FAMED executioner Albert Pierrepoint had already made his final checks of the gallows when he slipped the noose around the neck of a convicted child killer.

The hangman had ended the lives of hundreds of people, and as a cold winter wind whipped about the yard at Winson Green prison that New Year’s Day in 1952, it was the turn of Horace Carter.

The 30-year-old Kingstanding labourer had, 19 days earlier, been sentenced to death at Birmingham Assizes for the murder of 11-year-old Sheila Attwood.

Despite a last ditch campaign by his sisters, the then Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe ruled there was insufficient grounds for him to be reprieved, such was the revulsion over his crime.

Now it was time to meet his maker.

The journey from respected member of the community to the gallows was a short one for Carter.

Eleven-year-old Sheila Attwood, who lived in Caversham Road, Kingstanding, had disappeared while she was out playing on August 1, 1951.

Throughout the night her worried parents and neighbours searched for the youngster with lanterns and hurricane lamps.

But it wasn’t until noon the following day that neighbour Edith Ford discovered Sheila’s body, as she and her teenage daughter Doreen had gone to pick flowers at the bottom of their garden.

Elsie Tippins, who heard the screams, said: “Mrs Ford was hysterical and kept repeating, ‘I can’t have seen it’.

“She told me she had gone to the bottom of her garden with her little girl and had seen two legs sticking out of the bushes.”