Forty-one-year-old Lily Volpert owned a clothing store on Bute Street in the docklands area of Cardiff, Wales. According to the media, she was also an “unofficial moneylender.” On the evening of March 6th, 1952, Lily had just closed the shop and was preparing to have dinner in the back of the store with her mother and sister when she heard the doorbell ring. There was a man standing outside, and Lily went to talk to him. Minutes later, she was seen talking to a different man behind the shop.
Not long afterward, Lily was found dead of a cut throat on the floor of her establishment. The murder weapon appeared to be a razor or a very sharp knife. Robbery was thought to be the motive, as approximately £100 was missing from the store.
Nine days after the murder, a twenty-nine-year-old seaman named Mahmood Mattan was arrested for the crime. Mattan was originally from Somalia, but ended up marrying a Welsh woman named Laura Williams and settling in the Rhondda Valley; Butetown residents in the 1950s very obviously did not approve of the interracial relationship.
Mattan was one of several men who lived in the area and were questioned for the crime; police searched his lodgings, but found nothing suspicious. Further, Lily Volpert’s sister, mother, and niece, who had seen the man or men Lily had been talking to shortly before she was killed, did not identify him when they were brought in for a lineup.
Reportedly, police told Mattan that he would hang for the crime “whether he did it or not,” and described him in court as “half child of nature, half semi-civilized savage,” mainly because he didn’t have an interpreter.
It was discovered later that there had been some shady business with one of the prosecution witnesses named Mary Tolley, who initially said she knew Mattan by sight but had not seen him around the shop at the time of the crime. After an intense grilling by police, however, she claimed she had seen him, even though the friend she was with, Margaret Bush, stuck to her initial story about not seeing him. Mary Tolley’s identification was the only direct evidence presented at trial that Mattan was guilty.
Only five months after Lily Volpert was slain, Mahmood Mattan went to the gallows for the murder, despite no solid evidence linking him to the crime. His family began a long and frustrating campaign of trying to clear his name, only succeeding forty-five years later, in 1998, when his conviction was reassessed and subsequently overturned.
Mahmood Mattan is considered the last innocent person executed in Wales, and Lily Volpert’s murder remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 