Fifty-two-year-old welfare worker Beryl Culverwell lived with her husband Anthony in a house called Woodholme in the Widcombe Hill area of Bath, England.
At around six p.m. on the evening of January 13th, 1978, Anthony came home from work as usual. At first, nothing seemed amiss; Beryl’s Renault was parked where it always was, and the residence looked undisturbed.
When Anthony went into the house and called out for his wife, though, he got no response, and he became alarmed when he went into the kitchen and saw the grocery shopping strewn haphazardly across the table, and food burning in the oven.
Panicked, Anthony searched the entire house but saw no sign of Beryl. Finally, he went into the garage, and to his horror found his wife lying dead in a pool of blood. She had been bound with twine and beaten in the head repeatedly with a blunt object before being stabbed more than twenty times. The bread knife used to kill her was found alongside her body, as was her sheepskin coat.
When detectives arrived, they also discovered that the killer had taken a pair of secateurs from the garage and used them to cut the phone lines before leaving them in the hallway.
The house itself bore no sign of ransacking, and nothing appeared to have been stolen. Further, an autopsy determined that Beryl had not been sexually assaulted. Police were therefore baffled as to the motive for the savage crime.
The investigation was hampered from the beginning by the lack of any fingerprint evidence at the scene, and the fact that none of the neighbors had heard anything unusual at the time of the murder. One witness claimed to have seen a yellow Volkswagen Beetle driving quickly away from the house, but this vehicle was never traced.
The case was featured on Crimewatch in 2003 and remains open, but as of this writing in May of 2024, Beryl Culverwell’s brutal murder is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 