Desmond Cussen kept part of his bargain with Ruth, in that he financed Andy into a boarding school called St. Michael s in Surrey. However, he never attempted to contact him and eventually Andy left school and went to live with his grandmother, who was then in service in Hemel Hempstead, earning the paltry sum of thirty shillings a week for her labours. Bertha, herself on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was in no state to look after him, and he grew from a disrupted childhood through a confused adolescence into a mentally unbalanced adulthood. He would spend hours travelling on trains, going nowhere in particular, living in his own confused and schizophrenic world. One hot August day, all his journeys ended, and he committed suicide by taking a mixture of drugs and alcohol at his small, dingy flat in the Euston area of Camden, North London.
Different sources give different dates.
The Findlaters divorced towards the end of 1956. Ant re-married and moved to the South of France. Ruth s sister Muriel Jakubait, now aged 77 and living in Woking, Surrey, has fought a lifelong campaign to clear her sister s name. She is trying to get the case considered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the hope of getting the conviction reduced to manslaughter. A legal team headed by solicitor Bernard de Maid says new evidence, kept from the trial, shows Ruth was mentally ill with battered wives syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder, not recognised in Britain until the 1980 s.