Harvey Holford was a club owner and well-known figure in Brighton, England, in the 1960s through his ownership of the Whisky-A-Go-Go coffee bar and the Blue Gardenia Club, both located in the same building in Brighton. The Club was popular among the young and trendy crowd and attracted some famous musicians such as The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Kinks. 
With his striking looks, dark beard, and impeccable attire, Holford exuded the style and charisma reminiscent of a movie star, making him a familiar face to the majority of Brighton's residents. He could be seen driving around Brighton in his huge, red open-topped convertible often with his motor-boat and trailer in tow.
He first met 18-year-old Christine Hughes in 1959, a small-town, goodtime, party girl, blonde, delicate and petite, not beautiful, but oozing sex appeal. Meeting Holford must have seemed like all her Christmases and birthdays had come at once. In him, she saw a way out from boredom and obscurity to the good life. 
Holford and Christine married in 1960 after defeating legal opposition from her father who felt Holford was not good enough for her. Soon after they married, Christine who apparently had a voracious sexual appetite and found sex with Harvey boring, resorted to affairs with other men.
In 1962, Christine returned from a holiday on the French Riviera having found a new lover, John Bloom, a washing machine millionaire. She naïvely believed that Holford would accept her decision to leave him for Bloom. The remainder of the year was marred by violent rows. The last straw for Holford came in September 1962, when Christine allegedly taunted him using their daughter Karen, claiming she wasn’t his, which resulted in him shooting her. He shot her shot three times in the head - through the front of the lower jaw, through the right temple and through the left ear - and three times in the body, including once through the genitals.
When police arrived at the scene, Holford was cradling Christine in his arms. He was unconscious having taken an overdose. Holford recovered and was held in Lewes Prison until he could stand trial for murder. 
The day before the proceedings were to begin, whilst in Lewes Prison, he fractured his skull after falling from the safety wire on the first floor, landing on the stone floor beneath it. Again, he recovered.
Holford eventually went to trial, in March 1963. The all-male jury found him not guilty of capital murder and returned a verdict of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation and diminished responsibility. In sentencing Holford, Mr Justice Streatfield said: “after a very careful hearing the jury has, I consider, perfectly rightly acquitted you of capital murder I. I fully recognise there must have been few men indeed who have been subjected to greater provocation than you were”. Harvey Holford’s defence was he acted in a fit of passion — ironically the very quality Christine always claimed he lacked in their marriage. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment.
Harvey Holford was paroled in1964.
After his release from prison, he changed his name to Robert Beaumont, became an estate agent, twice stood for Parliament (unsuccessfully) and was instrumental in setting up the charitable trust to campaign for legal reform in the wake of 8 year old Maria Colwell's murder.
Harvey Holford died in 2006.