It was Wednesday, April 2nd, 1969. Seventy-six-year-old Annie Walker had been at her bank in the village of Coalville that day, withdrawing the sum of one-thousand pounds. As she headed back toward her home in nearby Heather, Leicestershire, England, it seems that someone was following her.
The next day, the body of Annie Walker was discovered in the front room of her house. The cash she had withdrawn from the bank was missing, as were three of her handbags. Annie was still clad in her pajamas, and had been smashed in the head with an unknown blunt object.
Because Annie Walker had once run a pub, and since the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street also featured a pub landlady named Annie Walker, the crime was inevitably nicknamed, “The Coronation Street Murder” by the press. Though police were quite sure that Annie had been murdered by a random perpetrator who had trailed her home from the bank, leads were otherwise unforthcoming, and the case went cold within weeks.
In 2005, investigators reopened the inquiry, hoping that isolating a DNA profile from some bloodstains found at the scene would help to finally track down the killer. However, as of this writing, no progress has been made, and the cold-blooded robbery and murder of Annie Walker remains unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 