Crime Immemorial

Only a couple of days after Christmas of 1966, two boys enjoying their school holidays were happily scrounging through some abandoned buildings on Spa Lane in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England. In a derelict warehouse that had once been part of the Scarsdale Brewery, the boys suddenly came upon an appalling sight: the mostly-nude body of a teenaged girl, lying on an empty sack and clad only in black stockings.

The boys hurried back home, and one of them told his father what they had found. After checking for himself that the children were telling the truth, the boy’s father reported the murder to the authorities.

The remains were quickly identified as those of fifteen-year-old Mavis Hudson, who was known as something of a wild child and had spent some time in a children’s home when her widowed mother had a hard time dealing with her shenanigans. Mavis, despite her rebellious nature, had been studying hairdressing at the local college and had plans to eventually open her own salon, a dream that would now, of course, never be realized.

At the post-mortem, the cause of death was found to be suffocation or asphyxiation. Mavis was thought to have been killed at some time between ten p.m. on December 26th and one a.m. on December 27th. There was money found in her nearby handbag, which would seem to preclude robbery as a motive, and though she was found nearly naked, she did not appear to have been raped. Because of the relative remoteness of the area where the body was found, no witnesses emerged who might have seen a suspicious individual or individuals lurking around the desolate site.

Investigators began trying to piece together Mavis’ movements in the hours before her death, but this proved more difficult than anticipated. It did seem that Mavis had been at home with her mother until about seven-thirty that evening, after which they both went to the Sun Inn in the Chesterfield city center, a pub where Mrs. Hudson worked as a barmaid. Evidently, Mavis left the pub at around eight p.m., telling her mother that she was going back to the children’s home.

There were conflicting accounts over where Mavis went next, however. Some later eyewitnesses claimed to have seen the girl at the Queen’s Head Hotel in Chesterfield at around nine-forty-five p.m., but other accounts placed her at an ice skating rink in Sheffield only an hour later. Though it is possible that Mavis had taken a bus from Chesterfield to Sheffield, there was no way she could have taken this journey and been seen in both places at the times reported. Police suspected that some of the witnesses who came forward had mistaken Mavis for someone else, or had misremembered the time they had last seen her. Even more frustratingly, the girl’s movements were completely unaccounted for between eight and nine p.m.

Despite a massive investigation, no solid suspects in the murder of Mavis Hudson were ever discovered, though a few persons of interest were considered. One of these was a local man known only as Bill, who knew Mavis and had been seen with her on more than one occasion. Another possible culprit was Peter Pickering—also a suspect in the murder of Elsie Frost from 1965—who would later be convicted of the rape and murder of Shirley Ann Boldy in 1972. It’s possible, however, that Pickering was in prison at the time that Mavis Hudson was murdered.

Because Mavis’ body showed no evidence of a struggle, it was theorized that she had perhaps willingly gone along with her killer to the warehouse on Spa Lane, which was known around town to be something of a couple’s hangout, as well as an area frequented by prostitutes and their clients. Mavis did have a reputation among her schoolmates for being rather free-spirited and promiscuous, so it remains a possibility that someone she had been dating had killed her. One investigator on the case further hypothesized that Mavis might have been attempting to obtain an abortion—then illegal in England—and had been murdered in the course of this enterprise.

Though family members have been urging authorities to reopen the case and examine the forensic evidence using modern techniques, as of this writing, the case remains at a standstill.