Seventy-four-year-old Annie O’Donnell was a quiet, staunchly Catholic woman who was originally from Ireland. She ran a religious bookstore in Clerkenwell, London, and was a regular church attendee but largely kept to herself.
On October 12th, 1962, she was found murdered in the shop. She had been beaten to death, possibly with a fireplace poker or a tire iron, and the shop had been ransacked. Authorities determined that the £599 in cash she kept sewn into her skirt had been stolen, as had several documents from the store, and £5 out of the till. The £5 and the documents were found scattered on the road outside, presumably dropped as the killer fled.
A set of fingerprints found in the store matched a nineteen-year-old butcher named Robert Reed, who also matched a description of the attacker given by a witness. Reed claimed he was at home with his family at the time of the murder, a claim which his family verified, but Reed was arrested and tried regardless in February 1963.
The jury couldn’t agree on a verdict, so Reed was placed on trial a second time a month later. Again, the jury failed to come to a decision, so Reed was arraigned a third time only days later. This time, however, the Crown offered no evidence, and the jury acquitted him once and for all.
Only months after his acquittal, Reed assaulted a woman during the course of a robbery in Westminster. He was convicted of this crime in late May of 1963.
Whether Robert Reed was the killer or not may never be known, but since his acquittal, there has been no further progress on the case, and the murder of Annie O’Donnell remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 