Burning airlines Daihatsus give you so much more

Malcolm Webster's first wife died in Scotland in 1994 when their car went off the road and crashed. Webster barely escaped himself before the car burst into flames, and was not able to rescue his wife.

Webster is cursed with terrible luck, because almost exactly the same thing happened to his second wife, in New Zealand in 1999! Except this time the car failed to burst into flames after he left it. Also his wife survived. The coincidence aroused suspicion... as did the quantity of sedatives found in her blood... and the arson attacks on their house.

Alert readers will recognise this "Repeated use of a faked accident that worked so well the first time" from "The Man who Murdered in Public", from 1944, one of Roy Vicker's Department of Dead Ends stories (the Department of Dead Ends was a forerunner of the 'Cold case' sub-genre of television policier dramas). Clearly the book needs to be banned to prevent similar copy-cat killings in the future and to drive up the black-market value of my copy.

At this point Webster decided that the most tactful course of action was to leave NZ for the sake of everyone's feelings, and to spend more time with a third wife and her estate. However, he is now undergoing trial in a Scottish court for staging both crashes for the sake of the life insurance, for lack of imagination, and for stealing literary plots (an offense under the Abuse of Narrativium Act of 1987).

Webster has denied murdering Ms Morris in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1994 and attempting to murder Ms Drumm in various locations, including New Zealand, Aberdeenshire and the Gulf States during the late 1990s.

Sadly, the report does not go into detail about these other attempts. Thus we are free to imagine Ms Morris making her way through her day, blithely oblivious as anvils and grand pianos plummet to the ground in locations where she had passed a few seconds earlier, curare-tipped blowdarts miss her neck by a hairs-breadth, and painstakingly-trained pit vipers break their fangs upon the doorstep, while teams of dacoits and phansigars blunder into one another in darkened rooms and end up in mutual strangulation. Yakkety-Sax is optional.

Last week Webster told Scottish media he refuted all "allegations" about Claire and Felicity

When I am world dictator the use of 'refute' as a mere synonym for 'deny' -- in the absence of actual refutation -- will itself be an imprisonable offense.