A NOTORIOUS child killer from Poole is living in an old people’s home with residents unaware of his sinister past, it has been revealed.
Albert Goozee, now 86, was sentenced to death for the murder of a 14-year-old girl whose body was found along with her mother’s following a picnic in the New Forest.
The fitter’s mate and former serviceman had been lodging at the Alexandra Road, Parkstone, home of one-legged Thomas Leakey, his wife Lydia, 53, and daughter Norma.
On June 17, 1956, motorists discovered Goozee on a forest road with stab wounds, leaning over the bonnet of a car. A trail of blood led to the bodies of his landlady and her daughter.
The prosecution told jurors how Mrs Leakey, who was 20 years older than Goozee, had been his lover, and he had decided that the only way out was to kill her and her daughter.
But, in his defence, he claimed Norma had gone to pick bluebells. On her return she had found him with Mrs Leakey and axed her mother, who went wild with a knife.
Jurors took less than four hours to convict him and a second charge of murdering Mrs Leakey remained on file.
A few days before he was to step onto the scaffold, the Home Secretary intervened and Goozee, a paranoid schizophrenic, was sent to Broadmoor where he remained until the 1970s. He was later convicted of other crimes including the sexual assault of girls aged 12 and 13.
A film based on the horrific double murder, called Intimate Relations, starring Julie Walters and Rupert Graves, caused a storm on its 1996 release.
It has now emerged that Goozee, who can no longer walk, is living at Cedar Court care home in Wigston, Leics, where prices start at £560 for a month.
Home owners Southern Cross Healthcare would not comment and the probation service said that offenders were not put in homes unless they were “risk-assessed as suitable”.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here