The really BIG read...

A NEW book about Dover called Our Town, Dover, has proved such a hit at the bookshops there is to be a second edition printed after just two weeks on sale.

The book. written by Derek Leach and Terry Sutton covers the history of the town from 1945 to the present day and is available at W. H. Smith at £12. What follows is an excerpt from the book covering a series of mysteries that haunt I the town to this day.

WHAT happened to little Dorothy Morris? How did raiders scale Dover cliffs to steal gold pen nibs? Who killed Valerie Osmond? These are some of the mysteries that have baffled local police since the Second World War.

In August, 1950 Dorothy Rosemary Morris, aged three, went on a Sunday School outing to Sandwich Bay. She disappeared and was never seen by her family again. Did strangers carry her away or did she die in some sort of sinking sands?

A spectacular robbery occurred in 1951 when raiders climbed down the cliffs to break into Parker Pens' factory at the Eastern Docks where they stole £20,000 worth of gold nibs for fountain pens. They then made their escape by re-climbing the cliffs.

In 1955 the body of a newborn baby was discovered stuffed in a rabbit hole at Langdon Cliffs. The inquest verdict was murder, but no one was ever arrested. During the same year an airman staged an armed siege at St Radigund's. Shots were fired and the airman was later jailed for 21 months. A terrible tragedy was discovered in Dover in December 1956 when a man murdered his wife and daughter with a pair of scissors and then hanged himself.

A soldier stationed in Dover was convicted of strangling his Dover-born wife in a local guesthouse in 1961. He received life imprisonment for manslaughter and the incident sparked off trouble between troops and local youths. During the following year a 15 year old boy was convicted of manslaughter for shooting his father at Tower Hamlets. Dover coroner, James A Johnson, held the Christine yacht inquest over 12 days in 1964 and sent a man for trail to the Assizes on a manslaughter charge where the prosecution offered no evidence.

The trussed up body of murdered Valerie Osmond, missing since 1968, was discovered floating in Dover's underground water reservoir at Guston in 1970. Mrs Osmond was 33 when she went missing from her Temple Ewell home and was the mother of five children. She had been knifed, her body bound by wire to a concrete post and sunk in the town's water supply.

The wire had rusted thtough and her body came to the surface two years later. Police interviewed two men at length but no one was ever charged or arrested. Terry Sutton, who as a journalist covered the investigation, says, "I believe I know who murdered Valerie. I occasionally see the person walking the streets of Dover."

Temple Ewell was the scene of a tragedy in 1974 when a man killed his wife and their sons aged 12 and eight before committing suicide. In 1979 a Dover man found guilty of murdering his wife at their Folkestone Road home and was jailed for life. In the same year a Dover mother was acquitted at Lewes Crown Court of murdering her husband at the Diamond Hotel in Dover.

A London court in 1981 jailed a Capel youth for five years for firing blanks in The Mall during the Queen's procession. The next year saw a daring theft from Dover Castle when raiders scaled the walls and stole £5,500 from a safe. In 1984 a Dover man was jailed for life for murdering his wife at their home in Old Folkestone Road. The Dover Express and a television programme threw doubt on his guilt. Was he covering for someone? Or was someone else responsible? Following an armed siege in 1987, at Gunn's the jewellers shop in Worthington Street, the business closed down after 70 years trading.

In 1988 at the Old Bailey a former Dover College pupil was jailed for an indefinite period for murdering a former college friend who allegedly raped his girlfriend. Unfortunately, murder and serious assault were happening far too frequently by end of the century.

Copies of Our Town, Dover 1945-2000 are available from the Express office in the High Street or W.H. Smith.

Terry Sutton is an Old Boy of Dover Grammar School for Boys.