Just as March of 1970 gave way to April, there would be a brutal child murder in England with very little in the way of motive or suspects.
Eleven-year-old Philip Green had been hanging out with friends at a field near his home in Bristol on the morning of Tuesday, March 31st. After lunch, he told them he was going down to the golf course in Shirehampton, which he often did. He was in the habit of searching for lost golf balls, cleaning them, and then selling them back to the golfers for pocket change.
On this particular day, he’d had quite a decent take; he came home that afternoon for tea and showed his mother Gladys the two shillings he had earned. He then told her that he was heading back out again, and left the house at approximately quarter to seven that evening. Gladys subsequently went out herself, to play bingo.
When Philip’s father Ivor returned from work later that night, he was apparently not alarmed by his son’s absence, assuming that Philip was with his mother. However, when Gladys arrived home shortly before nine-thirty without the boy, both parents began to panic, particularly as the night was a bitterly cold one. The Greens called police and organized neighborhood families to begin a search.
On the following day, April 1st, police dogs came across the body of Philip Green lying on a bed of leaves at the bottom of a ditch on the Shirehampton golf course. He had been strangled, and bludgeoned with an oak branch, which was found broken and spattered with blood only a few feet from the remains. He had been neither raped nor robbed.
Police in Bristol were soon joined by investigators from Scotland Yard, who undertook a far-reaching inquiry in the hopes of finding the child’s killer. Though one witness did report that he had seen a shabbily-dressed man with black, greasy hair climbing over the wall that divided the golf course from Shirehampton Road at around eight-fifteen p.m., this individual was never able to be identified.
Even more frustratingly, it seemed that no one at all could remember seeing Philip Green between the time he left his home and the time he was discovered dead eighteen hours later, even though he likely would have passed along the busy Shirehampton Road on his way to the golf course. And authorities had even less of an idea why someone would batter the eleven-year-old to death for what appeared to be no reason whatsoever.
Despite the efforts of police and locals, who raised over a thousand pounds (equivalent to approximately twenty-four-thousand dollars in 2023 U.S. currency) for information leading to a conviction, the case went cold and has remained unsolved for more than half a century.
Crime Immemorial 