 | This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia.(April 2021) |
The below incomplete list of 160 entries chronicles unsolved known and presumed murders in the United Kingdom between 1536 and 1969. Victims believed or known to have been murdered by the same perpetrator(s) are grouped together in this list.
| Year | Name(s) of victim(s) | Location of body or bodies | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1536 | Robert Pakington | London | The slaying of Pakington was considered the first instance of murder committed using a handgun in London. [1] |
| 1593 | Christopher Marlowe | Deptford | Marlowe was an Elizabethan English playwright, poet, and translator whose works influenced the life of William Shakespeare. He was murdered under unclear circumstances, and there are several theories attempting to explain the killing. [2] |
| 1678 | Edmund Berry Godfrey | Primrose Hill | Godfrey was strangled and posthumously impaled on his own sword. Both killer(s) and motive(s) are unknown.[ citation needed ] |
| 1752 | Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure | Appin, Argyll | Known as the Appin Murder , the murder of Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure took place at Appin, in the west of Scotland, in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745. It inspired events in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped. [3] |
| 1759 | George Burrington | St. James's Park, Westminster | The body of Burrington, former Governor of North Carolina, was retrieved from the canal in St. James's Park on 22 February 1759. He had been beaten and robbed. [4] [5] |
| 1837 | Eliza Davis | Marylebone, London | Davis was 21 at her death. Her throat was cut at the King's Arms public house on Frederick Street, near Regent's Park, on 9 May 1837. She may have been murdered by the same person who killed Eliza Grimwood in 1838. [6] [7] |
| 1838 | Eliza Grimwood | Waterloo, London | Grimwood, 28, was found murdered in her bedroom at 12 Wellington Terrace, off Waterloo Road, on 27 May 1838. Grimwood, a sex worker, accompanied her suspected murderer, described as a "well-dressed foreigner", to a theatre the previous evening. Both went to her home at around midnight. Grimwood may have been murdered by the same person who killed Eliza Davis the previous year. [8] [7] |
| 1857 | Emile L'Angelier | Glasgow | L'Angelier was killed in Glasgow in 1857. His secret lover Madeleine Smith was prosecuted on a charge of poisoning him with arsenic, but the verdict was "not proven". [9] [10] |
| 1861 | Martha Halliday | Kingswood, Surrey | Halliday, 55, was murdered when burglars broke into Kingswood Rectory on the night of 10 June 1861. Halliday, the wife of the parish clerk, was minding the rectory while the vicar and his family were away. Bound and gagged during the burglary, she died from suffocation. Three German men were suspects. Johann Carl Franz stood trial for Halliday's murder but was found not guilty. [11] |
| 1863 | Emma Jackson | St Giles, London | Jackson, a 28-year-old prostitute, was found dead in a brothel bedroom at 4 George Street, St Giles, on 9 April 1863. Her throat was cut, and she had been stabbed. Jackson entered the house with the suspect, a man, at around 7:00 that morning. Despite several witnesses seeing them together, the man was never found. [11] |
| 1866 | Janet Rogers | Mount Stewart Farm, near Perth, Scotland | Rogers, 55, was beaten to death with an axe while visiting her brother Charles Henderson at his farm on 30 March 1866. Ploughman James Crichton was charged with her murder, but at the trial, the jury returned a verdict of "not proven". [12] [13] |
| 1866 | Sarah Millson | City of London | Millson, 51, was murdered on 11 April 1866 in a warehouse at 2 Cannon Street, where she worked as a housekeeper. She was heard answering the door to an unknown person during the evening, and her body was found by another occupant of the building later that evening. She had been bludgeoned to death. A man called William Smith stood trial for Millson's murder but was found not guilty. Reportedly, many blamed the City of London Police for poor investigation. [11] |
| 1871 | Jane Clouson | Attacked in Eltham, London; died at Guy's Hospital | Clouson, 17, was found with serious head injuries on Kidbrooke Lane, Eltham, in the early hours of 26 April 1871. She died on 30 April at Guy's Hospital. She was two months pregnant. Clouson's boyfriend, Edmund Pook, was first tried for her murder at a coroner's trial and found guilty of wilful murder. At a full trial, however, he was found not guilty after Clouson's supposed deathbed statements were ruled as hearsay evidence instead of dying declarations. [11] |
| 1872 | Sarah and Christiana Squires | Hoxton, London | In a murder known as the Hoxton Horror, Sarah Squires, 77, and her daughter Christiana, 36, were murdered at the print shop they owned at 46 Hyde Road, Hoxton, at around midday on 10 July 1872. Both women were brutally attacked with a hammer, and their home was ransacked. There had been an attempted burglary at their shop a few days before. No one was ever charged with their murders. [11] |
| 1872 | Harriet Buswell | Bloomsbury, London | Buswell, 31, was a prostitute found with her throat cut in her room at 12 Great Coram Street on 25 December 1872. She was murdered by a client who police believed was ship chaplain Dr. Gottfried Hessell, a visiting German. Hessell was arrested, but the case was dismissed because he had an alibi for the time of Buswell's death. [11] |
| 1873–1889 | Elizabeth Jackson and four unidentified victims | River Thames and other locations around London | A police officer found the left side of a woman's torso in mud off a South London waterworks area on 5 September 1873. The right side was found floating near Brunswick Wharf the next day. Four more bodies would be found in or near London in the same fashion over the next 16 years. The murders became known as the Thames Torso Murders. [14] |
| 1876 | Charles Bravo | Balham, London | In a murder known as the Charles Bravo Murder or the Murder at the Priory, Bravo, a 30-year-old lawyer, was poisoned with antimony in April 1876. It took him three days to die, but he gave no indication of who the poisoner was. This led some to theorize that he had been trying to slowly poison his wife but instead poisoned himself by mistake. No one was ever charged with Bravo's murder. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] |
| 1878 | Rachel Samuel | Bloomsbury, London | 74-year-old Samuel was found dead in her kitchen at 4 Burton Crescent (now Cartwright Gardens) on 11 December 1872. She had been beaten, and some coins, her wedding ring and boots were missing. Former servant Mary Donovan was arrested, but the case against her was dismissed for lack of evidence. [11] |
| 1881 | P.C. Fred Atkins | Kingston Hill, Kingston, Surrey | Police constable 356 V Fred Atkins was shot while on patrol at the Knoll, Kingston Hill, Kingston, in 1881. Frank Blackwell, whose initials were found on an altered file used as a burglar's tool and whose footprints matched the killer's, was detained by police but released for lack of evidence.[ citation needed ] |
| 1881 | Lucy Sands | Workington, Cumbria | Sands, 16, was fatally attacked on the Northside road of Workington and was left under carefully placed cobblestones. On the evening of 1 December 1881, Sands went missing without a trace. At about 10:00 on the morning of 1 March 1882, a stonebreaker who had just started work uncovered the remains of her vermin-eaten body. This sparked a police hunt for her killer. The case remains officially unsolved, although a researcher claimed to have solved it in 2015. [21] [22] [23] |
| 1884 | Annie Yates | Bloomsbury, London | Yates, believed to be 23, was a prostitute who was murdered by a customer at 12 Burton Crescent (now Cartwright Gardens), Bloomsbury, in the early hours of 9 March 1884. She was strangled and beaten, and her purse and a ring were taken. Yates's age and real name are unconfirmed. [11] |
| April 1888 | Emma Smith | Whitechapel, London | Smith, 45, went to her lodging house in the early hours of 3 April 1888 and told its deputy keeper that several men attacked and robbed her in Osborn Street, Whitechapel. Supported by two fellow lodgers, she walked to London Hospital to be treated. On 4 April, she died there of her injuries. She was the first victim of what would become known as the Whitechapel Murders . |
| August 1888 | Martha Tabram | Whitechapel, London | Tabram, a 39-year-old prostitute, was stabbed 39 times, and her body was discovered on the first-floor landing of a building in George Yard (now Gunthorpe Street) on 7 August 1888. Jack the Ripper was a suspect, but some circumstances cause doubt: Tabram was with a soldier when last seen alive. Also, there were marked differences between her injuries and those of Jack the Ripper's five canonical victims. |
| August–November 1888 | Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly | Whitechapel (Mary Ann Nichols and Elizabeth Stride), Spitalfields (Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly) and the City of London (Catherine Eddowes) | Victims of Jack the Ripper |
| December 1888 | Rose Mylett | Poplar, London | A policeman on patrol on 20 December 1888 found the 26-year-old prostitute's still-warm body near where she was last seen alive with two sailors. Two surgeons claimed that someone strangled Mylett with a cord, and the jury at her inquest agreed, but two other doctors did not believe she was murdered. One of the latter doctors—the last of five people to examine the body—stated that Mylett probably died because she choked on her stiff jacket collar after falling over. [24] |
| December 1888 | John Gill | Bradford, West Yorkshire | Seven-year-old Gill's body was found behind Mellor Street in Manningham on 29 December 1888. His heart was ripped out, his arms and legs were cut off and his ears were removed. Milkman William Barrett was arrested for the murder, but magistrates dismissed the charge. [25] At least one contemporary newspaper indicated a suspected connection to the Jack the Ripper murders, [26] but a London doctor ruled out that possibility. [27] |
| February 1889 | Louisa Smith | Lewisham, London | Smith, a sex worker, was found in Algernon Road, Lewisham, early on 10 February 1889. She had a fractured skull caused by a blow from a blunt instrument—probably a hammer. She died from her injuries in a workhouse infirmary in Lewisham on the night of 14 February. [28] |
| July 1889 | Alice McKenzie | Whitechapel, London | Jack the Ripper was suspected to have killed McKenzie, who was found dead with stab wounds in Castle Alley: She had been working the streets of Whitechapel and was murdered there several months after Mary Jane Kelly was murdered in the neighbouring district of Spitalfields. However, because the stab wounds on McKenzie's body were not as savage as those on the bodies of most of Jack the Ripper's victims, it seemed unlikely that Jack the Ripper was the killer. |
| January 1890 | Amelia Jeffs | West Ham, London | Jeffs, 15, known as Millie, went missing on her way to a fried fish shop on Church Street, West Ham, on the evening of 31 January 1890. Her body was found on 14 February in a bedroom cupboard at number 126, Portway—an empty property in a row of recently built terraced houses. She had been strangled with her scarf. [11] |
| February 1891 | Frances Coles | Whitechapel, London | Coles, a prostitute, was 31 at the time of her death. A policeman found her body on 13 February 1891. Her throat was slit from ear to ear. The culprit may have just fled the scene: the policeman heard footsteps leaving the area, and blood was still flowing from Coles's throat. James Sadler, a 53-year-old seaman with whom Coles was drinking in public houses on 12 February, was charged with her murder, but doubts about his guilt during her inquest led to a decision to acquit him. The final victim of the Whitechapel Murders, Coles is not widely believed to be a victim of Jack the Ripper's. [29] |
| January 1898 | Thomas Webb | Finchley, London | Webb, a head cowman, was found fatally shot outside his cottage at College Farm. Before his death, he had a presentiment that one night he would be shot when looking around the farm. [30] |
| December 1898 | Mary Jane Voller | Barking, London | Five-year-old Voller, known as Little Jennie, vanished on 31 December 1898 during a shopping errand to a chandler's shop fifty yards from her home at 77 Harpour Road, Barking. Her father found her body in a flooded ditch later that night. She had been stabbed multiple times. [11] |
| February 1899 | Bertha Russ | Little Ilford, London | Six-year-old Russ was last seen talking to a young man near St. Barnabas' Church on Browning Road, East Ham, after she attended Sunday school on the afternoon of 19 February 1899. Her body was found about a mile away in an upstairs cupboard of a newly constructed house on Lawrence Avenue, Little Ilford, on 5 March. She had been suffocated. [11] |
| June 1902 | Rose Harsent | Peasenhall, Suffolk | Harsent's throat was slit during the early hours of 1 June 1902 at Providence House, where the pregnant 23-year-old was a servant. William Gardiner, a married man in his forties who was supposedly having an affair with her, was twice tried inconclusively and then freed. [31] [32] |
| September 1905 | Mary Money | Merstham, Surrey | Money's body was found in a Merstham railway tunnel. A postmortem revealed that a scarf had been thrust in her mouth, and marks on a tunnel wall showed that she was thrown to her death from a moving train. [33] |
| October 1905 | Elizabeth Peers | Liverpool | Ten-year-old Peers went missing while running an errand to a butcher's shop on Lodge Lane, Toxteth, on 28 October 1905. Her body was found the next morning on Toxteth's Cullen Street, a three-minute walk from her home on Wendell Street. She had been strangled. She may have been murdered by the same person who killed Margaret Kirby in 1908. [34] |
| June 1906 | Mary Anne Hogg | Camberley, Surrey | On the afternoon of 11 June 1906, two half-sisters were attacked in their home on London Road, Camberley. The younger sister, Caroline, 62, was resting upstairs when she heard screams from Mary, 68, downstairs. When Caroline went downstairs, she was attacked by a man with a weapon. Both sisters suffered head injuries, and their throats were cut. Mary died, but Caroline staggered out to alert a neighbour. She survived despite her injuries. The Hogg sisters were known to be wealthy, but there was no sign of theft. There is no clear motive for the incident. [35] [36] |
| September 1907 | Emily Dimmock | Camden Town, London | Sex worker Dimmock, 22, was found with her throat cut in a case known as the Camden Town Murder . Robert Wood was accused and acquitted after a defence by Edward Marshall Hall. [37] |
| January 1908 | Margaret Kirby | Liverpool | Seven-year-old Kirby was led away by a man as she played with her brother and a friend on Farnworth Street, Kensington, on 6 January 1908. Her body was found on 15 August in a sack on Great Newton Street. An anonymous confession letter, purportedly from the killer, was sent to police. The author claimed that he had been a lodger in Great Newton Street. He may have also murdered Elizabeth Peers in 1905. [34] |
| August 1908 | Caroline Luard | Ightham, Kent | In an incident known as the Seal Chart Murder, Luard, 58, was shot in a summerhouse in a wood near Sevenoaks, Kent. Her husband was accused and later committed suicide. [38] Later, murderer John Dickman, hanged for a shooting on a train in 1910, was a suspect. [39] |
| December 1908 | Marion Gilchrist | Glasgow | Gilchrist, an 82-year-old woman who lived in the West End of Glasgow, was bludgeoned to death. Despite her affluence, only a diamond brooch was stolen. Oscar Slater was suspected because he went to America and tried to pawn a brooch. He was wrongfully convicted in 1909, and this conviction was quashed in 1928. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was prominent in securing his release. [40] |
| November 1909 | George Harry Storrs | Gorse Hall, Stalybridge, Cheshire | Storrs, 49, owned Gorse Hall and was a prominent businessman in town. He made enemies through his business dealings. After a gun was fired at a window of the hall from outside on 10 September 1909, he had a bell installed on the roof that could be rung to alert police to intruders. On the night of 1 November 1909, an intruder entered the hall and, in a scuffle with Storrs, stabbed him 15 times. Two men were tried independently of each other for the killing, but neither was convicted. [41] [42] |
| July 1910 | Thomas Weldon Atherstone | Battersea, London | Atherstone, an actor in his late 40s, was shot dead in a yard in Battersea on the evening of 16 July 1910. A man was seen fleeing the scene. Police speculated that the culprit was a burglar. |
| November 1910 | Alexander Norval | Carlisle, Cumbria | Earlier, Norval, a currier, discovered that his son forged a cheque in his name. Nevertheless, the two were reconciled, and Norval lent his son money to keep the latter's betting business going. On 5 November 1910, Norval, 75, was bludgeoned to death in his warehouse on West Walls, Carlisle. His son was acquitted of murder in January 1911. [43] |
| July 1911 | Amy Reeves | Longcross, Chertsey Common, Surrey | Ten-year-old Reeves was last seen alive in her yard in Longcross at 12:30 p.m. on 18 July 1911. Her body was found late that night by a pond, or "dip hole", about two hundred yards from her home. She had head injuries and had drowned. That morning, she was seen with gardener Albert Hampton, a 16-year-old neighbour. Hampton was charged with Reeves's murder but discharged when the jury at the inquest gave a verdict of "wilful murder without evidence to show by whom committed". [44] [45] [46] |
| October 1911 | George Wilson | Lintz Green railway station, County Durham | The 59-year-old stationmaster was shot when returning home after closing his office at the station. Although he did not die instantly, when questioned, Wilson could not say who shot him. Railway porter Samuel Atkinson was charged, but no evidence was offered against him in court. [47] |
| October 1913 | Mary Speir Gunn | Northbank Cottage, Portencross, North Ayrshire | Gunn, 51, died when six shots were fired through a living-room window during the evening of 18 October 1913. The two other occupants of the room—her sister and brother-in-law—were injured but not killed. No one was charged with the offence. |
| January 1914 | Willie Starchfield | Haggerston, London | The body of Starchfield, aged five or six, was discovered beneath a seat in a third-class train carriage on the North London Railway on 8 January 1914. He was strangled and died between 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. that day. A witness named Starchfield's father as the culprit, but the judge at his trial ordered the jury to return a verdict of not guilty when the witness proved unreliable. [48] |
| May 1914 | David Ombler | Hull, East Yorkshire | Ombler, 71, was found dead in the back room of his greengrocer's shop on West Parade, off Spring Bank in Hull, on 30 May 1914. He had been beaten about the head with a poker. Witnesses saw a stranger loitering near the shop at around the time of the murder. The motive for the murder may have been theft. [49] |
| April 1915 | Margaret "Maggie" Nally | City of London | Seven-year-old Nally went to buy sweets with her five-year-old cousin close to Edgeware Road on the evening of 4 April 1915. Her cousin returned home alone, reporting that Nally left with an "old man". Nally's body was found hours later in the ladies' waiting room at Aldersgate Station (now named Barbican tube station). She had died at around 10:00 p.m. and been suffocated. [50] |
| July 1917 | Vera May Glasspool | Owslebury, Hampshire | The body of the 15-year-old scullery maid was found on 11 July 1917 in woodland close to Longwood House, her place of work. She had been strangled and stabbed. Suspicion centred on an army camp at Hazeley Down. The police offered a £50 reward for information that might lead to the arrest of the guilty party. [51] [52] |
| January 1919 | John Bianchi | Newcastle | Bianchi, 18, was walking a young woman (his cousin and partner) to her workplace on 26 January 1919 when a man shot him in the abdomen before hitting the woman over the head with a gun. She escaped after playing dead and ran to Bianchi's family home to raise the alarm. A motive was never established, but Bianchi and his partner were in a lovers' lane when assailed, and police thought the gunman may have had a religion-fueled desire to rid it of courting couples. (The lane was in Bigges Main, a former coal mining village near Wallsend.) Bianchi died in hospital in Newcastle the day after the attack. [53] [54] |
| June 1919 | Mabel Greenwood | Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire | Harold Greenwood (1874–1929) was accused of poisoning his 47-year-old wife, Mabel, with arsenic. He was acquitted at Carmarthen Assizes in 1920 after a defence by Edward Marshall Hall. [37] [55] |
| July 1919 | Bella Wright | Little Stretton, near Leicester | In an incident known as the Green Bicycle Case , Wright, 21, was shot dead soon after being seen with a man riding a bicycle. A green bicycle was found in a canal, and its owner, Ronald Light (1885–1975), was traced. He stood trial but was found not guilty of the murder, primarily because his defence counsel, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, had him, in the witness box, admit to every allegation against him except owning a service revolver and murdering Wright. [37] |
| January 1920 | Florence Nightingale Shore | East Sussex | Florence Nightingale Shore, the 55-year-old goddaughter of Florence Nightingale, was found on a train at Bexhill, East Sussex, with serious head injuries. Her money and jewellery were missing. She died in hospital in Hastings a few days later. [56] |
| February 1924 | Vera Hoad | Chichester, West Sussex | Hoad, an 11-year-old girl who had been missing since failing to arrive home from a music lesson on 25 February 1924, was discovered strangled to death on 28 February in a field belonging to a psychiatric hospital. A blowtorch was used to release her body because it had become trapped in ice due to freezing weather conditions. [57] |
| June 1926 | James White | Nottingham | White ran into a tree and died at the foot of it on 30 June, but a doctor found the impact not to have been the cause of his death, concluding that he collided with the tree in Acorn Wood and was then attacked with an instrument that fractured his skull as he lay on the ground in a dazed state. The collision occurred when 43-year-old White was fleeing after being spotted by a woman who was part of a couple he and two male companions were spying on. [58] |
| 10 February 1929 | Kate Jackson | Attacked in Limeslade, Wales, died in hospital | 43-year-old Jackson, an Englishwoman who had moved to the area with her husband to avoid recognition following his trial for embezzlement, was attacked shortly after departing from a meeting with a friend. She died from her injuries in hospital. Though Jackson's husband was tried for her murder, he was not convicted and the case remains unsolved. [59] |
| 25 September 1930 | Margery Wren | Ramsgate, Kent | A sweetshop owner and former maid who was around 80 years of age, Wren was battered with fireplace tongs in her shop on Church Road, Ramsgate, before succumbing to her injuries at Ramsgate Hospital five days later. Though potential suspects in the attack were named by her, nobody was charged, and the case remains unsolved to this day. [60] |
| 7 January 1931 | Evelyn Foster | Otterburn, Northumberland | 28-year-old Foster ran a successful car-hire business and on returning from a journey on 6 January 1931, picked up a young man wearing a tweed suit, overcoat and bowler hat. He threw her into the back of the cab and then covered her with a rug, which he doused with petrol and set alight. Although horrifically burned, Foster was able to crawl away from the burning vehicle and gave a description of her attacker after being found. She succumbed to her injuries the following day. [61] |
| 20 January 1931 | Julia Wallace | Liverpool | This is a case known as the Wallace Case. The victim's husband, William Herbert Wallace, was convicted of killing her and sentenced to death, but his conviction was quashed after he appealed. Recent books have named another suspect. |
| 21 June 1931 | Hubert Chevis | Aldershot, Hampshire | Chevis, 28, was poisoned after eating partridge laced with strychnine. [62] |
| 14 December 1931 | Vera Page | West Kensington, London | Ten-year-old Page's strangled body was found in the front garden of a house on Addison Road in West Kensington, London, on 16 December 1931. It was believed she was murdered elsewhere and then transferred to this location. [63] [64] [65] |
| January 1932 | Nancy Patterson | Silloth, Cumbria | 28-year-old Patterson's body was found washed up at Silloth on 8 January 1932, but a pathologist ruled out drowning as the cause of death on account of bruises on her neck – bruises indicative of strangulation – and lack of water in her lungs. A verdict of murder against a person or persons unknown was accordingly returned at her inquest. Two men said they saw Patterson near Navvies Bridge at Workington (a Cumbrian town some 15 miles down the coast from Silloth) five days before she was found dead. [66] |
| July 1932 | Queenie Harman | St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex | Queenie Winifred Harman (née Hicks), 17, was bludgeoned to death at her home. [67] [68] [69] [ better source needed ] Her husband, Arthur Edward Harman, was formally accused but not convicted. [70] [68] [69] He died 18 months later, aged 25, after wandering onto a railway line near Polegate. [67] [68] [69] The case against Mr. Harman appears to have ended at the police court (magistrates' court) level as police had no solid evidence. He worked for John Carter, a haulier, and went to work on that fateful day in July 1932. [70] The police seemed to want the case closed rapidly and never followed any other possible leads. |
| October 1932 | Albert and Annie Keen | Shackleford, Surrey | Albert Keen, 61, and his wife Annie, 54, were both found dead on 8 October 1932. Annie was discovered on the floor of the scullery in the cottage they had lived in, close to Cutt Mill crossroads. She had suffered injuries to her throat and head. When Albert failed to turn up for his work as a farmhand, his body was found in Cutt Mill Pond. He had received head injuries and died from drowning, and police believed he had been murdered before his wife. A murder-suicide was ruled out and a motive of theft was suspected instead because the couple had kept money in their home. A man stood trial for the Keens' murders but was acquitted after three days. [71] |
| October 1932 | Sidney Marston | Birmingham | 21-year-old Marston was found dying of stab wounds in the front garden of 63 Willows Crescent, Cannon Hill, Birmingham, on the evening of 9 October 1932. Two teenage sisters stood trial for his murder; they claimed he had assaulted and attempted to rob them but denied killing him. During the trial, it was decided that there was no evidence that the two girls had committed the crime and the judge ordered the jury to return a not guilty verdict. [72] [73] |
| June 1934 | Unidentified female | Brighton, Sussex | The murder of this woman, whose torso was found in a trunk at Brighton Station, is known as the Brighton Trunk Crime No. 1 (see Brighton trunk murders). In 2020, the BBC One documentary Dark Land: Hunting the Killers suggested that a man called George Shotton could have been the murderer. Shotton was posthumously named in 1961 as the killer of his wife Mamie Stuart. [74] |
| August 1935 | Minnie Lawson | Ogle, Northumberland | 58-year-old Lawson was a widow who ran a sweet shop in the village of Ogle, Northumberland. On 12 August 1935, her body was found next to her bed. She had been beaten with a hammer, had her bed set alight, and had her home ransacked. A local man was arrested and charged over Lawson's death, but the case against him collapsed. [75] |
| May 1938 | William Murfitt | Risby, Suffolk | Murfitt, 56, was poisoned with cyanide at his home, Quays Farm, on 17 May 1938. Suspicion fell on his housekeeper, but there was not enough evidence to charge anyone. [76] |
| October 1938 | Phyllis Hirst | Bradford, West Yorkshire | Eight-year-old Hirst was murdered on the evening of 28 October 1938 after she had been playing outside with a friend. Her body was found on a lane near All Saints' Church in Little Horton Green. [77] |
| April 1939 | George Stapleton | Greenfield, Bedfordshire | Stapleton, a farmworker aged 66, was bludgeoned with a fence post on 22 April 1939 while walking along a bridleway between Ruxox Farm and his home in Flitton, and his wages were stolen. The police report said the attacker had probably been waiting for him in nearby bushes. [78] |
| Year | Name of victim(s) | Location body found | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 1939 | Joyce Cox | Cardiff | Four-year-old Cox vanished while walking home from school with her seven-year-old brother on 28 September 1939; her body was later found on a railway embankment in Coryton, Cardiff. A family member researching the case in the 2010s learned that the police's prime suspect had died in the 1950s. [79] |
| November 1940 | Minnie Stott | Bolton, Lancashire | 17-year-old Stott went out for the evening on 16 November 1940 and her body was found by a police officer shortly before midnight in the yard of Parker's Garage, through an archway on Bradshawgate, Bolton. She had been strangled with her scarf and sexually assaulted. There had been various sightings of Stott during the evening, but no firm leads emerged. It was suggested years later that the investigating police officers had traced the crime to a man who committed suicide before he could be arrested, but this has not been substantiated. [80] |
| April 1943 | Wych Elm Bella | Wychbury Hill, Hagley, Worcestershire | Skeletal remains of a woman were discovered inside a hollow tree in April 1943. Police established that the victim had died approximately 18 months earlier but could not identify her. In 1944, the message "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm? – Hagley Wood" was found painted on a wall in Birmingham. Various theories about the identity of the victim and her killer have been proposed. |
| August 1943 | Mabel Harper | Cardiff | 53-year-old Harper was attacked while walking home from visiting friends on the night of 12 August 1943. Her body was found on a grass verge on Western Avenue, Cardiff, the following day. She had been gagged, stripped, and had facial injuries, and her attache case and handbag were missing. [81] |
| September 1943 | Louisa Price | The Wrekin, Shropshire | Price, an 18-year-old private from Birkenhead on Merseyside, went to a dance for soldiers at a pavilion in the Shropshire countryside on 8 September 1943 and was beaten to death with a rock or rocks that night after heading outdoors. She was discovered about 200 yards from the pavilion the following day. No charges relating to Price's murder have been filed since the acquittal in November 1943 of an American sergeant tried in England by a US court martial. [82] [83] |
| November 1943 | Norah Bartlett | Swansea | The body of Bartlett, 33, was found on the evening of 18 November 1943 in a lane close to her home on Rhyddings Park Road, Brynmill, Swansea. She had been strangled, and it was reported that she had last been seen alive in the company of an American soldier. [84] |
| February 1945 | Charles Walton | Meon Hill, near Upper Quinton, Warwickshire | Local farm labourer Walton, 74, was found murdered on the slopes of Meon Hill on Valentine's Day 1945, pinned to the ground with a pitchfork and with at least four inches of the tip of his own billhook embedded in his neck. There were also head injuries where he had been beaten with his walking stick. Rumours circulated linking the killing to witchcraft. [85] |
| October 1945 | Caroline Evans | Coedpoeth, Wrexham | Evans, a 39-year-old schoolteacher, was last seen alive on the evening of 6 October 1945 and found strangled to death the following day next to a path through Pant Tywyll which she had taken on her way to visit her mother at the City Arms pub in Minera. [86] |
| December 1945 | Betty Hadden | Torry, Aberdeen | On the morning of 12 December 1945, a severed arm was found on the foreshore at Torry. Fingerprint analysis revealed that it had belonged to Elizabeth "Betty" Hadden, a local 17-year-old girl; she had previously been arrested for shoplifting and police had kept her fingerprints on file. Hadden was last seen on 11 December and there were reports of screams being heard in the early hours of 12 December. The rest of her remains were never found. [87] |
| May 1946 | Robert Parrington Jackson | Bristol | The 33-year-old manager of the Odeon cinema in Union Street, Bristol, was shot on 29 May 1946 during a showing of the movie The Light that Failed . About 2,000 people were in the cinema watching the film when he was shot twice in his office, but they were unaware of the attack. Jackson died later in hospital. Theft was a suggested motive, but the key to the safe remained in the manager's pocket and the money in the safe was left untouched. In 1993, a man claimed that his father, a criminal called Billy "The Fish" Fisher, confessed to the murder on his deathbed in 1989. [88] |
| June 1946 | Muriel Drinkwater | Penllergaer, near Swansea | Drinkwater, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, was bludgeoned about the head, raped and shot in the woods at Penllergaer, a village a few miles from Swansea. [89] The case came to be known as the Little Red Riding Hood Murder. In 2020, the BBC One documentary Dark Land: Hunting the Killers suggested that Ronnie Harries could have been the murderer. [90] [74] Harries was hanged in 1954 for the double murder of John and Phoebe Harries, a husband and wife who were distantly related to him. |
| July 1946 | Sheila Martin | Fawkham, Kent | Martin, 11, was murdered early in the evening on 7 July 1946. She had last been seen at 4.30 pm and her body was found early the following morning in Stony Field Wood (also known as Sun Hill Wood), Fawkham Green. Martin had been strangled with her hair ribbon and it was believed she had died between 5 pm and 6 pm on 7 July. [91] |
| November 1946 | Margaret Cook | Soho, London | 26-year-old Cook was shot dead outside the Blue Lagoon, a nightclub in a narrow passage near Carnaby Street. Nobody was charged with her murder at the time, but Scotland Yard detectives interviewed a suspect in 2015 after he confessed to it. [92] |
| February 1948 | Evan Harris | Swansea | Harris, 71, was a retired industrial chemist who was a nightwatchman at Swansea's Consolidated Fisheries. His body was found in the company's dry dock at South Dock on the morning of 28 February 1948. Although Harris had died from drowning, murder was suspected when signs of a struggle were discovered in a nearby boilermaker's shop. [93] [94] |
| April 1948 | Jerzy Strzadla | Aberdare, Glamorgan | 32-year-old Strzadla, a miner, was stabbed over forty times in Abedare Park in an apparent robbery on 19 April 1948. Money and his watch were stolen. [95] |
| July 1948 | Joan Woodhouse | Arundel, West Sussex | The body of Woodhouse, 27, was found partially clothed near Swanbourne Lake, Arundel Park, on 10 August 1948. She was believed to have been murdered on 31 July. Woodhouse was a librarian in London and had met a man and travelled by train to Worthing, despite having told friends she would be travelling to Barnsley in Yorkshire to see family. The man who reported having found her body was charged with her murder but acquitted before he was due to stand trial. Woodhouse's family subsequently began a private prosecution against him, and he was charged again and then cleared. In 1956, police reopened the case and questioned a suspect who had moved to Rhodesia; however, the case remained unsolved. A book written about it asserts that the man who claimed to have found Woodhouse's body was the culprit and that he was protected from prosecution. [96] |
| November 1948 | Terence McNamara | Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire | McNamara was a 22-month-old infant who was murdered on 12 November 1948 in his home at 46 Richmond Street whilst his mother Irene was out at work. His father Raymond had died in 1947. [97] |
| January 1949 | Ernest Melville | Swansea | Two girls playing on a bomb site on Croft Street, Swansea, on 22 January 1949 came across the body of 38-year-old Melville; he had been battered to death with bricks. Melville had last been seen the previous evening drinking in the Full Moon pub on High Street. He was homosexual and police believed at the time that this was a reason for his murder. [98] |
| April 1949 | Emily Armstrong | St John's Wood, London | Armstrong, 69, was beaten to death and her body was found at her place of employment, a dry cleaner's shop on St John's Wood High Street. Police later determined that she had been killed an hour to two hours before her body was found at around 4.00 pm. A post-mortem examination also revealed that her skull had been shattered by at least 22 blows from a blunt object believed to have been a claw hammer, a stonemason's hammer or a heavy spanner. |
| June 1949 | Gertrude O'Leary | Stokes Croft, Bristol | 66-year-old O'Leary was found beaten and strangled to death in her off-licence on Thomas Street in Stokes Croft. It was determined that a gold watch and a jewelled pendant were missing, suggesting theft as the motive. Despite extensive inquiries, the killer was never found. [99] |
| November 1950 | Andrew Paterson Drury | Dundee | The 28-year-old machinist was stabbed and robbed in the Stannergate area. His stolen belongings were discovered wrapped in a towel in the bed of a Pathan seaman who had been charged already because a knife had been found in a box he owned, and the seaman's trial began in January 1951. However, the judge there cautioned the jury to be mindful that the items could have been planted in the seaman's bed to make it seem as though he had committed the murder, and a "not proven" verdict was returned. [100] [101] |
| July 1951 | Christine Butcher | Windsor, Berkshire | Seven-year-old Butcher vanished on 8 July 1951 when she went to see the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, who was staying at Windsor's Star and Garter Hotel ahead of his fight on 10 July with Randy Turpin at Earl's Court, London. Butcher's body was found two days later in a meadow close to Windsor Castle. She had been raped and strangled. [102] [103] |
| November 1951 | Edwin Youll | Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire | Youll, a 43-year-old taxi driver, was shot and beaten to death during an evening attack in Ladgate Lane on 16 November 1951, and his taxi was then driven to and abandoned in Middlesbrough town centre with all of his takings still in it. The day after the murder, a cleaner on duty at Waterloo Station in London found a torn piece of paper with handwriting describing the crime and giving two details about it that were yet to be revealed to the public – namely that two people had committed it and had done so in the vicinity of the Blue Bell Hotel. [104] |
| March 1952 | Lily Volpert | Cardiff | 41-year-old Volpert was found dead with a cut throat in her shop, Volpert's Clothing Store, in the docklands area of Cardiff, on 6 March 1952. Mahmood Hussein Mattan was found guilty of her murder and hanged in September 1952. After a campaign to clear his name, Mattan's conviction was quashed in 1998, and Volpert's murderer has not been caught. [105] |
| November 1952 | Patricia Curran | Whiteabbey, County Antrim, Northern Ireland | Curran, 19, was found stabbed to death in the grounds of her father's estate house on 13 November 1952. Her father was a High Court judge. Iain Hay Gordon, a 20-year-old Scottish airman stationed in Northern Ireland, confessed to the killing and at trial was found guilty but insane. In 2000, forty years after his release from a psychiatric hospital, the Court of Appeal agreed that Gordon's confession was inadmissible as it had been tainted by controversially aggressive interview techniques employed by police. There being no other evidence against him, the verdict was overturned and the killing remains unsolved. [106] [107] |
| January 1953 | Elizabeth Thomas | Attacked in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, died in hospital in Carmarthen | Thomas, 78, died the morning after she was beaten with a stick and stabbed in her Clifton Street cottage on the evening of 10 January 1953. Because people claimed to have seen him near her home that evening, a local deaf and mute man was quizzed by police and then charged following an apparent confession. However, a jury was directed to find him not guilty when the prosecution announced that it was to offer no further evidence. [108] |
| January 1954 | Penelope Mogano | Coventry, Warwickshire | 44-year-old Mogano was found dead in a chair in her dining room, her face and tongue mutilated with a carving knife and her skull smashed to pieces by hammer blows. [109] [110] The killer(s) did not ransack, steal, or sexually assault her whilst at the property. [111] Investigators wondered whether both the slaying and an earlier incident involving the pantry of a nearby home being set alight had a shared perpetrator with an attitude of contempt towards the old-time dancing that Mogano, her husband and the owner of that residence were into, but the line of inquiry into this theory led to a dead end. [112] Another line of inquiry that led nowhere concerned a bogus official who called at a house less than 200 yards from the Moganos' on the afternoon of the murder, saying he was there to inspect the electricity meter before making sexual advances to the woman who answered the door to him. [113] Neighbours of Mogano told detectives that they frequently saw her making afternoon trips from her home from late 1953, but where she was going or whom she was going to meet on each of those occasions was not established. [114] In all, over 25,000 statements were taken by the police as they investigated her murder. [115] |
| April 1954 | Olive May Bennett | Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire | 45-year-old Bennett was seen drinking alone in the Red Horse Hotel in Bridge Street, Stratford, on Saturday 24 April 1954. Shortly before midnight she was seen again, standing outside the hotel while the streets around her were empty. Bennett's body was discovered wedged against an obstruction on the bank of the River Avon the following morning. She had been strangled with a long woollen scarf and her body weighed down with a 56-pound tombstone wrenched from a riverside churchyard. Two women told police in 1962 that on the night of the murder, they were in the churchyard with two men and one of the men threatened to push them into the river and weigh them down with a tombstone. The men have never been traced. [116] |
| September 1954 | Jean Townsend | Ruislip, Middlesex | 21-year-old Townsend was found murdered on wasteland near the junction of Victoria Road and Angus Drive on 15 September 1954. [117] The autopsy report stated that she had been strangled with her own scarf. In 1982, the Metropolitan Police announced that they were to review their files on the case following some anonymous telephone calls. To this day, no one has been charged with Townsend's murder and it remains unsolved. Britain's National Archives has indicated that the police files on the case are likely to be made available for public inspection in 2031. [118] |
| September 1955 | Alice Barton | Birkenhead, Merseyside | A schoolboy found the strangled and mutilated body of Barton, 49, in a wartime pillbox near the Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead, on 24 September 1955. Barton had been a prostitute and had been known to take her clients to the location where her body was found. A local woman later shared her suspicion that her deceased grandfather may have been responsible for the murder. [119] |
| May 1956 | The Ormesher Sisters | Ormskirk, Lancashire | The two elderly sisters, who ran a sweet shop in the small market town, were bludgeoned to death in their own home. Despite national media coverage and an extensive investigation in which all of the adult male population of the town were fingerprinted, the identity or identities of the murderer or murderers has/have never been established. |
| September 1956 | Jean Chalinder | Cardiff | 32-year-old Chalinder, from Roath, was murdered while picking blackberries. Her body was found in a ditch at Llyn-y-Grant Farm on 20 September 1956, five days after she had gone missing. Chalinder had died from head injuries and police said the crime appeared to have been motiveless. [120] |
| April 1957 | Fred Jeffs | Birmingham | 37-year-old Jeffs had a confectionery and tobacconist at 12 Stanley Road in Quinton, Birmingham, and was battered to death after a dark-haired young woman had been spotted getting into his Austin A30 van outside the premises. Her appearance matched that of someone to whom he had silently mouthed that he would see later when she was in the shop about four hours previously. Jeffs's body was found the next day (19 April – Good Friday) in a spinney between Handsworth and West Bromwich after the police had been told by a nine-year-old boy that he had picked up and discarded a blood-covered lorry starter handle (thought to have been the murder weapon) in the spinney before being followed out of there by a tall man wearing a trilby and a mackintosh. The Austin A30 had already been found with blood on the roof and bonnet in Birmingham's district of Witton. Suspicion was that the unknown woman had lured Jeffs to a spot where a male accomplice then proceeded to beat him over the head. His pockets were empty when he was discovered and more than £150 in cash, along with a watch and a radio, had been stolen from his shop. [121] |
| May 1957 | Teresa Łubieńska | Attacked in South Kensington, London, died in hospital | Łubieńska was a 73-year-old Polish countess who had been a lieutenant in the Polish Underground Army and survived two concentration camps. She was fatally stabbed on the eastbound Piccadilly line platform at Gloucester Road tube station on the evening of 24 May 1957, and her attacker was never caught. |
| June 1957 | Emily Pye | Halifax, West Yorkshire | White-haired 80-year-oldPye had been running her grocery shop in Gibbet Street, Halifax for 30 years. When her niece called on her on 8 June 1957, she found her aunt's body in a crumpled heap in the living quarters at the back of the shop. She had been battered to death with a fireside poker and had a fractured skull. Police immediately thought theft was the motive for the attack when they discovered that a few pounds were missing from the till. Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam and Detective Sergeant Christopher Rowe called the killing a horrible murder case at the time and appealed for local people to get in touch, but out of Halifax's population of around 97,000, just four responded with leads, which came to nothing. The murder remains unsolved as of today. [122] |
| June 1957 | June and Royston Sheasby | Bristol | June Sheasby was seven and her brother, Royston, was five years old when the pair left their home in Brockworth Crescent, Stapleton, to visit some horses on 20 June 1957. They never returned home and after a large search, their bodies were found on 1 July in undergrowth near the River Frome in Snuff Mills Park. Both children had suffered head injuries. In 1964, a Home Office psychiatrist stated that a deceased prisoner jailed for a minor offence had confessed to him that he had killed two children. The psychiatrist did not name the prisoner or confirm if he had been referring to the Sheasby children. [123] |
| December 1957 | Anne Noblett | Whitwell, Hertfordshire | On the night of 30 December 1957, 17-year-old Noblett alighted from a bus on the corner of Lower Luton Road and Cherry Tree Lane in Wheathampstead and began the short walk home to Marshalls Heath. A month later her strangled and partially disrobed body was found seven miles away in Rose Grove Wood near Whitwell. Known as the Deep Freeze Murder, mystery surrounds the circumstances of the killing, due to Noblett's body being found in a frozen condition notwithstanding the relatively mild weather at the time. Despite extensive enquiries, her killer has never been caught. [124] [125] |
| January 1958 | Mary Kriek | Boxted, Essex | Kriek, a 19-year-old Dutch au pair, was beaten to death with a tyre lever after waving goodbye to a friend still on the bus she had just alighted from. It was 10.45 pm when Kriek got off the bus as it passed through Eight Ash Green – the village where the family she was staying with lived and a place some 14 miles from where her body would be found early the next day, on Monday, 6 January. [126] [127] A link with the murder of Anne Noblett was suspected. [128] [129] |
| April 1958 | Susan Southgate | Writtle, near Chelmsford, Essex | A duster was stuffed into the 83-year-old's mouth, and she was then gagged with insulation tape while the duster was still in there, tied to a chair (left in a turn of the stairs after getting stuck as it was being carried up with her in it) and burgled on 17 April 1958. One of the culprits later called the police from a phone box in Barking to make a request for officers to go to Southgate's house and release her, but she had suffocated to death by the time she was found. [130] |
| June 1958 | Harry Baker | High Legh, Cheshire | 61-year-old Baker was last seen at 1.45 pm on 5 June 1958 talking to a man on Strand Road, Bootle. His body was found 18 days later, on 23 June, wrapped in two sacks in woods at High Legh, near Knutsford. He had been beaten, strangled and robbed. The search for Baker's killer was one of the biggest ever manhunts on Merseyside. [131] |
| April 1959 | Carol Ann Stephens | Horeb, near Llanelli, Carmarthenshire | Six-year-old Stephens left her home on Malefant Street, Cardiff, to play outside on 7 April 1959. She never returned home, and her body was found two weeks later in a river culvert near the village of Horeb, north of Llanelli. She had been suffocated before being dumped in the water. Police made a new appeal for information on the 60th anniversary of Stephens's death in 2019. [132] In 2020, the BBC One documentary Dark Land: Hunting the Killers suggested that confectionery salesman Ronald Murray could have been the murderer. [133] [74] |
| May 1959 | Kelso Cochrane | North Kensington, London | 32-year-old Cochrane, an Antiguan expatriate to Britain, was stabbed in a racially motivated attack by a gang of white youths on the evening of 17 May 1959. |
| 1959–1965 | 1959: Elizabeth Figg; 1963: Gwynneth Rees; 1964: Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helene Barthelemy, Mary Fleming and Margaret McGowan; 1965: Bridget O'Hara | West London | Hammersmith nude murders, a.k.a. "Jack the Stripper" murders |
| August 1959 | Florence Gooding | Attacked in Oxted, Surrey, died at Wimbledon Hospital in London | Gooding, 75, was found badly beaten in her bed at her home on Oast Road, Oxted, on 4 August 1959. She died the following day. It is reported that forty years after Gooding's death, a detective recalled that the main suspect had died before he could be interviewed. [134] |
| August 1959 | Miles Vallint | Croydon, London | Eleven-year-old Vallint was last seen alive on 27 August 1959 as he visited a bicycle shop in Croydon, having travelled there by bus from near his home on Farnley Road, South Norwood. The following day he was found strangled to death on the site of a demolished vicarage on Tavistock Road, Croydon. [135] |
| January 1960 | Emily Tharme | Poole, Dorset | 44-year-old Tharme went missing in January 1960. [136] Her body was later found in Wheelers Lane. [137] |
| January 1960 | Eva Booth | Hartley, Plymouth, Devon | The 70-year-old widow was found deceased with head injuries in an airing cupboard of her home on 25 January 1960. [138] |
| December 1960 | Ronald Coomber | Ilford, London | 28-year-old Coomber was fatally stamped on in the neck in the grounds of the Ranch House Club on Ashurst Drive, Ilford, on 23 December 1960. He had been drinking in the club and was followed outside after getting into an argument with its owner and punching him. Four men were acquitted over Coomber's death and awarded compensation. [139] |
| January 1961 | Linda Smith | Polstead, Suffolk | Twelve-year-old Smith, from Earls Colne in Essex, was in the main street of her village on 16 January 1961 when she was last seen alive. A retired farmworker found her body in the Suffolk countryside four days later, and wrapped tightly around the neck was the scarf that had been used to strangle her (her own school scarf). There has never been an arrest in connection with this murder. [140] [141] |
| January 1961 | Dorothy Mills | West Bromwich, West Midlands | Mills, a 32-year-old local government filing clerk, left her home one evening and was found battered to death the day after (22 January 1961) in the grounds of a tennis club where she was a champion player. The home was shared with her adoptive parents. Mills's autopsy revealed that she was three months pregnant when she died, and that the blows from the murder weapon – believed to have been a hammer – caused her skull to shatter into 13 pieces. [142] |
| April 1961 | Patrick Mulligan | Worcester | When Mulligan, 22, was seen staggering and then collapsing in the street close to midnight on Saturday 8 April 1961, it was found that it was because he had been stabbed, and he soon died from his wound. The stabbing had taken place in public toilets on an adjoining road. A 39-year-old vagrant was cleared of Mulligan's murder after a senior transport policeman had stated in court that he had seen the vagrant at a railway station many miles from Worcester that night. [143] |
| December 1961 | Maureen Dutton | Liverpool | 27-year-old Dutton died in the presence of her sons (both under three years of age) when she was stabbed in their house on Thingwall Lane, Knotty Ash within four weeks of giving birth to the younger of the two. The murderer did not steal anything from the property and seemed to have gained entry to it by Dutton answering the door. [144] Three people who remain unidentified became suspects: a young male bogus doctor who had visited a woman at her Halewood address to offer postnatal care, a young man seen running along Greystone Road (which adjoins Thingwall Lane) and vomiting outside the church at the junction with Court Hey Avenue, and a young Irishwoman heard muttering to herself on a bus that she had to leave Liverpool as a matter of urgency, had "done something terrible" and was going to catch a plane from London. [145] [146] |
| July 1962 | Olive Duncan | Hammersmith, London | 61-year-old Duncan smashed a window of her flat in Sulgrave Gardens at around 12.30 am on 18 July 1962 – prompting neighbours to come to her aid – despite her wrists having been bound by an assailant. Acute fear then caused her to die of heart failure. The male assailant had left the flat before the arrival of any of Duncan's neighbours after gaining access to it via the transom toilet window, using a piece of rag or pillow slip to tie her hands together, and raping her. [147] [148] |
| October 1962 | Annie O'Donnell | Clerkenwell, London | Murdered on 12 October at the religious bookshop she owned, O'Donnell was bludgeoned and the premises were ransacked before money totalling about £600 was taken away. Because a fingerprint of his was discovered at the scene and a witness claimed to have seen someone matching his description in the environs of the shop at or near the time of the crime, a 19-year-old was soon charged with it, despite appearing to have a good alibi. Prosecuted three times in 1963, he was finally found not guilty of the 73-year-old's murder when no evidence against him was presented at the last trial. [149] |
| August 1963 | Stanley Blackmore | Yetminster, Dorset | The 66-year-old taxi driver went missing after dropping a soldier off at Pen Mill railway station in Yeovil and was found stabbed to death eight days later in a ditch at nearby Yetminster. [150] [151] |
| September 1963 | George Wilson | Nottingham | 42-year-old Wilson's wife found him dying in a pool of blood close to Sneinton's Fox & Grapes pub (of which he was the landlord) when she opened the side door to it after hearing their dog barking and scratching at it from outside. A pathologist counted 14 stab wounds on the body of the deceased, who was attacked on 8 September whilst out with the dog for a nighttime stroll. [152] |
| September 1963 | Linda Cook | Redcar, North Yorkshire | On 21 September 1963, Cook, a 23-year-old on the verge of relocating to Leeds to live in her father's property due to having separated from her husband, was staying at a friend's flat but never returned after telling him she was going to see her ex-employer (a local doctor whose surgery she had been working at as a receptionist) and would be back later. A milk lorry driver found her strangled to death in Green Lane the next day. Police interviewed thousands of people about Cook's murder, but the information given to them during those interviews failed to lead to an arrest or to enable them to build up a detailed picture of the Redcar woman's last movements. [153] |
| October/November 1963 | Katherine Lillian Armstrong | Newcastle | Known by her middle name of Lillian, the 70-year-old retired headteacher was found dead in her home on Goldspink Lane, Sandyford, Newcastle, on 1 November 1963. She had been stabbed 28 times and had a nylon stocking tied around her neck, as well as defensive wounds on her hands. There was no sign of forced entry to the house. [154] |
| May 1964 | Charles Griffiths | Southport, Lancashire | 84-year-old Griffiths was discovered battered to death in his house at 7 Bridge Street on 4 May 1964. Local residents were urged by police two days later to search their gardens and footpaths for his missing wallet. [155] [156] |
| May 1964 | Anne Dunwell | Near Maltby, South Yorkshire | 13-year-old Dunwell was found strangled to death on a manure heap on 7 May 1964. She had been sexually assaulted too. It is believed she was killed the previous evening after leaving her aunt's house to catch a bus to be with her grandmother. Despite a reported DNA "breakthrough" in 2006, Dunwell's murderer has never been identified. [157] [158] |
| June 1964 | Yvonne Laker | Basingstoke, Hampshire | 15-year-old Laker was found dead in a toilet cubicle on a train travelling from Southampton to Reading on 29 June 1964. Her throat had been cut with a broken bottle. Laker's body was discovered as the train was leaving Basingstoke and her shoes and beret had been thrown from the train ten miles south of Basingstoke. A man – who claimed to have seen the girl with her attacker – stood trial for her murder but was acquitted. [159] |
| October 1964 | Arthur Cope | Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire | Lack of evidence of a break-in at Arthur Cope's caravan (where he was bludgeoned to death) led the police to think it was probable that the 56-year-old and his attacker were known to each other. Analysis of a pair of bicycle handlebars taken from the crime scene ruled out either as the murder weapon, but they were kept in storage afterwards in spite of that. Builders found those handlebars during a renovation of a former police station in Newark in 2013. [160] |
| April 1965 | Florence Lewis | Wigmore, Kent | Lewis, a widow aged 77, was hit with a blunt object 14 times after opening the front door of her bungalow. The culprit might have targeted it because they were hoping to steal a large quantity of money they believed to be stored there somewhere. [161] |
| September 1965 | Sidney Leeson | Leicester | Leeson, 75, was battered to death with a vase at his home by somebody he appeared to have let in. £23 was missing from a drawer that had been prised open there, presumably by the attacker or an accomplice. [162] |
| October 1965 | Elsie Frost | Wakefield, West Yorkshire | 14-year-old Frost's body was found with stab wounds on 9 October 1965. A subsequent investigation turned up one suspect, who was charged before being acquitted. After this, there was no further investigation, and details of the case were made exempt from Freedom of Information requests. Frost's siblings filed an FOI request when the original exemption date was coming to an end, only to find that the date had been extended to 2060. [163] [164] The case was reopened in 2015 after a series of reports on BBC Radio 4. In September 2016 – more than 50 years after the offence had been committed – Peter Pickering, a convicted child murderer in his late 70s, was arrested on suspicion of Frost's murder. [165] He was expected to be charged but died before police could do so. [166] |
| December 1965 | Ivor Pearce | Stanmore, London | The 30-year-old Edgware man was found dead in his taxi, killed by someone firing a bullet from an automatic pistol into the back of his head. A letter indicating that he and the perpetrator might have known each other was received by the police by the fourth week of January 1966. [167] |
| December 1965 | Alfred Bowler | Attacked in Kegworth, Leicestershire, died at the Leicester Royal Infirmary | 74-year-old Bowler owned a shop on Derby Road and died 23 days after being stabbed in the stomach during a struggle to stop a man from taking money out of the till there. [168] |
| April 1966 | Fred Craven | Bingley, West Yorkshire | Craven's head was battered at his Wellington Street betting office and £195 was taken from the premises on 22 April 1966. A man appearing to be in his 20s was seen near there during the crucial time window and soon regarded as a suspect, but efforts to identify him with certainty have not been successful. The victim was in his 60s. [169] |
| June 1966 | Winifred Sharp | Leeds | A thin-faced man with dark hair grabbed about £160 from the counter in a post office and fled the premises after firing gunshots that would kill 50-year-old Sharp and seriously injure the person in charge on 9 June 1966. Sharp worked there as a counter assistant. [170] |
| June 1966 | Louis Bega | Eccles, Manchester | The father-of-two aged 43 was stabbed 26 times in his living room on 23 June 1966. As he lay dying from his wounds, he was heard to name his wife's lover as the culprit, but the police thought he had been killed because he had disturbed someone who was in his property to commit burglary. [171] |
| November 1966 | Helen Davidson | Hodgemoor Wood, Buckinghamshire | On 9 November 1966, 49-year-old Davidson, a popular GP, was battered to death in dense woodland a few miles from her Amersham home. She had been birdwatching and exercising her dog. Davidson's body was found the next day, but nobody has been convicted of her murder. [172] [173] |
| December 1966 | Mavis Hudson | Chesterfield, Derbyshire | 15-year-old Hudson was last seen alive on 26 December 1966. The following day her body was found in a derelict building. She had been strangled. In spite of appeals on national TV, no arrests were ever made, and the case remains unsolved. [174] |
| January 1967 | Bernard Oliver | Tattingstone, Suffolk | Oliver, a 17-year-old from Muswell Hill in London, disappeared on 6 January 1967 and his dismembered body was found in suitcases 10 days later at Tattingstone, near Ipswich. No one has been charged over his murder, but a spokeswoman for Suffolk Constabulary stated in January 2017 that DNA evidence may help to yield some clues 50 years on. [175] |
| January 1967 | Alfred Swinscoe | Pinxton, Derbyshire | 54-year-old colliery worker and father-of-six Swinscoe disappeared on 27 January 1967 after last orders were called at The Miner's Arms pub, giving his son 10 shillings to buy the final drinks before going to visit the outside toilets. Swinscoe never returned, and it was believed by some that he had absconded from his wife after their recent separation; the man sharing Swinscoe's lodgings worried Swinscoe had tried to dodge paying his board money. [176] In April 2023, a farmer from Sutton-in-Ashfield discovered human remains and clothing buried on his land. The body was identified when Swinscoe's grandson, after seeing an image of the clothes and having a flashback about the pattern on his grandfather's large socks, submitted a sample for DNA testing. [177] It was found that Swinscoe had both blunt and sharp force trauma to his head and jawline, ribcage and spine; the right hand was also broken, showing Swinscoe had attempted self-defense. Fingers and ribs were missing from the remains, suggesting that they were left uncovered and interfered with by local foxes before being buried. Police stated that they had identified two suspects - one with "a history of violence" - that have since died, meaning it is extremely unlikely anyone will be charged with Swinscoe's murder. [178] |
| March 1967 | Ruth Bradbury | Crowthorne, Berkshire | 14-year-old Bradbury was shot dead in Simons Wood, off Wellingtonia Avenue, on the morning of 29 March 1967 as she walked home from a shopping errand for her grandmother. It was believed that she may have been shot accidentally while passing through the wood, for close to her body was evidence that someone had been using trees and tin cans for target practice with a .22 rifle. [179] |
| May 1967 | Keith Lyon | Woodingdean, East Sussex | 12-year-old Lyon was stabbed to death on a bridleway linking the villages of Ovingdean and Woodingdean, near Brighton, on 6 May 1967. Despite arrests in connection with his death as recently as 2006, no one has ever been charged with Lyon's murder. [180] |
| June 1967 | Herbert Wilkinson | Whatcroft, Cheshire | The body of Wilkinson, a 54-year-old solicitor, was discovered in a shallow grave between the towns of Northwich and Middlewich in October 1967. Wilkinson, who had been struck off by the Law Society seven months earlier, had disappeared on 2 June after scribbling a note for his housekeeper. Based on the remoteness of the location alongside the Trent & Mersey Canal, police believed he had been taken there by boat. Beyond that, nothing could be determined, and a coroner's inquest in March 1968 returned a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. [181] |
| June 1967 | Louisa Dunne | Easton, Bristol | 75-year-old Dunne was raped and strangled at her home in Bristol in late June 1967. A 92-year-old man from Ipswich was charged with her rape and murder in November 2024. [182] |
| November 1967 | Rita Ellis | RAF Halton, Buckinghamshire | 19-year-old Ellis's body was found partially hidden under leaves and foliage at Rowborough Copse, near the edge of the RAF Halton camp, on 12 November 1967. Ellis, who was in the WRAF and worked in the catering department of the RAF hospital on the camp, had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled. She had last been seen the previous evening. Scientific advances mean that the police now have a DNA profile of the killer. [183] [184] [185] |
| January 1968 | Kimberley Jackson | Norton, County Durham | Five-month-old Jackson was taken in her pram from outside the back door of her home in Carmel Gardens, Norton, and found drowned in water at nearby Billingham Bottoms an hour-and-a-half later. A teenage boy was seen pushing the pram and it was abandoned in Amble View, a short distance from where Jackson was found. [186] |
| 1968–1969 | February 1968: Patricia Docker; August 1969: Jemima McDonald; October 1969: Helen Puttock | Glasgow | "Bible John" victims |
| February 1968 | Mary Judge | Leeds | The naked and battered body of the 43-year-old prostitute was found near Leeds Parish Church on 26 February 1968. It has been speculated but never proven that it was Peter Sutcliffe (dubbed "the Yorkshire Ripper" some years after this slaying) who killed her. [187] |
| March 1968 | David Lawrence | Southwark, London | Five-year-old Lawrence was murdered in public toilets in a children's playground in Tabard Gardens, Southwark, on 8 March 1968. He lived with his family in Rochester House on Manciple Street – the building overlooks the park where he had been playing. [188] [189] |
| August 1968 | Adeline Bracegirdle | Macclesfield, Cheshire | A 22-year-old man's conviction for Bracegirdle's murder was quashed in July 1984 (by which time he was 37 or 38) following an appeal. Bracegirdle, an 84-year-old spinster, had been raped and strangled at her home on Buxton Road, Macclesfield. [190] [191] |
| November 1968 | Ernest Bennett | Lewisham, London | 57-year-old Bennett was a newsagent and his attacker stole £200 from the till in his shop on George Lane in Lewisham after battering him there and leaving him in a disused air-raid shelter behind the building. [192] |
| April 1969 | Annie Walker | Heather, Leicestershire | Walker, a retired pub landlady in her 70s, was beaten to death in her home on 2 April 1969. Cash totalling £1,000 was stolen from there as well. The killing became known as "the Coronation Street murder", due to the victim sharing the same name and occupation as one of the programme's characters. In 2005, by re-examining bloodstains on a piece of clothing from the scene, forensic scientists were hoping to extract DNA samples which would positively identify the murderer. [168] [193] |
| April 1969 | April Fabb | Body not found | On 8 April 1969, 13-year-old Fabb left her Metton (Norfolk) residence to cycle to a house about 1.7 miles (2.7 km) away to take a pack of cigarettes as a birthday present for her brother-in-law. She never arrived, and Ordnance Survey workers saw her blue and white bicycle dumped in a field between her home and her sister's at around 2.15 pm. [194] Fabb has still not been found, but the police have always suspected her to be a victim of homicide. [195] |
| June 1969 | Lesley McMurray | Fair Oak, Hampshire | The 21-year-old Southampton University student kissed her boyfriend goodbye and told him she was heading back to her hall of residence on 2 June 1969, but did not arrive at her destination. Her remains were discovered at Fair Oak in March 1970. [196] Over 30 years later, police charged a Rampton patient with McMurray's murder, but the Crown Prosecution Service made a last-minute decision not to go ahead with a trial, giving insufficient evidence as the reason. [197] |
| September 1969 | Reginald Stevens | Luton, Bedfordshire | Sub-postmaster Stevens, 57, was shot dead in a car park near his workplace during a raid that witness statements indicated four men were involved in. Three men received prison sentences for his murder and the raid, but in 1973, the conviction of one of them was quashed. Ongoing concerns about the convictions of the other two meant that in 1980, they too were allowed to walk free; however, the guilty verdicts against them were not formally declared unsafe until a court ruling posthumously exonerated both men in 2003. [198] |
Unsolved Mysteries is an American mystery documentary television series, created by John Cosgrove and Terry Dunn Meurer. Documenting cold cases and paranormal phenomena, it began as a series of seven specials, presented by Raymond Burr, Karl Malden, and Robert Stack, beginning on NBC on January 20, 1987, becoming a full-fledged series on October 5, 1988, hosted by Stack. After nine seasons on NBC, the series moved to CBS for its 10th season on November 13, 1997. After adding Virginia Madsen as a co-host during season 11 failed to boost slipping ratings, CBS canceled the series after only a two-season, 12-episode run on June 11, 1999. The series was revived by Lifetime in 2000, with season 12 beginning on July 2, 2001. Unsolved Mysteries aired 103 episodes on Lifetime, before ending on September 20, 2002, an end that coincided with Stack's illness and eventual death.
This is a list of sex workers who were murdered in the United Kingdom.