In August 1970, Maria Grech was found dead in a bathtub in a flat in Valletta. A teenage US sailor, Huston Eugene Featherstone Jnr, was accused of her murder but was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and was sent to Mount Carmel mental asylum instead. Extensive research reveals for the first time what happened to Featherstone after he was detained, how the US pressured the Maltese government to quietly extradite him and how his family maintains his innocence to this day. 

Maria Grech’s body was found in a flat in Fountain Street, Valletta, on August 2, 1970 by her neighbours, who broke in when they became worried about her.

Left lying in her bathtub, she was covered in blood after being stabbed as many as 60 times. A former police officer, who saw the crime scene photographs, describes her as having been “butchered”.

There were bloodstains on the walls and floor of the flat, and a bloodstained knife was found in the kitchen. 

Police arrested a 19-year-old US Navy sailor, Seaman Apprentice Huston Eugene Featherstone Jnr from Chester, Pennsylvania, who served on the destroyer USS Robert L. Wilson.

Maria, 29, was a mother of two, who was said to have worked as a barmaid and prostitute in Valletta. With her dark complexion, she was given the nickname Maria s-Sewda – Maria the black one.

News that an American sailor had allegedly murdered a Maltese woman caused huge tensions.

Author George Cini, in his book Strait Street, quotes an eyewitness describing a “real war” between hundreds of Maltese men and US sailors in the following days, with violence erupting in the streets of Valletta and a US Navy jeep being overturned.

After a legal process of around 18 months, the courts declared Featherstone was likely insane at the time of the attack.

So instead of being tried for murder, he was detained in Mount Carmel mental asylum, where his treatment began in 1971.

Crowds gathered outside the home of Maria Grech after her murder, which led to tensions between the US and Maltese. Photo: Times of Malta

A life marked by fear

More details came to light a year later when, in August 1972, L-Orizzont newspaper carried a front-page story revealing intimate details about Featherstone’s life. This information appeared to come from the man himself, via people with close knowledge of his medical care within Mount Carmel Hospital.

According to the report, Featherstone told three psychiatrists of the racism he had endured as a child, how he had been a teenage gang leader with the Black Panthers political group, and that he had been shot at and stabbed in fights with groups of racist white people as a teenager.

A stabbing attack left him physically and mentally wounded, and it was after this incident that he began to feel that he was being watched and followed.

While still in his teens he got a job as a driver, and while on a long-distance trip, picked up a hitchhiker, who pulled a gun on him. Featherstone said he suddenly drove very fast around a corner, throwing the gunman out of the truck.

The man then fired four shots at the truck – Featherstone turned to look back and saw the gunman being hit by another car, tossing him in the air and crushing him. Featherstone sped away, with the gunman left probably dead in the middle of the road.

He never went to the police. This, however, would not be the last time Featherstone would see the gunman’s face.

The Times of Malta coverage of the murder.

Photograph in a wallet

Featherstone began feeling increasing amounts of paranoia after all these traumatic events. He joined the US Navy to start a new life, but the feeling of being constantly watched and followed never left him, no matter where he travelled.

He began drinking whisky heavily, and, according to the report, says he received repeated anonymous messages, telling him to “always be ready and keep a weapon on you”.

Featherstone visited Malta several times in 1970, a result of the USS Wilson docking regularly while on manoeuvres in the Mediterranean that year.

The sailor told psychiatrists he carried a photograph of Maria Grech in his wallet, along with a woman from Puerto Rico, both apparently bearing a striking resemblance to each other.

This revelation suggests Featherstone did not meet Maria on the night of her murder. He may have already known her, with the two having previously established a relationship of some kind on a previous visit to Malta.

Featherstone told Mount Carmel’s psychiatrists he had been drinking in Strait Street on the night of August 1 when he suddenly started staring at a man nearby.

Featherstone thought he looked exactly like the man who had attempted to hijack his truck years ago. What’s more, the sailor believed this person in the bar was the very same gunman, who had somehow followed him to Malta.

Featherstone drank a bottle of whisky and headed to the flat in Fountain Street where Maria lived, describing himself as being in a state of confusion, and not knowing what he was doing.

He said he was hysterical when he arrived at Maria’s flat. He had gone there intending to hide from the man who had tried to steal his truck and kill him, and whom Featherstone was convinced was now chasing him in Valletta.

He told psychiatrists he did not recall what happened next. 

According to her death certificate, the details of which are published here for the first time, Maria was a housewife born in Santa Venera and was killed by an “internal haemorrhage from multiple stab wounds [and a] fractured skull and contusion of brain”.

The Times of Malta report on how the young sailor was charged with the murder of Maria Grech.

Appeals from the US

Around 1973, the US authorities began approaching the Maltese government to ask if Featherstone, still a serving US Navy seaman while he was in Mount Carmel, could be repatriated to be closer to his family. 

Documents later published as part of the Wikileaks data dump reveal regular updates about this request, sent from the US embassy to government officials in America.

A telegram from the US ambassador on July 19 ,1973 states that Malta’s Crown Advocate General Edgar Mizzi “was clearly sensitive to possibility that Featherstone might be found not – repeat – not dangerously insane and might be released shortly after being turned over to US custody”.

The ambassador goes on to say Mizzi “made it quite clear that GOM [Government of Malta] is unwilling to face situation in which Featherstone is transferred to US custody and released shortly thereafter”.

The telegram also says the chances of getting Featherstone transferred to America would be “fairly good” if US Navy psychiatrists “could examine Featherstone on Malta with a result that confinement in St Elizabeth’s [a mental asylum in Washington DC] would be assured for a further period of at least a year after transfer”.

On December 6, 1973, a US Navy psychiatrist did examine Featherstone and “his conclusions roughly parallel those of Maltese doctors”.

In a further telegram dated August 7, 1974, the ambassador states: “Although clearly disposed to settle the case, Mizzi said that he could not recommend this approach to high authority (meaning the prime minister) unless he could be given an assurance that Featherstone would not be subject to another trial i.e. court martial”.

According to the ambassador, Mizzi had pointed out that this case “had already been treated by Maltese courts and that Featherstone had been found not competent to plead, implying that a further trial in the US, particularly if he were found competent, would be most embarrassing to Maltese courts and to GOM”.

Quiet return to the US

Despite regular requests by the American authorities, Featherstone was not released from Mount Carmel during this time – until finally, in January 1975, an agreement was struck.

A telegram states that Mizzi called the ambassador on January 23 “to report that he had obtained ministerial approval for release of Featherstone to US custody”.

There is no explanation given as to how this approval was arrived at.

After the necessary documents were signed by President Anthony Mamo, Featherstone was officially transferred to the US Navy on February 12, 1975 – “thus bringing to a mutually satisfactory conclusion the long confinement of Featherstone in Malta” according to the US ambassador.

Huston Eugene Featherstone and his wife.

Featherstone was quietly flown to the US airbase in Sigonella, Sicily and then back to a naval hospital facility in the US. A later message from the US embassy states that “neither we nor GOM desired any publicity concerning the seaman’s evacuation from Malta”.

According to the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri, Huston Eugene Featherstone Jnr served in the US Navy from June 5, 1969, until March 26, 1975, meaning he left military service about six weeks after leaving Malta.

It seems highly likely that Featherstone was released back into civilian life at that point, which means four and a half years after he was accused of killing Maria Grech by stabbing her multiple times and fracturing her skull, Featherstone was a free man.

‘He never had a mental illness’

His sister, Ruth Featherstone, has now told Times of Malta she believes her brother was “innocent” of the murder of Maria Grech, and that the diagnosis of insanity by Maltese doctors was false.

“He never had a mental illness,” she said. “The authorities said that he had it. He was a scapegoat because of the colour of his skin.”

A marriage certificate from the County of Allegheny in Pennsylvania shows Featherstone, aged 18, married a 17-year-old in October 1969.

On August 21, 2015, his wife posted a photograph on Facebook of herself and her husband cutting a cake together.

Her caption reads “40 years ago!!” which would date the image to summer 1975, shortly after Featherstone’s discharge from the US Navy the previous March.

The couple had at least two daughters and a son, Huston Eugene Featherstone III.

Decades later the family would be affected by a tragedy which befell Featherstone III – and which marked the end of his father’s life too.

Huston Eugene Featherstone, date unknown, died on the same day his son Huston Eugene Featherstone III was shot dead.

On February 7, 2004, the younger Featherstone III was shot dead while leaving a nightclub in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania around 7am.

The target appears to have been the friend he was with, but according to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the gunman then turned to Featherstone III, asked if he was “ready to die” and then shot the 27-year-old father of two who was soon due to be married. 

The same newspaper quotes a family aunt who said Featherstone, the victim’s father who was by now 53 and a retired roofer with high blood pressure, had been writing about his son’s death in his diary when he collapsed.

“The last thing he wrote in his little journal was ‘Huston Eugene Featherstone III was shot in the head and wasted’,” the aunt said.

As he was writing, Huston Eugene Featherstone Jnr had a stroke and collapsed, dying the same day that his son was murdered. 

Mario Cacciottolo is a journalist and tourist guide who runs Dark Malta Tours.