Guns and roses

It's not all hearts and flowers on St Valentine's Day.

Occasionally, as James Morton recalls, pookums may decide to shoot snuggle-bun

Valentine's Day may be a day of synthetic romance clothed, bathed and wrapped in chocolates, champagne and flowers along with pages of sickly messages but, over the years, it has also provided some quite outstanding murder cases.

The best known of those - if only because of the frequent reruns of 'Some Like it Hot' on television - must be the massacre of the Bugs Moran Gang by Al Capone's henchmen in Chicago in 1928.

Curiously, it was an incident which established ballistics as a forensic science in the US.

Until then it had to an extent been in the hands of fake experts and charlatans who caused rather more harm - particularly to defendants, who were likely to be executed - than they did good.

With the massacre things changed.

One of the gunmen, Fred Burke, a member of the notorious Purple Gang of Detroit, was recruited as part of Capone's gang.

Later, on a frolic of his own, he was arrested for shooting a policeman in St Joseph, Michigan, on 15 December 1929.

Extensive tests were carried out by the rising star of US forensic science, Calvin Goddard, which proved that the gun with which Burke killed the police officer was one used in the Chicago massacre.

There had been around 70 cartridges left in the garage, and Mr Goddard test-fired bullets from Burke's gun into containers of cotton.

He then showed, by microscopic examination of the bullets, that they had the same rifling as the ones used in the St Valentine's Day Massacre.

The gun was also linked to the shooting of one of Capone's redundant mentors, Frankie Yale, in New York some two years earlier.

In fact, Burke never stood trial for the massacre.

He was sentenced to life for shooting the police officer and died in prison on 10 July 1940.

Nearly 30 years after Chicago, Montreal had its own massacre, in every way as bloody but this time on St Valentine's Eve 1975.

The two crime syndicates of the time were the Dubois Brothers, and one headed by their friend-turned-rival Pierre McSween.

Difficulties had arisen over the sale of drugs, and - trapped in their favourite watering hole, the South Shore Lapiniere Hotel - four members of the McSween gang were killed and a number of others wounded when Dubois gang gunmen opened fire.

As with the Chicago case, no one was convicted.

A killing in Cardiff on St Valentine's Day 1987, when the prostitute Lynette White was hacked to death, showed that despite the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 there was still room for false confessions.

Three men were convicted following a trial which ran for 197 days.

One of them, who had a mental age of 11, confessed after five days of interviews and denying involvement more than 300 times in the presence of his solicitor.

In 1996 the convictions were quashed.

'Oppression', said the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, quashing the conviction, 'may be of the obvious, crude variety or it may be just by relentlessness'.

Perhaps one of the most ingenious defences to a Valentine's Eve murder came following the death of Karen Roston, who disappeared overboard from the cruise ship Stardancer near San Diego in 1988 while on her honeymoon.

The police applied the principle that when a wife is killed look first at the husband, and if the husband is a doctor, don't look anywhere else.

The investigators discovered that the honeymoon had not been going well.

The new and diminutive Mrs Roston was addicted to sweets and was also having trouble sorting out the complex silverware on the dining table; neither of these afflictions endeared her to her chiropractor husband, Dr Scott Roston.

The body was recovered and there was evidence of manual strangulation and Roston had been seen quarrelling with a woman shortly before he reported his wife missing.

There was gouging and scratching on his face.

At first the doctor said his bride had fallen overboard and he had obtained the injuries to his face trying to save her.

There was a technical problem with this.

As she was only 5ft 3ins tall, there was the suspicion that she might have needed help to fall over the ship's rail, which was 3ft 6ins high.

Arrested and charged, Roston produced a much more interesting story which he said he could disclose.

His wife had been killed by Israeli agents to punish him for a book he had written, Nightmare in Israel.

Roston had once had a practice in Israel and the Palm Beach Post had carried a story in which his parents suggested that following publication of the book there had been an attempt to kidnap the author, who had valiantly resisted and shot one of his attackers.

Again there were problems.

It might be that Israeli agents were vengeful, but the book had been produced by a vanity publisher and had sold only one copy of the thousand printed.

Roston was in luck, however.

There were two Israeli nationals on board.

As his counsel said the claims, 'may at first appear unbelievable but these kinds of things do happen in the world of international intrigue'.

Roston's luck ran out when one of the Israelis was called in rebutting evidence to say that far from being a secret agent he was a photographer on his own honeymoon.

The sentence was life imprisonment, reduced by the California Appeal Court in November 1994 to 33 years and nine months.

James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist