CHARLES Cowle was well-known for torturing cats, but nobody could ever have imagined the depths of his depravity.

Little Naomi Annie Farnworth was a friendly girl who loved to help by running errands for her neighbours in Kay Street, Darwen.

Her generous nature had the misfortune to put her in contact with neighbour Cowle, 18, who regularly had her fetch him tripe and chips from Mrs Brumfitt's shop nearby.

Whether Cowle had been planning to rape and kill Annie, as she was commonly known, or if it was a spur of the moment decision, nobody knows.

But what was clear to Darwen residents was Cowle's odd character.

He was described as having dual personalities and the mental age of a 10-year-old.

When he was nine he left a two-year-old child in a brook with a cut head, and received five years in a reformatory school as punishment.

Although school reports during his sentence were excellent, Cowle's sadistic streak was being expressed through the torture of cats by the time of his release.

Because of his history and strange habits, police had their eye on Cowle, an out of work labourer, when Annie went missing on Tuesday March 22.

She had not been seen since she left Highfield Congregational School to go and have lunch at 12.15pm.

By 5.30pm her parents become worried that she had not returned.

Police, relatives, neighbours and boy scouts scoured Darwen for her. Even Cowle helped the search of Sunnyhurst Wood.

His demeanour seemed normal to fellow searchers and he even played dominos at a friend's house that night.

But a flip comment he made to a 13-year-old girl was to focus the police eye of suspicion on him.

He told Doris Sharples: "You will be next" when she asked if he had heard about the little girl who had been lost.

And the discovery that Annie had been sent to the chip shop by Cowle left Detective Sergeant John Kenyon ready to take some direct action.

On Thursday morning he dispatched two pairs of officers separately to get Cowle's story, then check for discrepancies.

And there was an inconsistency.

Cowle told the uniformed officers he had sent Annie out for chips and tripe.

But he later said to detectives that he asked her to get chips and peas, but there were no peas so he sent her back for chips and tripe.

It was only a slight discrepancy but enough to heighten the suspicions of the police.

After conferring back at the station, the officers decided to search Cowle's home.

Although they were suspicious, they could not have been prepared for horror they would find or how quickly Cowle crumbled.

When they called back at his home and announced they had arrived to conduct a search, Cowle immediately told them: "She's upstairs".

Leading them to the bedroom, he pointed to a tin box which his mum had used to keep hats in and said: "She is in there. I've strangled her."

Officers removed the print cloth covering the box and took a deep breath.They found Annie, naked and dead, a cord still sickeningly tight around her neck.

It was described by police as the most hideous sight they had ever seen.

Her clothes were found elsewhere in the room, along with a blood-stained blanket.

A post mortem examination showed she had been raped or outraged as the Telegraph at the time euphemistically termed it while she was alive. The following day at her inquest hundreds booed as a car took Cowle back to Strangeways at the close of the day's proceedings.

For the following day's appearance, women demonstrated at the train station as he was put on the 3.20pm service back to the Manchester prison.

The result of the inquest was that Cowle would be tried for murder, but before the trial was Annie's funeral, with thousands lining the streets.

Funds were started in mills for the girl's parents, who had been unemployed for two years.

Darwen was united in sympathy and a wish for Cowle to face the justice of the death penalty in his trial.

The court case lasted only one day on one point of issue the state of Cowle's mind.

Defence counsel argued that Cowle was mentally unstable, but the prosecution said he was not insane in the legal sense.

The jury took just 20 minutes to decide that he was indeed in control of his mind when he killed Annie.

He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

Throughout his trial Cowle had maintained an air of indifference, but as the judge donned the black cap to pass the death penalty, a feint smile glanced across his face.

A petition was started for Cowle to avoid the gallows, but it did not attract widespread public support, despite the words of Roy Calvert, secretary of National Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, who said: "This execution is an outrage of humanity.

"Cowle was a mental defective with the mental age of a child.

"He was executed because our courts still judge insanity by an 1843 definition, because few prison doctors are trained in mental disease and because the Home Secretary inexplicably neglected to refer the case to a board of medical referees."

In later years it was likely that Cowle would have been spared the gallows due to his mental health problems.

But in 1932 less significance was given to such mitigating factors and Cowle hanged at 9am on May 18 1932, bringing an close to an ugly chapter in Darwen's past.