A few days before Christmas of 1961, in Liverpool, England, the appalling murder of a young woman in her own home stirred up lurid speculations about fake medical doctors, leather-jacketed strangers, and violent pagan cults.
Maureen Dutton was twenty-seven years old, and resided on Thingwall Road in the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash with her husband, chemist Brian Dutton, and their two children: two-year-old David, and baby Andrew, who had been born less than a month earlier.
On Wednesday, December 20th, Maureen had planned to take David to the nearby Childwall Parish Church to see their nativity scene. Maureen’s mother Elsie had dropped by that morning, and told Maureen that she would return later that afternoon to baby-sit infant Andrew while Maureen and David went on their excursion.
However, the freezing fog that had been hanging over the area for the past few days had not let up by Wednesday, and the weather was so grim that townsfolk were more or less confined to their homes because of the cold and the lack of visibility. At about half-past one, Elsie phoned and said that she wouldn’t be able to come over to baby-sit after all, because the fog had thickened so severely.
Maureen resigned herself to the fact that she would be staying in with her babies for the rest of the afternoon until her husband got home, and she set about preparing some lunch for all of them.
What she had no way of knowing was that the fog outside her windows was hiding a killer.
Brian Dutton arrived home from work at a little past six p.m. Upon entering the house, he immediately became concerned, as the residence was dark and eerily silent. His worry multiplied immeasurably when he spotted the kitchen table, which still held the half-eaten remnants of a lunchtime meal.
He opened the door to the front room with some trepidation, and beheld a frightful scene: his wife Maureen lay dead on the floor in a pool of blood, having been viciously stabbed more than a dozen times. Two-year-old David sat nearby, alive but obviously dazed at the horrific crime he had witnessed. Baby Andrew lay unharmed in his crib a short distance away.
Investigators descended on the once-happy home. They discovered no sign of forced entry, indicating that whoever had killed Maureen was either someone she knew, or someone who had somehow convinced her to let him inside. Nothing at all had been stolen, there was no indication of a struggle, and Maureen had not been sexually assaulted. The motive for the ghastly crime was a complete and utter enigma.
Police scoured the area, interviewing thousands of witnesses and searching in vain for the murder weapon, thought to be a long-bladed knife. No trace of it was ever recovered. Neighbors claimed they had seen no one unusual going into or out of the Dutton house that day, and apparently no one had heard anything to indicate a grisly slaying was taking place within the home’s walls.
Authorities even attempted to garner some useful information from toddler David Dutton, who had ostensibly witnessed the murder of his mother, but the child’s meaningless burbling gave them nothing in particular to go on.
As the inquiry continued, several separate leads provided investigators some hope that the case might eventually be resolved. The first of these emerged a day or two after the murder, when a woman from the nearby suburb of Halewood reported to police that a man had come to her front door on December 19th, claiming to be a doctor. The woman, much like Maureen Dutton, had given birth only a short time before, and assumed that the man had been sent to examine her as part of her post-natal care.
However, the woman stated, the man’s “examination” had made her extremely uncomfortable, and when the woman’s husband phoned the health service to check on the man’s credentials, he was told that there was no record of him, and that he was likely not a doctor at all. A thorough search for this fraudulent physician, unfortunately, produced no results.
Another lead stemmed from witness testimony that on the afternoon of the murder, a blonde Irish woman had boarded a bus near the crime scene and was acting very strangely, repeating, “Oh my god,” over and over, and claiming that she had done something terrible and needed to catch a plane out of the country. This woman was likewise never located.
A third person of interest was a handsome young man clad in a leather jacket, who a neighbor had noticed running down Thingwall Road on the afternoon of the slaying. This same individual was spotted vomiting behind a nearby church, with his hands crammed tightly in his pockets.
Another neighbor informed police that a young man fitting the same description had knocked on her door that day, and when she opened it, he had just stood there staring menacingly at her and clapping his hands in front of her face. She had slammed and locked the door before he could do anything else, and he subsequently fled.
Police were able to assemble a sketch of this mysterious individual from the handful of witnesses who had seen him, but despite numerous tips that poured in from the public after the sketch was published in the paper, the young man was never identified.
By far the strangest hypothesis about the murder of Maureen Dutton was that she could have been the victim of some sort of pagan cult allegedly operating in the area. In a scenario that recalled the bizarre 1945 “Witchcraft Murder” of Charles Walton in Warwickshire, some investigators speculated that Maureen might have been a ritual sacrifice for the winter solstice, undertaken by a supposed Polynesian Tiki cult. Apparently, members of this cult could be identified by the distinctive, backward-swastika tattoos they sported.
Delving into the purported sacrifice angle also proved to be a dead end, though, and the case soon ran out of steam. But intriguingly, as outlandish as the cult theory may have sounded, there was an unsettling development along those lines in the early part of 1962.
During an unrelated investigation, police happened to apprehend a nurse in Liverpool who had been stealing drugs and medical equipment from local hospitals. Upon scrutinizing him further, it was discovered that not only was this the same individual who had reportedly showed up at the Halewood woman’s home claiming to be a doctor, but he also bore a backward swastika tattoo on his upper arm.
The coincidence seemed far too profound to ignore, but ultimately, the man was cleared of suspicion in the murder of Maureen Dutton, and the peculiar case entered the annals of unsolved crimes under the moniker, “The Knotty Ash Murder.”
Crime Immemorial 