A 91-year-old man diagnosed with cancer has confessed to killing a woman nearly 70 years ago.
The elderly man, living in a care home in Canada, told police he had shot a prostitute called Margaret Cook, aged 26, in Carnaby Street in London in 1946, after a dispute about money.
It is believed the man wanted to clear his conscience before he died.
Miss Cook has no surviving relatives.
British authorities have applied for the man to be extradited, but Canadian judges have not decided whether to comply or not.
The judiciary are reportedly in a dilemma over whether to approve the extradition because of the man’s age and the mitigating factor that without his confession nobody would ever have been any the wiser.
Writing in the UK Catholic Herald, Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith guessed that the unnamed 91-year-old made his admission to the police at the prompting of a confessor.
“To confess to the crime, and to allow the crime to be officially solved, would be part of making amends, indeed the only amends the man can now make,” Fr Lucie-Smith wrote.
“In so doing, and in confessing to a priest (if that is what he did, though we have no way of knowing) the murderer admitted his guilt, took the penance, faced up to the truth about himself, and encountered the truth about God too – namely that God forgives because he is loving.
“That would have been a truly liberating experience.”
The priest described the demand for the 91-year-old’s extradition as “ludicrous”.
The time period in this case is believed to be the longest gap between a crime and a confession in British criminal history.
Sources