Crime Immemorial

Olive May Bennett was around forty-five years old, a Scottish woman who made her living as a nurse. Though the first half of her life had reportedly been rather dull and uneventful, by the time 1954 rolled around, it appeared that Olive had decided to let her hair down and have a little fun. She suddenly took up smoking and drinking, began burning through her savings account, and enjoyed dolling herself up and going out on the town, meeting various men for dates and evidently making up for her rather straight-laced youth.

On Saturday night, April 24th, she was sitting in a pub called the Red Horse Hotel on Bridge Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Though she was drinking alone, witnesses who saw her there that night told police that she seemed to be looking out for someone, and a little after midnight, when the bar had cleared out some, she was seen standing outside the hotel, presumably waiting for someone to come pick her up. Evidently, someone finally did.

The following day, police were summoned to the banks of the River Avon, where the body of Olive Bennett lay wedged against some debris at the shoreline. She had been strangled with a scarf, and whoever had killed her had then wrenched a fifty-pound tombstone out of the ground from the nearby Holy Trinity Churchyard and attempted to weigh her body down with it. Obviously, this tactic had not been successful.

Upon delving into Olive’s private life, police found no shortage of suspects, as the woman had a diary in which she kept track of the men she’d recently been dating, but none of these men proved to be viable candidates for the killer. Investigators did find Olive’s recent personality change odd, but the circumstances surrounding her newfound hedonism didn’t seem to have any direct connection to her murder.

The only significant clue in the case came more than eight years later, when two women suddenly came forward and told police that they had been with two men that night in the Holy Trinity Churchyard. The women claimed that these men had specifically threatened to kill them and weigh their bodies down with headstones. They evidently gave no reason as to why they had waited eight years to tell this story, and further investigation into the lead produced no new evidence. The unsolved slaying of Olive Bennett went down in English crime history as “The Tombstone Murder.”