Like most of the 22 in attendence, Leicester Cotton and his wife were regulars for the New Year's Eve party in Chatswood. He and his wife arrived, like most of the other guests, between 9 and 10pm.

At about 2:30am, Mr Cotton and his wife decided to leave. They were the first guests to do so, and as their timing roughly coincided with Mr Chandler's return to the party, the details have been recorded more thoroughly than otherwise might have been the case. In their car and ready to leave, Mr Cotton and his wife were seen off by Ruth Nash. Supper had not yet been served, and as compensation she passed them each a ckicken leg to chew on. The Cottons finally left between 2:30am and 2:45am, but probably closer to the latter.

Leicester Cotton was a journalist, working for the Sydney Morning Herald during the 1960s. Using the pen-name of "Stafford Silk", he wrote a book about the Bogle-Chandler case, titled "The Bogle Mystery". The first book about the case, it was published in 1963, the same year as the events themselves unfolded. By the time the second book about the case was published, Geoffrey Chandler's "So you think I did it" in 1969, Mr Cotton was dead.

As well as being a journalist and writer, Mr Cotton appears to have had a fascination for interesting criminal cases. In 1962 he came across details of the Parramatta River murders of 1872. Long forgotten, there were certain irregularities with the case that were immediately obvious to Mr Cotton. He proceeded to research the case very thoroughly, pursuing angles which had never been officially investigated. The results of his investigations were published in his book "The Sydney Assassins", published by Lansdowne Press in 1964 (The speculation that has resulted from Mr Cotton's research, and the case itself, is excellently summarised in Alan Sharpe's "Crimes That Shocked Australia". See the bibliography).

With such a background, one can only wonder at Mr Cotton's reaction to finding himself, by pure chance, involved in one of the most baffling and intriguing cases in Australian history.