John Vincent Cain (1907 – 7 August 1940[1]) was a British civilian aviator, AWOL soldier, convicted petty criminal, and confidence man who appeared as an unreliable narrator[2][3] in newspaper coverage of 1930s European international relations.
[6] On return to England, his brother Harold Newman Cain employed him within his business as a travelling salesman and he enjoyed some success until he left it in 1936 after losing the confidence of customers through lying and dishonesty.
[10][9] A detailed account from within the Sabena airliner from which Max Wenner fell on 4 January 1937 was provided to a New Zealand newspaper in March 1937 by "Mrs. J. V. Cain, formerly Miss Tinka Jackson, of Devonport, Auckland.
[11] In April 1937, Cain ("an Australian") and a British airman named Ken Waller made the newspaper because they used a speedboat to follow the French ocean liner SS Île de France down Southampton Water and boarded her off the Isle of Wight.
"[9] In March 1938 he pleaded guilty in West London Police Court to obtaining almost £300 under "false pretences" by offering shares in Imperial Airways and another company to a businessman but then disappearing without providing the stock certificates.
[14] Detective-Sergeant Broom told the bankruptcy court in April 1938 that Cain was "so full of deceit he almost deceives himself" and that "this man is extremely fond of luxury and seems unable to adjust his mode of living to his circumstances.
[15] On 2 August 1940, Cain fled his home at 48 Upper Berkeley Street in west London in a car in company with a woman friend, Edith Leslie Knight, trailed by the police.
In the grounds of Ranslett House, a farm at Eaton Constantine,[5] near Shrewsbury,[9] Cain shot himself in the head in front of two police detectives who were coming to investigate why he had told the woman (but not the wife he had in 1937) he was going to shoot her, put her body in the car, and set fire to it.
[17] After his death, one newspaper in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, wrote: "Fair-haired and slightly built, Cain always gave the impression of becoming one of the leading air aces, but his ventures came to naught.
"[16] Information reached the Special Branch that a man giving the name John Vincent Cain was traveling the country with a woman and posing as a British Secret Service agent.