EVEN for the richly experienced Mr Justice Hallett, the trial represented a personal milestone.

"I have never encountered or heard of any case like it in my many years at the Bar and over 16 years on the Bench," he declared.

The murder trial of George McDonaldWilliams, aman of "very peculiar mentality," was one of confession, retraction and denial.

There had been nothing to link the former Broadmoor patient with the brutal killing of frail and tiny spinster Frances Pressley, until - on the eve of her funeral - he walked into Southampton's main police station and astonishingly confessed: "I killed the old lady."

The following day, in the biting chill of a winter's morning, wreathbearing mourners at Thornhill Baptist Church in Southampton were probably heedless of three figures standing in nearby bushes.

There, 30-year-old Williams took two detectives through the grim reconstruction of the killing, explaining to Insp Robert Masters and Sgt Percy Amess how he had hidden off a woodland path on the afternoon of December 6, 1954, and pounced upon Miss Pressley, striking her over the head with a wooden table leg.

As the 35 tearful members of the congregation listened to the scripture, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the lord," other officers a few hundreds yards away were checking the veracity of his statement.

Its accuracy was the central issue in the five-day trial the following March, when jurors heard how Williams bizarrely claimed he had only admitted the killing because he wanted to hang.

The victim had lived with the family of Victor Bennett atMoorhill Farm, West End, for 40 years.

Although not blood related, she was accepted as one of the family.

"Sis" - as she was affectionately known - had left home that fateful afternoon to make her customary shortcut through the woods tomake a withdrawal from her savings account at the post office.

She never reached her destination. Along the main path, her discarded stick marking the spot, she was attacked by her lurking assailant who knocked off her hat, ripped off her shoes and stockings, and dragged her behind a thick screen of shrubs and bushes.

It was not until early evening that the Bennetts, making a systematic search of the area, discovered Miss Pressley after hearing her pathetic groans.

As she was rushed to hospital to undergo an emergency operation, the conditions at the scene quickly deteriorated.

Gumbooted officers from the town's own force and Hampshire police colleagues assisted by an alsation dog called Quacker endured driving rain, mud, a thick layer of fallen leaves and a thin layer of snow as they hunted for clues.

Sadly, they were to receive no assistance from the victim. Four days after she was admitted to hospital, she died from a fractured skull.

A sexual motive was quickly ruled out. So too was robbery because her handbag and shopping bag were found nearby apparently untouched.

Days passed and with the lack of a major development, the story began to slip away from the Echo's main page - until Williams walked into the police station to make his startling admission.

"It's about the woman in the wood," he told Det Sgt Smith. "I want to tell you it was me. I thought she might have some money and I jumped on her. It was after dinner and I went out there and had some drinks in a pub. I was nearly drunk.

"I met her on the path and jumped on her. I took her stockings off and tied one around her throat. I am a bit vague and I was bit drunk. It has been worrying me a lot."

He said he had been too frightened to steal anything valuable and at one point had to hide because a man came running past to catch a bus.

Williams was duly charged with murder, but ten days later following a consultation with a solicitor, he extraordinari ly retracted his statement, saying he had only made it because he wanted to hang.

"Since I have been in prison I have thought it over and come to the conclusion there is a possibility of being sentenced, not to death, but to Her Majesty's Pleasure which I do not cherish... It is a sentence the court could impose on me because of my medical history.

"I was fed up with life. I would not mind being hung but I do not like the idea of spending the rest of my days at Broadmoor."

His five-day trial opened on March 20, 1955, and the two contrasting statements were the fulcrum of a 65-minute opening address by prosecutor, Henry Phillimore QC.

In a soft accent, he told the jury of nine men and three women to disregard the notion Williams could have furnished the police with such a detailed account of her death from what he had read in the press.

"Do you think anyone could have done that unless he had actually been present and done the deed?" he argued, scoffing at suggestions the defendant could have based his confession of what he had seen in the Echo.

A detective surveys the scene where Frances Pressley was dragged into the woods

Williams told jurors how he had come to Southampton three days before the murder to find work and had been found lodgings by a probation officer. On the morning of the murder, he went to the Employment Exchange where he was directed to a sausage skin factory in Millbrook, but he was told he was unsuitable for the work.

"I thought so myself too," he said, adding, "There was an unpleasant smell and a lot of water on the floor."

In the afternoon, he returned to the Employment Exchange and was given a card to to go to the Marchwood power factory. "I am not positive about this, but I think I was given a card by the foreman to come back the following day, to start work in the morning."

Williams said he then returned to Southampton and did some shopping in Woolworths, buying shaving things, a towel and a comb, before returning to his hostel, insisting to defence lawyer Malcolm Wright QC he had never attacked Miss Pressley.

But in his summing up the judge told the jury the defendant's mental and criminal history - that he had been to Parkhurst and had been detained in Broadmoor - had been revealed by Mr Wright because they wished it. But no defence of insanity had been raised and it was not open to them to consider it.

The judge however made his telling observations about the extraordinary number of coincidences in themurder's reconstruction when Williams led detectives on a tour of the woods, ignoring six side turnings and leading them to within 6ft of where Miss Pressley had been found.

Almost three hours elapsed the following day when jurors filed back into the historic courtroom in Winchester to return their guilty verdicts.

Williams calmly shook his head and unemotionally replied, "No, nothing to say" when the judge asked him why sentence of death should not be carried out.

But the judge gave Williams hope of a reprieve: "The medical officer of the prison reported to the court before the trial began that, in his opinion, you were sane enough to be tried and to be held responisble for the crime you have committed.

"But it is the invariable practice of the Home Secretary to cause further inquiries to be made after conviction in a case such as this. I shall indicate my opinion as to the desirability of that practice being followed in this present case.

"In the meantime, it is my duty to pass upon you the only sentence under our law for this offence."

Even though his appeal against conviction was rejected in the Court of Appeal, Williams was never to hang. A few days before his appointment with the hangman at Winchester Prison, the Home Office announced he had been certified insane as a result of a medical examination.

So Williams was to return to the very same institution where he had been a patient from March 1949-April 1950 when he went berserk and smashed up the contents of his cell at Parkhurst Prison.