Bernette Forde started writing her first book more than 40 years ago.

“I was in my twenties,” said Mrs Forde, who is now 68. “At that time I was banging away on a typewriter. I was writing my autobiography.”

Not all of her relatives supported the project.

“I let one of them read some of the manuscript,” she said. “They were upset by it, so I packed it away. It sat in the cabinet collecting dust for a long time.”

Then she and her husband, Michael Forde, moved to Britain.

“My husband found a job easily, but I really struggled,” she said.

Looking for something to do, she started writing again.

She now has 27 self-published books under her belt in genres such as science fiction and fantasy, memoir and Bermudian historical true crime.

Last October, she released Chesterfield, about the 1913 murder of Charles Chesterfield Paul in Pembroke.

Mr Paul was 22, a soldier in the Bermuda Militia Artillery and newly married to Mary Madeline Outerbridge.

On the evening of Saturday, October 4, Mr Paul, his wife and sister, Theodosia Paul, were at the Coronation Bar on Friswells Hill, Pembroke.

Another man, Robert Montgomery Armstrong, was at the bar when the Paul party entered. He was already so drunk that the bartender was refusing to serve him.

“Armstrong and Chesterfield got into a little scrap and Chesterfield beat Armstrong to a pulp,” Mrs Forde said.

Sporting a split head, Armstrong went home to lick his wounds.

“He was obviously embarrassed,” Mrs Forde said.

In the wee hours of Sunday, Armstrong turned up at Mr Paul’s Pembroke home with a long-bladed knife, thought to be a fishing tool.

Mr Paul’s wife and sister tried to intervene but Armstrong reportedly told them: “It’s not you I want to hurt”.

With one quick thrust he stabbed the knife into Mr Paul’s heart, then went home to sleep off the alcohol.

Mr Paul lived for two minutes before dying from his injuries.

Local newspaper reports stated that police later found Armstrong asleep in bed, still dressed in his clothes, with a knife beside him on the bed.

After a lengthy trial, Armstrong was found guilty of Mr Paul’s murder and executed on the morning of Christmas Eve 1913. He was the first man to be hanged in Bermuda in the 20th century.

He was buried on Burt Island in the Great Sound.

The eight-acre island off Warwick is otherwise known as Skeeters Island because of its association with another murder that Mrs Forde explored in another book, Anna. She published it a month before Chesterfield.

In 1878, Edward James Skeeters and wife, Anna Evans, lived unhappily together on Long Bay Lane, Sandys.

“We lived around the corner from there,” Mrs Forde said. “I tried to find the Skeeters’ homestead. There is just a little piece of the house left.”

Mrs Forde explained that Skeeters was a womaniser who was openly having affairs with several women.

“Bermuda was like a small village,” she said. “People would talk, and everyone knew what Edward was up to except Anna.”

Skeeters was known to have a violent temper while Anna was a meek churchgoer.

“After hearing and hearing about her husband’s ways, from other women, Anna confronted him,” Mrs Forde said. “She told him she was tired of hearing about this other girl.”

The couple quarrelled and Skeeters threw an oil lamp at Anna, catching her hair on fire. He is thought to have choked her to death, but when her body was recovered it was so badly decomposed that it was hard to pinpoint her cause of death.

Mrs Forde believes that after his wife’s hair caught fire, Skeeters feared repercussions from the legal system.

He had already been in trouble for abusing her once before.

“There were not many police officers in those days,” Mrs Forde said. “Back then you had to go before the magistrate.”

Skeeters rowed Anna’s body out to the channel off Somerset Long Bay, tied a boulder to her and threw her body overboard.

After several days her family began to worry about her.

Standing on a hill, Anna’s brother and other friends could see a patch in the water that hinted at something on the sea bottom.

Anna’s badly decomposed body was eventually recovered.

Skeeters was tried and hanged for his wife’s death.

Mrs Forde believes that the legal system got the case right and that Skeeters was guilty of the brutal murder.

“I like old murder cases,” Mrs Forde said. “I find it interesting how the police and the system handled that situation back in the day.”

In one of her books she wrote that the challenges faced by investigators in collecting and preserving evidence years ago were manifold.

Anna is not the first book written about the Skeeters murder. Bermudian Terry Tucker published What’s Become of Anna? in 1972.

Mrs Forde stopped short of calling Ms Tucker racist, but had some problems with the way she depicted Black speech.

“She portrayed Black people as unintelligent,” Mrs Forde said. “Being from the Black community, it is very hard for me to believe that they spoke that way. I tried to write properly out of respect for the people involved.”

After living in England for some time, the Fordes returned to Bermuda and ran a store called Bargain Hunters in Sandys.

However, when Mrs Forde developed cancer for the third time, the couple sold up and moved back to England. They now live in Coventry.

“Because I still have a National Health Service number, it was better to be in England for treatment,” Mrs Forde said.

She received some research help from Bermudian historian Jolene Bean, also a Sandys resident.

“She was a regular customer at Bargain Hunters,” Mrs Forde said. “When she came in, we would often talk about different things. She offered to help me. Karla Ingemann at the Bermuda Archives also helped me a lot.”

As to the autobiography that Mrs Forde wrote long ago, she has now dusted it off, updated it and plans to bring it out soon.

She took out the references to her relative who was upset by the book so long ago.

Mrs Forde’s books can be found on Amazon.com.

• For more information, see her website,bernetteforde.com