George Scully was an unscrupulous landlord who rented out seedy bedsits to desperate people. One of them was Lucille Hewitt who in January 1973 had had enough of living under Annie Walker's roof with her controlling ways and walked out on her. Suitcase in hand, she wandered the streets looking at one bedsit after another until she came to one at 21b Marsland Road in Mossley Range. The place was dingy, damp and unwelcoming but despite that Lucille was forced to agree to pay £6.50 per week to rent one room from Scully. She determined to try and make the place as homely as possible and put a poster of Marc Bolan on the wall and started to paint a battered old chest of drawers a fashionable shade of purple. When Scully visited her to see how she was getting on, he hit the roof over this piece