it was the decaying corpse of a large man wearing only pyjamas.

Police quickly confirmed that the body was that of Brian William Hocking, reported missing by his wife the previous September.

The cause of death was several blows to the head with a heavy, sharp instrument. There was an axe close to the wardrobe in the garage.

Officers went to the Hockings' home on Victoria Road, Westbury Park, to break the news to Mrs Elizabeth - Betty - Hocking that her husband's body had been found and that this was a murder case.

For her sake, and that of the baby she was expecting imminently, she was taken to hospital.

The story of Brian Hocking's killing has many of the elements you might find in a fictional murder mystery - an attractive young couple, greed and infidelity. For the villain, there's a plausibly convincing man who turns out to be conceited, manipulative, and almost pathologically dishonest.

You might say also that there are shades of The Talented Mr Ripley here - the 1955 Patricia Highsmith novel (and 1999 film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow), in which an accomplished fraudster tries to take over the life of a wealthy young man.

Except that this was real life, and the villain was as incompetent as he was arrogant. For one thing, he was already in prison.

It was more a case of The Talentless Mr Bamber.