Most people relish the relative peace and quiet of our surroundings, but on rare occasions that peace is broken by extreme violence. In the case of Stanley Setty, the violence occurred elsewhere, but bizarre and unique circumstances brought it home to local people.

On 21 October 1949, a farm labourer, Stanley Tiffin, was shooting ducks in the marshes near Tillingham. He saw a large parcel, and thinking it might be of value examined it. It contained a human torso, minus the head and the legs.

Securing the parcel, Tiffin got the police, and the body was recovered. The torso had a number of stab wounds, and was identified from fingerprints as that of Sulman Seti ('Stanley Setty'), a Jewish immigrant from Baghdad who had been involved in dealing in stolen cars and forging petrol coupons.

Setty had a close associate called Brian Donald Hume, a former serviceman who had been in the army but had also posed as an RAF pilot. The two had quarrelled (allegedly over Setty kicking Hume's dog), and Setty had not been seen since October 4.

Stanley Setty (Photo: Findagrave.com)

When the story of the body became known, the United Services Flying Club at Elstree contacted the police to tell them that Hume had hired a light Auster aircraft and flown off with two parcels. He had landed at Southend airport without the parcels, and a window on the plane had been damaged.

Police found traces of blood in a suitcase belonging to Hume, and under the floorboards of his apartment in Golders Green.

The Auster aircraft flown by Hume over the Dengie.

Confronted with this, initially said that he had used the plane to get rid of a printing press for forged coupons. Pressed further, he said that he had indeed disposed of the body, but that the actual murder had been carried out by three gangsters called 'Greeny', 'Mac' and 'The Boy'.

Perhaps surprisingly, the jury must have been partly persuaded by this story, because they could not reach a verdict. At his second trial, the judge instructed the jury to find him 'Not Guilty', but Hume pleaded guilty to being an accessory and served eight years of a twelve-year sentence in prison.

Brian Donald Hume.

In a bizarre postscript, Hume on release from prison took advantage of the current Double Jeopardy laws and sold his story to the Sunday Pictorial, admitting to the murder of Setty.

He said he had killed him with an SS dagger, and dropped the head and legs into the channel. On his second flight he had misjudged the watery Dengie landscape for the sea, and dropped the torso where it was found. Undeterred by this, Hume went on to carry out further violent offences, robbing banks, eventually being caught in Zurich after he had killed a taxi driver during a robbery. He was given a life sentence but was released to Broadmoor in England in 1976 on the grounds of insanity. The case remains one of the strangest in criminal history, not least because it was the first involving the use of an aircraft.