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She had been playing in a communal stairwell when Wilkes came out of his flat and stabbed her with a penknife three times, once to her jaw, then her shoulder and knee.

The surgeon in the penknife case, who the BBC is not naming, was operating on a patient at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton when he struggled to find a scalpel.

He managed to tear a flat strip of wood from a nearby log and with his pearl-handled penknife whittled a shapely handle.

In others, he utilized a metal comb, or a penknife’s back, or a razor’s edge.

And their behavior made them notorious, as when Capote threw himself a lavish masquerade party, the Black and White Ball, or when Mailer almost killed his wife by stabbing her with a penknife.