Crime Immemorial

It was May, and Anne Dunwell had been staying with her aunt in Bramley, South Yorkshire, but only a few days into her visit, she decided to go back to her home in Whiston, where she lived with her grandparents. Reportedly, she had been meaning to stay with her aunt for several more days, but then discovered that her grandfather was going to be working the night shift on May 6th, 1964. Anne decided to go back home to keep her grandmother company in his overnight absence.

At a little past nine p.m. on that Wednesday night, thirteen-year-old Anne began heading toward the bus stop across from the Ball Inn to catch the 9:29 bus that would take her back to Whiston. Sadly, Anne never boarded the bus, and she never arrived back home.

At around seven-thirty on the following morning, a truck driver on his way to work spotted what he believed to be a mannequin lying across a pile of manure. Not thinking all that much of it, he went on to his job, but upon telling his brother-in-law about the “mannequin,” the two men thought the situation somewhat odd, and decided to go back and have a look.

Upon returning to the site, the men were horrified to find that they were actually staring at the naked, dead body of a young girl. She had clearly been raped and beaten, and had been strangled with her own stockings, though no other articles of clothing were found with the remains. The body was quickly identified as that of thirteen-year-old Anne Dunwell.

An enormous police investigation ensued. It was soon established that no one matching Anne’s description had been seen on the 9:29 bus to Whiston on the night in question, though a handful of witnesses had seen the girl waiting at the stop prior to the bus’s arrival. This led police to theorize that Anne had been forcibly taken from the stop by a motorist, or had alternately missed her bus, began walking toward home, and then accepted a lift from a passing vehicle. Since Anne’s grandparents insisted that she would not get into a car with a stranger, investigators hypothesized that her killer might have been someone she knew.

Less than a week after Anne’s murder, a search of the nearby Ulley Reservoir turned up several of Anne’s personal belongings and articles of clothing, including her new blue coat and the wicker basket she had been carrying on the night she died. The coat bore traces of dust or coal slag, leading investigators to speculate that she had been raped and killed in the back of a work van, and then later dumped on the manure pile. The killer had then presumably discarded Anne’s clothing in the reservoir, which was six miles away from where the body had been discovered.

More witnesses also came forward in the following days. One couple who had been parked in the area near the bus stop reported that they had seen a young, dark-haired man in a blue van at around eleven p.m., that there had been a girl in the vehicle with him, and that the pair of them appeared to be struggling.

It also came to light that six days prior to Anne’s murder, another teenaged girl in Yorkshire asserted that a man had offered her ten shillings to get into his car with him, an offer she vehemently refused. She described this man as being about five-foot-six-inches tall, with dark brown hair and a pockmarked complexion. She also said that he was in his mid-twenties and drove a gray or blue van. Several other teenaged girls in the area also came forward and said that a man fitting this description had offered them rides as well. Police put together a sketch of this suspect, who they called “Pete,” but the identity of the man was never established.

The possibility was later put forth that Peter Pickering—otherwise known as “The Beast of Wombwell,” who would be convicted in 1972 of the rape and murder of Shirley Ann Boldy, and would likewise be a person of interest in both the 1965 murder of Elsie Frost and the 1966 murder of Mavis Hudson—could have been the elusive “Pete” that witnesses had described. Peter Pickering did somewhat resemble the sketch released by the police, and he was known to drive a van similar to the one that had been reported in the area on the night of Anne’s death.

Another mysterious suspect in the killing was an unknown Scottish man, also in his mid-twenties, with reddish hair, a somewhat slight build, and several distinctive pieces of jewelry and accessories, including a pair of shiny cufflinks, a ring with a blue stone, and a silver cigarette case. This individual had been seen at the Ball Inn on several occasions prior to Anne’s murder, and was thought to drive a blue, gray, or green van. Significantly, a girl who had seen Anne on the night of her death reported that Anne had been walking toward a blue or gray van parked near the inn, and that the driver had been wearing shiny cuff links. Further, some witnesses claimed that they had seen a similar van on the night of the murder parked only a few hundred yards from where Anne’s body was later found.

Despite a massive manhunt for the perpetrator who had raped and killed Anne Dunwell, the case went nowhere, and no compelling suspects were ever identified. The investigation was reopened in 2002, after which police were able to extract the killer’s DNA profile from semen that had been left in the knots of the stockings that had been used to strangle Anne.

Though this profile demonstrated that the murderer had probably suffered from gonorrhea, no matches of the DNA have been found as of this writing, and in fact, the forensic evidence seemed to all but eliminate the possibility that serial sex offender and murderer Peter Pickering was the culprit, who in any case was most likely behind bars when Anne was killed. Pickering died in prison in 2018, at the age of eighty.

The murder of Anne Dunwell remains the oldest unsolved case in South Yorkshire.