In the UK in the summer of 1946, the heartbreaking rape and murder of a schoolgirl in Wales would grab headlines under the chilling appellation of the Little Red Riding Hood Murder.
It was June 27th, and twelve-year-old Muriel Joan Drinkwater rode the bus home from Penllergaer Grammar School, near Swansea, as she did every afternoon. The bus stop was about a mile away from her family home, known as Tyle-Du Farm, and the path snaked into and out of the woods.
Friends noted that Muriel was singing to herself as she got off the bus at two-thirty p.m. and began the short walk, and the child’s mother Margaret saw her daughter through the window as the girl disembarked from the bus and set off down the path. Though she clearly saw Muriel entering the woods, however, she never saw the girl come back out.
At some point, a thirteen-year-old neighbor named Hubert Hoyles, who had been at the Drinkwater farm buying eggs, passed Muriel on the path, and stated that nothing at all had been unusual. But after hours had passed with no sign of the girl, Margaret Drinkwater went down to the village to look for her, and later called police, who organized a search party.
Sadly, on the following day, Muriel Drinkwater was found dead in the woods. She had been beaten in the head, raped, and shot in the chest. Two days after that, the murder weapon—a Colt .45 of a type commonly issued to the American Army—was also discovered nearby, and police noted that it was the same type of weapon that had been used in another recent murder in Bristol.
Despite the involvement of Scotland Yard, and of investigators interviewing over 20,000 people and circulating a description both of the gun and of a possible suspect—who was thought to be a thirty-year-old man with thick hair and a brown jacket and pants—no arrests were ever made in the crime.
Welsh police retroactively speculated that the murder of Muriel Drinkwater could also be tied to the rape and murder of eleven-year-old Sheila Martin, which took place only ten days later and bore a similar modus operandi, though Sheila Martin was strangled rather than shot. Additionally, despite the fact that Sheila Martin was killed in Dartford, hundreds of miles away from Penllergaer, authorities pointed out that there was a great deal of travel between the two areas, and noted further that there had been a large sporting event in Dartford that day that had drawn thousands of spectators from across the region.
In 2008, a complete DNA profile of Muriel Drinkwater’s killer was able to be extracted from a semen stain on her clothing, but unfortunately, the profile matched no other records in the database.
Years later, in 2020, a BBC One documentary presented the theory that a man named Ronnie Harries, who was hanged at Swansea Prison in 1954 for bludgeoning two of his relatives to death with a hammer, was responsible for the killing of Muriel Drinkwater. Harries was a farm worker who may have been employed by Muriel’s father at the time of her slaying.
Crime Immemorial 