After the 1970 general election, he served as Minister of State at the Home Office, before resigning his seat in 1972 to take up the position of Governor of Bermuda.

An informal dinner party for a small group of guests had just concluded, when he decided to go for a walk with his Great Dane, Horsa, and his aide-de-camp, Captain Hugh Sayers of the Welsh Guards.

After the assassination HMS Sirius provided enhanced security for Commodore Cameron Rusby, the Senior Naval Officer West Indies (SNOWI)[3] who was stationed on the island.

A detachment of Royal Marines (subsequently replaced by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment) was posted to the Dockyard to guard SNOWI.

Elements of the British Army's airborne forces, which were training at Warwick Camp with the Bermuda Regiment at the time of the murders, were called in to assist the civil authorities.

At his trial he was also convicted of murdering the Bermuda Police commissioner George Duckett on 9 September 1972 and killing the co-owner and the bookkeeper of a supermarket in April 1973.

[7]A co-accused named Larry Tacklyn was acquitted of assassinating Sharples and Sayers but was convicted of killing Victor Rego and Mark Doe at the Shopping Centre supermarket in April 1973.

A moratorium on hanging was then in effect, and, although others had been sentenced to death in the intervening years, no one had been executed in Bermuda since the Second World War.

As a consequence, at the request of the Bermuda Government, soldiers of the 1st Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were flown in as reinforcements in the aftermath of the riots.

[13] In 1946, he was awarded the Silver Star, the United States Armed Forces third-highest military decoration for valor in combat.