Kelso Cochrane murder: Suspect told police he’d kill a black man

While Digby was “a known troublemaker” according to the police, Breagan was a far more “vicious” character. Two years earlier he had been sentenced to three years in prison for three separate unprovoked attacks on black men, all on the same day, stabbing them in the face and the body.

It was when he was arrested for these offences that he told two police officers, using a racial slur: “If I do time for this, when I come out I’ll kill the first [black person] I see. I mean that too.”

Cochrane was murdered 10 days after Breagan was released.

Millicent Christian says she was “speechless” when she saw this comment in the files.

“How could police miss this?” she says. “He has said exactly what he was going to do.”

In one of the newly released documents, police described Breagan and Digby as “strong suspects”. Over the next 48 hours all efforts were concentrated on them.

But although they had good evidence that racism could be a factor, publicly the police ruled it out.

A senior Scotland Yard told journalists that officers were satisfied “it was not a racial killing” and that robbery had been the motive.

Mark Olden, the author of an investigation into the case, Murder in Notting Hill, says that after the riots in 1958, there was concern at the highest levels about reaction to the Cochrane murder.

He says the only explanation is that police were “concerned about a repeat or worse of the race riots of the year before” and that “public order concerns were foremost in their minds”.

At the time, he adds, everyone in the local community “thought it was a racist attack”.