It was the evening of October 31st, 1963 in Newcastle upon Tyne. Seventy-year-old Katherine Lillian Armstrong, who usually answered to her middle name, was preparing to go to the nearby Methodist church for choir practice, as she did every Thursday evening. Lillian, a retired headmistress and lifelong spinster, had been a member of the congregation and the choir for more than four decades, and had lived in her rambling old abode, Doncaster House, for even longer than that.
At around half-past six, some passing children evidently saw Lillian looking out the front window of her home. However, an hour later, when her choir practice was due to start, the elderly woman had not arrived, though apparently no one found her absence alarming enough to go to her home to check on her.
The following morning at about ten-thirty, Lillian’s cousin Ada Ridley dropped by Doncaster House for a visit. Ada had been after Lillian for years to move to a smaller flat closer to where she lived; Doncaster House was too big for one person, Ada thought, and its darkened hallways and sunless rooms were terribly depressing. Lillian, though, had never seemed to mind the old pile, and asserted more than once that she had never been afraid of living there by herself.
When Ada arrived, she was immediately struck by the fact that all the curtains were closed. This was strange, as Lillian routinely woke early and opened all the curtains to let in what little light the windows afforded. Apprehensive, Ada knocked at the door, but received no answer. Now certain that something was wrong, she phoned police.
When officers arrived and forced their way in, they were faced with a sickening scene. Lillian Armstrong, clad in a housedress and slippers, lay dead at the foot of the staircase, a nylon stocking tightly knotted around her neck, and her face and head completely covered in blood. In fact, nearly the entire interior of the dreary old house was splattered with blood, and investigators surmised that Lillian must have put up a monumental struggle against whoever had attacked her.
The coroner later determined that despite the nylon stocking found around her throat, Lillian’s death had been caused not by strangling, but by blood loss, stemming from the nearly thirty stab wounds around her head and neck.
Detectives were confounded by the shocking violence of the crime, as well as the lack of clues and possible motive. There had been no forced entry, Lillian had not been sexually assaulted, and nothing appeared to have been stolen from the residence. The investigation turned up no murder weapon, no fingerprints, and no footprints, and the only witnesses to Lillian’s last day on earth were the two children who had allegedly seen her peering out the window at six-thirty the previous evening.
Police began a massive inquiry, going house to house in Newcastle, interviewing thousands of residents, and combing every sewer drain, garbage can, and privacy hedge in the area, searching for the knife that had killed Lillian. Nothing of note was recovered.
The churchgoing former schoolmarm had no known enemies in the world, and seemingly no one who would wish her harm. The only angle investigators could fathom was that perhaps the murder had been committed by one or more perpetrators as a Halloween prank gone appallingly wrong.
Perhaps, they speculated, a gang of teenaged boys had been prowling the neighborhood, had come to the door of Doncaster House pretending to be trick-or-treating, and then attacked the elderly woman in an attempt to frighten her. And maybe, authorities further presumed, Lillian had fought back more viciously than anticipated, at which point the boys had wildly overreacted and killed her. The presence of both stab wounds and strangulation, after all, did suggest more than one assailant.
Alternately, it was hypothesized that the killer might have been a former student of Lillian’s who was taking revenge for perceived wrongs.
Whoever the culprit was, though, he apparently vanished back into the crowded streets of Newcastle on that long-ago Halloween night, and has never been apprehended.
Crime Immemorial 