IT’S a bullet point that has long headed the police manual on how to solve a murder – first eliminate the person who finds the corpse. But, by any standards of human behaviour, Richard Graham was a very cool killer.

Because only hours after he “discovered” the body of a drinking mate with his skull smashed to a pulp, Graham was calmly relating his gruesome find to a journalist in a pub over a few beers. But as he walked out of the door of the Black Lion in Hereford, the 27-years-old unemployed labourer was arrested by police and on his way to a life sentence for battering to death bachelor Jim Corbett in his isolated caravan down a lonely country lane.

The case in 1977 was unusual in that investigating it had the input of two members of the editorial staff of the Hereford Times, a sister paper to what was then Worcester Evening News. George Thomas and Peter Manders were hardly the Starsky and Hutch of Hereford, but they both contributed to putting a murderer behind bars.

For it was journalist George’s interview with Graham in the Black Lion that began to pick his alibi apart and then when police wanted an image of the victim to circulate, they turned to the artistic skill of Peter, who was sketch artist on the HT. With no photographs of Jim Corbett available, Peter produced a facial drawing by visiting the morgue. He  later recalled: “The head looked like a squashed apple. It must have been a vicious attack.”

The body of the 53-years-old, who claimed dole money and whose main interests were betting on horses and drinking in the Black Lion, was found in his caravan in Bullingham Lane on the outskirts of Hereford on a bleak February day. He appeared to have been dead for about a week.

George explained: “We knew who had found him, so I decided to drop into the Black Lion to see if I could have a chat with this Richard Graham. When I went into the pub the landlord pointed him out sitting at the bar. I bought him three pints of beer as he unfolded his story of how he had been worried that Mr Corbett might be lying ill in his caravan because he had not been in the Black Lion for several nights.

“How with a mate he had gone to the caravan and climbed in through a window and found Mr Corbett with his head battered in. How he had dashed to the police to raise the alarm.

“But part of his story had already triggered off my suspicions. For at the start of our two hour chat, Graham said he often called to see that Mr Corbett was all right if he didn’t appear at the pub. I suggested it was strange for someone to show such concern for someone who was just a drinking acquaintance. 

“Yet later in the evening, when he was saying how independent Mr Corbett was, Graham said he only knew where his home was because he had given him a lift home in the rain once. And even then he had insisted on being dropped off at the end of the lane.

“But that was his only slip up. His story rang true otherwise. He was an amiable man, who related the facts without any hint of his gruesome secret, He even told me no-one would have thought of doing Jim in for money, because he was not the sort of bloke who looked like he had any.”

But it was all a lie and the police were already closing in on Graham, who had come down to Hereford from Glasgow with lots of other Scottish families in the Fifties when the Wiggin metals factory moved. At the time of the murder he was living in Villa Street in the city’s Hunderton district. 

His trial took place at Worcester Crown Court in July, 1977, when the jury was told Jim Corbett had died after being hit about 20 times on the head with a hammer in a prolonged attack. Prosecuting counsel Mr Piers Ashworth QC said police found Graham’s finger prints inside the caravan and on blood soaked newspapers, which could only have been made before the body fell on top of them.

There were two possible motives for the attack. Either Graham, who was desperately short of money, wanted to get his hands on a tax rebate and a large gambling win Jim Corbett had recently received or that the victim was threatening to report Graham to the authorities for receiving unemployment pay while he was working.

Graham eventually admitted to police that he had gone to the caravan to ask Mr Corbett not to report him to the taxman, but an argument developed and in a panic he picked up a hammer and hit his drinking mate around the head.

He denied murder saying: ”I did not intend to kill him. When I left his caravan, Jim was still breathing.” However, the jury disagreed.

George Thomas later said: “When Graham went back to the caravan allegedly to check on Jim Corbett’s health, he made sure he took a friend with him so it looked like a Good Samaritan act. But it was all a charade and he was fooling no-one.”