IT was virtually moonless, only the slimmest crescent of silver hanging low in the night sky over North Shore. It was also still. The winds came listlessly out of the south at just eight knots, gently whispering through the palmetto fronds and casuarina branches in the garden of Bleak House but doing nothing to clear the humidity that had covered Bermuda like a damp and oppressive funeral pall for days. Other than the dry rustling of the trees and the discordant chiming of the tree frogs there was no noise in the garden until the muffled sound of sneakered foot-falls heralded the killer's arrival.

Bermuda's Police Commissioner George Duckett spent the early part of Saturday night, September 9, 1972, watching television with his wife and daughter in the living room of his North Shore home, Bleak House.

The family ate dinner on trays, watching an ABC News documentary called The Fear Fighters on ZFB, Channel 8 which reported on "the new weapons in society's arsenal against crime being made through science and technology".

Duckett almost certainly made mental notes on what he saw, weighing the applicability of revolutionary breakthroughs in forensics and the then-nascent computer field to crime fighting in Bermuda. But given this was an island where most residents still left their homes unlocked when they went to work, Duckett probably concluded that most of this new scientific weaponry was better suited to the armouries of big city police forces than his own. Certainly with no homicide rate to speak of - one a year, possibly, usually a crime of passion - advances in forensic science detailed in the documentary that made it easier for police to identify and apprehend murderers had no real application in Bermuda.

After the documentary finished, Mr. and Mrs. Duckett retired to the kitchen abandoning the living room and the television to teenage daughter Marcia, who watched wiseacre Don Rickles going through a sanitised version of his Las Vegas routine on his short-lived CBS situation comedy. While he and Sheenah were sitting at the kitchen table, Duckett noticed a security light on the porch was not working.

He flicked the switch on the kitchen wall a couple of times; nothing.

A creature of unyielding routine, as the killer knew, Duckett immediately searched his kitchen cupboards for a new bulb. He found one and stepped out of the house to replace the dead light.

In so doing, he stepped directly into the killer's line of fire.

The killer moved as Duckett reached for the light fixture where the bulb had not in fact blown, as investigators later discovered, but had rather been unscrewed in its socket by the killer just enough to break the connection - and so draw the Commissioner's attention.

It was a textbook ambush, quite literally.

Such murderous set-ups were outlined in some considerable detail in The Anarchist's Cookbook and other underground guerilla manuals that constituted the Black Beret Cadre's preferred reading material. And Duckett walked straight into the trap that had been so methodically laid for him.

The killer emerged from the bushes where he had been sheltering and walked up directly behind the Commissioner.

He was armed with a .357 Magnum six-shot handgun. It was the type of lethal hand-cannon popularised in the then- current film Dirty Harry, a single shot-glass sized round more than capable of "blowing your head clean off" in star Clint Eastwood's oft-quoted and all-too-accurate phrase.

Duckett probably heard the breathing of the killer, certainly heard the revolver being cocked.

But before he could wheel around to face the intruder there was the thunder of the gun discharging.

Duckett's internal organs were shredded and pulped by a single .357-calibre bullet fired from less than a foot away. The bullet left an exit wound in his chest the size of a tea saucer.

"The Commissioner's murder was premeditated and well-planned," said Acting Governor Tim Kinnear in a secret situation report on the killing and its immediate aftermath that he compiled for the BritishForeign &Commonwealth Office on September 15, 1972. "He had been sitting in the kitchen of his home with his wife, while his daughter was in another room watching television.

"He was shot in the back at very short range outside his house when he went outside to check a security light which had gone out.

"He managed to get back to the door of the house and was dragged inside by his wife, who closed the door."

The killer lurked outside the house in the seconds after he mortally wounded the Commissioner, who was dying in a slick of his own blood that was beginning to pool across the kitchen floor.

Taking up a new position outside the kitchen window, the killer - doubtless holding his gun in the traditional two-handed grip to guard against a recoil as powerful as a mule's kick, crouched, legs splayed to better absorb the shock - took aim at the two women. Then he opened fire.

"(The) assailant then waited outside the kitchen window and fired five shots into the kitchen at Mrs. Duckett and her daughter, one of which hit Marcia," reported Kinnear.

"The Commissioner's body was out of the line of fire and it is quite clear the shots were aimed deliberately at Mrs. Duckett and Marcia."

HAVING survived the deadly fusillade uninjured, Mrs. Duckett sought to call help for her dying husband and wounded daughter - but the killer and his confederates had planned the attack meticulously.

"Mrs. Duckett was unable to telephone Police Headquarters as the telephone wires had been cut," noted Kinnear. "But she got her own car and drove there, an act of considerable courage as it was done in the full knowledge that an armed man was probably still outside the house.

"Subsequent investigation showed that the wire to the mircrophone of the radio in the Commissioner's car had also been cut."

The Deputy Governor was alerted to the tragedy by Deputy Police Commissioner L.M. (Nobby) Clarke, who drove to his Montpelier Road residence to inform him of the shooting directly police cars had converged on Bleak House and confirmed the horrifying, semi-coherent story Mrs. Duckett - clothes saturated with blood, voice blunted by trauma - had come out with at Prospect.

"We agreed there and then that he would phone Scotland Yard direct and that I would submit a formal request through the (Foreign & Commonwealth) Office for help from Scotland Yard," said Kinnear.

"I called in the Secretary to the Executive Council (now the Cabinet Secretary), the Director of Information and the Attorney General and we were joined by the Deputy Government Leader (Jack Sharpe), who had heard a rumour that the Commissioner had been shot at. He came to my house immediately, not realising at the time that the Commissioner had been killed.

"We (reconvened) at Police Headquarters at midnight when it was decided that the Director of Information should hold a press conference at 1 a.m., as the press had already started making enquiries.

"At a further meeting at Police Headquarters next morning it was agreed that I should put out a statement to say that the crime appeared to be an isolated incident without political implications and appealing to members of the public to respond to the Acting Commissioner's request for information."

But in the same memorandum, Kinnear emphasises he was not entirely happy with the hasty decision to officially label the killing a non-political act.

The authorities, he told London, knew they would be under pressure to come up with something by way of explanation for this unprecedented act - and in the hours immediately following the murder, they were as yet unaware of the meticulous planning that had gone into setting up the killing.

So for want of any other credible explanation, they had settled on an on-the-spot theory that the crime had most likely been carried out by either drug dealers pursuing a personal vendetta against a Commissioner notorious for his confrontational tactics or a deranged person ("of whom there are no shortage in Bermuda," Kinnear drily noted).

But within days, Kinnear now reported to London, it had become evident that this working theory, while placating fears among Bermudians and potential visitors alike, was fatally flawed.

In the short term it would doubtless help to protect Bermuda's reputation as a staid holiday resort when reports of a one-off killing were carried on the international Wire Services. However, what Kinnear described as a "self-deluding exercise in wish-fulfilment" would not necessarily help the island in the long term - or safeguard the lives of other public figures who might be targeted by the gunman who killed Duckett.

"As it is now quite clear that the Commissioner's murderer deliberately attempted to kill Mrs. Duckett and her daughter as well, it seems less likely than it did immediately after the murder, that it was the work of someone with a grudge against the Commissioner," he said in the report to London.

"The question we now have to try to answer is whether there was any political motive in the crime, whether external influences are involved, and whether, therefore, there could be a further attempt of a similar nature on someone else.

"For the time being guards have been placed on my own house and those of the Government Leader and the Chief Justice. We will keep the position under constant review. The full implications of the Commissioner's murder are probably only just beginning to sink in.

"We do not want to take unnecessary risks, nor must we create an atmosphere which would erode confidence and create panic."

As to the likely suspects, Kinnear from the start sensed the hand of the para-military Black Beret Cadre had been at work in the brutal murder of George Duckett.

"It would be imprudent to overlook the fact that a number of young men on this island have been indoctrinated in violence over the last three years through the activities of the Black Beret Cadre; it would be stupid to pretend that this has not rubbed off on some of them . . .," he told London.

"While the Cadre has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist, there is always a possibility that some of the more militant members have gone underground and that we have been unaware of their activities."

Just hours before the Duckett assassination, on the afternoon of September 9, Kinnear noted piquantly in his dispatch, Beret Black (pseudonymn) - a leader of the Cadre and one of the most vociferous advocates of total guerilla warfare against the Bermuda Establishment - had abruptly left the island for Canada.

ON SEPTEMBER 10, as Bermuda awoke to the news that Duckett had been killed, Kinnear was already busy co-ordinating the official response over coffee at his home.

"Those Members of the Executive Council on the island met at my house and I told them what action had been taken and what we knew of the crime," he reported to London. "The Government Leader, Sir Edward Richards, returned from Canada, where he had been attending his son's wedding, at mid-day and issued a strong statement the same evening condemning the killing.

"The Government have since said that it will be prepared to offer a substantial reward for information. The Chamber of Commerce has made a similar offer.

"I have told both Sir Edward and the president of the Chamber of Commerce that this was something on which I would take the advice of the Scotland Yard team (Chief Superintendent Bill Wright and Sgt. Basil Haddrell, who arrived on the island on September 11). As a first step the Government has agreed, at the request of the Acting Commissioner of Police, to make up to $10,000 available to pay out to informers."

The Scotland Yard detectives seconded to investigate on the Duckett murder had been specifically requested by Kinnear, having spent time in Bermuda assisting the local police on another homicide investigation in 1971.

"Chief Superintendent Wright and Detective Sergeant Haddrell of the Scotland Yard murder squad arrived on Monday afternoon," he reported. "They know Bermuda as they were here last year for the Jean Burrows murder case (a Royal Gazette reporter killed on Pomander Road), and the Bermuda Police know their methods.

"When they arrived, they found a Murder Room set up in Police Headquarters and organised as they would want it to be. As Mr. Wright told me on the evening they arrived, this in itself had saved him and Sergeant Haddrell a week's work."

The Commissioner was buried at the old military cemetery in Prospect on September 14, following a funeral service at the Anglican Cathedral in Hamilton attended by hundreds of dignitaries, police officers and ordinary Bermudians. Hundreds of spectators lined Church Street when his flag-draped coffin began its final journey to Prospect.

"The Catherdral was full for the Commissioner's funeral yesterday and there was a large crowd outside," said Kinnear. "Flags were flown at half-mast on many buildings throughout the island.

"The service in the Cathedral was attended by Members of the Executive Council, the judiciary, the legislature and all branches of the public service as well as large numbers of the general public.

"I was particularly gratified to see the Leader (Walter Robinson) and some other members of the Opposition there."

ERSKINE Durrant (Buck) Burrows was one of the young men who had been indoctrinated in violence by the Black Berets and he had proved to be an extremely adept student.

A Black Beret Cadre associate, he is believed to have been recruited by Beret Yellow (pseudonym) while they were both serving time in Casemates prison ("the man's concentratiin camp" (sic) as the Berets called it in their leaflets) in 1971 - Burrows on trumped-up charges of breaking into police officers homes, Beret Yellow for threatening behaviour.

Burrows, a handyman at Prospect Police Headquarters and something of a mascot to many of the officers and their families, was reinstated by Duckett after his release from Casemates.

The Commissioner was aware that the shy, retiring young man who loved Country & Western songs and carried sweets to hand out to children had been framed.

Duckett had been informed by other officers that Burrows only confessed to the break-ins after undergoing an interrogation by nightstick. It had been conducted by two rogue officers who decided they could hang the Prospect area crimes on the soft-spoken police janitor with both the means and opportunity to have committed the crimes - and who agreed to the manufactured motive his tormentors provided in order to stop the beating they administered to him.

But despite returning to Prospect and his duties as a police trusty, Burrows began to lead a double-life after his prison sentence and the violent treatment he had received.

After being introduced to the Berets' militant philosophy at Casemates, Beret Yellow encouraged Buck Burrows to begin attending the Cadre meetings at its Bassett Street Building headquarters on Court Street.

The Berets realised the potentially incalcuable value of having an agent in place at Prospect, one who was the unofficial sidekick of the Commissioner and had access to all areas of police headquarters.

BURROWS is known to have provided the Beret leadership with information on police activities and operations, supplying them with the names, addresses and private car licence numbers of Special Branch and Criminal Investigation Department officers, for instance, who were then to be targeted by Beret Red's (pseudonym) self-styled Intelligence & Security Units.

Then, when the Beret foot soldiers assigned to the I&S Units proved too disorganised to even attend regularly scheduled meetings let alone engage in track-and-kill exercises against police officers, there was a major shift in Beret tactics.

It was decided to turn Burrows from passive Trojan Horse at Prospect feeding raw data to the Bassett Building into an active player in the revolutionary drama they hoped to stage.

Burrows undertook one-on-one training in the use of firearms in abandoned quarries and the moats around Fort Langton, where he later hid his weaponry, encouraged to think of himself as "commander-in-chief of all anti-colonialist forces in the Island of Bermuda".

He was programmed ("brainwashed" is the word used most often by both former police officers and moderates who abandoned the Black Berets when it became clear the fanatical leadership was in earnest about implementing their murderous agenda) in the precepts of Black Power.

So successful and complete was this indoctrination in the violent and unimaginative language of revolution, that whole sections of Burrows' later written confessions to three of the shootings he participated in read like virtual word-for-word regurgitations of the anti-Establishment diatribes that had appeared in the Beret newsletter, Voice of the Revolutionaries: "The motive . . . was to make the people, black people in particular, aware of the evilness and wickedness of the colonialist system in Bermuda. One of their major evil strategies being to seek and encourage the black people to hate and fight each other, while those who are putting the evil strategy into effect laugh and pat themselves on the back and say, yeah, we have got them, we have got them conquered . . ."

Among the killings Burrows later confessed to was Duckett's.

He provided a written account of the killing to prosecuting counsel John Marriage QC while he was standing trial for the Commissioner's murder in the Supreme Court in 1976.

"This is for Mr. Marriage, the Crown Prosecutor. Sir, I Erskine Durrant Burrows, being of sound body and mind, wish to make known the following truths.

"First of all I wish to make known the truth that I, Erskine Durrant Burrows, was the person who shot and killed Mr. George Duckett at his home at Bleak House on the night as stated by the prosecution.

"I shot him in the back.

"I am the person who fired the other bullets through the kitchen window, one of which wounded his daughter, Marcia Duckett. I wish to state again that what I have written and revealed is all true.

"I wish to reveal also that I cut the telephone wires beforehand. I came on foot and left on foot. No one else was with me.

"Finally, I wish to state that I have made all these revelations of my own free will. Not one has forced or persuaded me into doing so. I also add my signature willingly and of my own free will. Erskine Durrant Burrows."

While there was never any doubt that Burrows was the lone gunman in the Duckett killing, those who set the stage for the tragedy played out at Bleak House were never charged as co-conspirators or accessories before the fact. Some are now dead. Others remain at large.

Bermuda, it seems, remained far more comfortable with "self-deluding exercises in wish-fulfilment" than in seeing justice being done - and the truth behind the killing revealed. s