Sixty-three-year-old Frederick Dunkley was a maintenance engineer, and his fifty-nine-year-old wife Miriam was a receptionist at a doctor’s office. The couple lived a comfortable life in their house on Clifford Road in Wembley, Middlesex, England.
At around twenty minutes past five on the evening of January 23rd, 1989, the pair arrived home and began to prepare for dinner, setting the table and putting out plates of salad. At some point shortly after this, however, a horrible fate befell them both.
Just before six p.m., a neighbor heard an explosion and looked out the window to see the garage of the Dunkleys’ house ablaze. When police and firefighters arrived, they found Frederick and Miriam dead in the garage, but not from the fire; they’d been beaten to death with a hammer, and their killer had then set the fire to destroy evidence.
There was no sign of forced entry into the residence, and nothing of value was stolen, leading authorities to conclude that the murderer was perhaps someone the Dunkleys knew.
To this end, the couple’s thirty-six-year-old son was summarily arrested. The son had been a school teacher but was unemployed at the time of the slaying. Investigators theorized that the son had been trying to get his hands on his parents’ £250,000 estate, which in their will was slated to go to his own then-eight-year-old son (i.e. the Dunkleys’ grandson).
The son was put on trial at the Old Bailey, but the case against him quickly fell apart. No trace of blood or accelerant was found on any of his clothing, in his car, or in his home, and what’s more, the timing of the murder would have made it almost impossible for him to have killed his parents. He had been at his mother-in-law’s house at around five-forty-five p.m., which was a fifteen-minute drive from the Dunkleys, and according to the fire investigator, the fire had been started no earlier than five-fifty p.m., which meant it had been burning for less than ten minutes before it was spotted by the neighbor at five-fifty-nine. The Dunkleys’ son was acquitted.
Though the culprit was still presumably running around loose, the police stated they had no intention of reopening the investigation, and closed the case after the trial ended. The grisly slaughter of the Dunkleys, then, remains unsolved and is unlikely to see any resolution in the foreseeable future.
Crime Immemorial 