On June 7th, 1958, sixty-one-year-old credit draper Harry Baker was due to visit a house at a little past one p.m. It was a Friday, and he had a specific route he followed every week to collect payments from families who had bought textiles or drapery on credit.
He never made his one-ten appointment, though he was spotted at quarter to two in the afternoon, talking to an unknown man at a bus stop on Strand Road, Bootle, Sefton, Merseyside, England. It was the last time he was seen alive.
Seventeen days later, his body was found, wrapped in two bags, in a flower bed off the A50 near Knutsford, Cheshire. He had been severely beaten and strangled to death. He had also been robbed; officers were able to ascertain that the perpetrator had stolen two watches, a fountain pen, and twenty-five pounds in cash (nearly six hundred pounds in 2023 money, or seven hundred fifty US dollars).
Though police mounted one of the largest manhunts in Merseyside history, interviewing more than twenty thousand people, no leads emerged that would get investigators any closer to catching the person who had killed Harry Baker. It was suspected that the murderer had perhaps fled the country, and though authorities scoured through departures from the UK and checked for clues overseas, no information was gleaned there either.
The mysterious and seemingly random robbery and murder of Harry Baker remains tragically unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 