Fifty-one-year-old Annie Walsh worked in a factory and lived in a flat on Charles Berry Crescent in Hulme, Greater Manchester, England. By all accounts, she lived a normal and unremarkable life.
But on January 31st, 1977, Annie was found beaten to death in her home. Whoever had killed her had perpetrated an attack so savage that the floors, walls, and ceiling of her flat were splattered with blood. She had been bludgeoned in the head an estimated sixteen times.
Authorities determined that she had likely been dead for two or three days before the discovery of her body, as the last time anyone had seen her alive was on January 28th. It was also suspected that the man who murdered her had come to her door posing as someone reading the electricity meter.
A few months later, in May, police picked up a man who lived in the same block of flats as Annie. His name was Robert Brown, and he was initially arrested for non-payment of a fine. But because he lived near where the murder occurred, investigators began questioning him about that, keeping him in custody for thirty-two hours without letting him contact an attorney, reportedly telling him, “Only guilty men need a lawyer.”
After hours of interrogation that allegedly included coercion and physical beating, Robert Brown signed a confession stating that he had killed Annie Walsh. At trial, he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years to life.
Brown, proclaiming his innocence and reporting that the confession had been forced out of him, filed an appeal in 1978, but it was rejected. A further appeal was filed in 1993 after Brown had spent sixteen years in prison, but this was also denied.
Finally, in 2002, the case was granted a reassessment, at which point it was discovered that much of the evidence given in court at the original trial did not point to Brown’s guilt at all. For example, a bloody pair of jeans alleged to have been worn by Brown during the murder of Annie Walsh were provably not his, a fact that police at the time had known; they belonged, in fact, to a woman who had suffered a miscarriage.
Further, fiber evidence found on Annie’s clothing did not match anything Brown owned, instead matching another suspect who was also questioned about the crime in 1977.
Robert Brown’s conviction was overturned in November 2002 and he was allowed to walk free. He received monetary compensation for his twenty-five-year sentence, though the government eventually demanded £100,000 of it back, making the outrageous claim that it paid for his room and board in prison. The police officers who coerced and purportedly beat the original confession out of him were never prosecuted, though one of the perpetrators, Detective Chief Inspector Jack Butler, was sentenced to four years for accepting bribes and perverting the course of justice in another case.
In 2005, authorities announced that the investigation into the murder of Annie Walsh was being reopened, but as of this writing, there have been no further updates.
Crime Immemorial 