By Staff Reporter

Last updated at 12:36, Monday, 09 July 2012

A killer found with a starting pistol after escaping from prison has had his conviction for a firearms offence quashed after top judges leafed through decades old laws searching for a definition of “a gun”.

William Bewley

William Bewley – who murdered a woman in Cumbria in 1970s – was arrested with the sporting prop in Kent in 2010, nine years into his second stint on the run.

But Bewley, 50, will now be able to apply for parole after senior judges ruled the pistol was not a working firearm.

Bewley was jailed for life in 1979 for shooting farmer’s wife Ruth Musgrave near Cotehill, Carlisle.

He was 17 when he murdered mother-of-two Mrs Musgrave in January 1979.

Her husband Frank discovered his wife’s bloodstained body in an outbuilding at the family’s isolated Knot Hill farm. Bewley, formerly of The Green, Cotehill, shot Mrs Musgrave when he was disturbed burgling the farm.

He absconded from prison for more than a year in the 1980s and then escaped from Leyhill Open Prison in Gloucestershire in 2001.

Bewley was named by Crimewatch as one of Britain’s most wanted men in 2008 after he was linked to a knife attack – of which he was later cleared.

Police eventually learned he was living on the Kent coast and uncovered the starting pistol when they raided his flat two years ago. A judge at Snaresbrook Crown Court then ruled the pistol a “prohibited firearm”.

Following that ruling, Bewley, who now lives in Kent, admitted possession of a prohibited firearm and escaping lawful custody and was jailed for a total of seven years in March last year.

But he launched his third, but only legal, bid for freedom at the Appeal Court in May, arguing the weapon could not fire shot or pellets and so should not have been treated as a firearm.

Prosecutors insisted it was a working firearm after a police expert managed to get it to fire in a laboratory, using a “clamp, mallet and punch”, the court heard.

After examining laws dating back to the 1930s, three judges ruled that, while the pistol could have constituted a “imitation firearm”, it was not a prohibited weapon.

Lord Justice Moses, sitting with Mr Justice Underhill and Judge Melbourne Inman QC, said: “A missile could only be discharged from the barrel in combination with other pieces of equipment, namely, the vice with which the pistol could be clamped, and the punch and mallet.

“There is no warrant for including, within the definition in the Firearms Act 1968, an item which can only discharge a missile in combination with other tools.

“It is clearly highly undesirable that starting pistols such as these should be used by someone, such as this accused, on the run from police. But such considerations should not override the true construction of the Firearms Act,” he added.

Having quashed the firearms conviction and the five-year sentence that went with it, judges also cut Bewley’s sentence for escape from lawful custody from two years to 18 months, meaning he can now apply parole.

Lawyers said he is a likely candidate for release, having “lived quietly” and “helped his landlady” while on the run.

First published at 11:27, Monday, 09 July 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk