Dorothy Mills was thirty-two years old, a government file clerk and avid churchgoer who also happened to be a champion tennis player. She was unmarried and lived in West Bromwich, West Midlands, England with her adoptive parents.
At around six o’clock on the evening of January 21st, 1961, Dorothy told her parents she was going to the movies and set out, but it was the last time they would see her alive.
Dorothy didn’t return home that night, and in fact it would be nearly six p.m. on the following day before she was found by two constables, lying dead beneath part of a broken gate on the grounds of the Wesley Tennis Club, where she often played. She had been beaten savagely in the back of the head with a hammer; an estimated eight blows had broken her skull into thirteen pieces. Because her watch had stopped at eight-forty-five p.m., it was assumed that this was the time of her murder the night before.
Upon autopsy, it was discovered that Dorothy had been three months pregnant, which led police to theorize that the unknown father of her child may have been her killer and that she may have gone to meet him in secret that night. Though this seemed a promising hypothesis, there were no leads to follow in that regard, and despite an extensive investigation, no arrests were ever made.
The brutal murder of Dorothy Mills remains unsolved more than sixty years later.
Crime Immemorial 