Crime Immemorial

Emmy Werner was certainly no stranger to tragedy. Though she had lived a pleasant life with her husband Albert, a dentist, and their daughter Hedy in Brno, Czechoslovakia, all that changed in 1939, with the German occupation.

Three years later, she and her family were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague, and two years after that, Albert was sent to Auschwitz, then Kaufering, where he was killed in early 1945. Emmy and her then-seventeen-year-old daughter were liberated by the Allies in May 1945 and eventually moved to the Finchley area of London in the autumn of 1946.

Unsurprisingly, Emmy’s mental health suffered because of her horrific experiences, and after a time, she sought counseling and moved into a residential care home. She still maintained an active and independent social life, however, and made a habit of visiting her sister in another part of London, normally staying at the Queens Hotel in Bayswater.

On Saturday, September 16th, 1972, sixty-eight-year-old Emmy had been doing exactly that, staying at her usual hotel. That evening, she had been out with two friends, seeing a play at the Vaudeville Theatre on The Strand, and after it was over, she headed back to the Queens alone and settled into her room for the night.

Some hours later, it was surmised, an unknown assailant broke into her room while she was sleeping, possibly with the intent to rob her. The following morning, a maid discovered Emmy’s lifeless body in her bed; she had been strangled to death.

Only a few weeks after the heinous crime, a sixteen-year-old boy was arrested and charged with the murder, but at his February 1973 trial, he was acquitted by the jury. No other arrests were made.

In 2017, authorities launched a new appeal for information in the decades-old case, asking that anyone who had stayed or worked at the Queens Hotel during the critical time come forward and aid the investigation if possible.

There have been no further updates as of this writing, and the tragic slaying of Emmy Werner, who survived a Nazi concentration camp only to be murdered in a botched robbery in a London hotel, remains unsolved.