Edwin Bush was 21 when he was executed at Pentonville Prison in London on July 6, 1961. He was the first British criminal to be caught through the use of a facial recognition system called the Identikit

Facial composite

A facial composite is a graphical representation of an eyewitness's memory of a face, as recorded by a composite artist. Facial composites are used mainly by police in their investigation of crimes.-PhotoFIT generation:...

 system.

Bush was sentenced to death on May 12, 1961 at the Old Bailey

Old Bailey

The Central Criminal Court in England and Wales, commonly known as the Old Bailey from the street in which it stands, is a court building in central London, one of a number of buildings housing the Crown Court...

, for the capital murder on March 3, 1961 of Mrs. Elsie May Batten, a 59-year-old assistant in an antique shop in Cecil Court

Cecil Court

Cecil Court is a pedestrian street with Victorian shop-frontages in London, England linking Charing Cross Road and St. Martin's Lane. Since the 1930s it has been known as the new Booksellers' Row and it is sometimes used as a location by film companies...

 off Charing Cross Road

Charing Cross Road

Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus and then becomes Tottenham Court Road...

in London. Mrs Batten had been found stabbed to death with an antique dagger in the shop where she worked.

Bush would be the second to last criminal executed in London and the twelfth from the last in the United Kingdom.

External links

• Article from Metropolitan Police website