It was shortly before midnight on Saturday, April 8th, 1961 when several passersby witnessed twenty-two-year-old Irish laborer Patrick Mulligan staggering along the road near Worcester Cathedral in Sidbury, Worcester, England. At first, they thought the man was just drunk, but then he collapsed onto the sidewalk, and they noticed a large quantity of blood streaming from a stab wound in his chest. Emergency services rushed to the scene, but the victim died in the hospital without regaining consciousness.
By following the trail of blood, investigators were able to trace back to the site of the assault on the young man: a block of public toilets on Bath Road. Authorities hypothesized that Patrick had perhaps been involved in an altercation inside the restrooms.
Witnesses came forward to describe the probable attacker, a homeless man who appeared around fifty years old and stood approximately six feet tall. A plaid pillow found in the toilet block was also believed to belong to him.
On the Monday following the slaying, three workmen from Birmingham were taken into custody and charged with the murder, but the public prosecutor decided not to proceed with the charges, and the men were simply fined £50 each for assaulting a different man on the night of the crime and then released.
A police sketch of the suspect seen near the public toilets was aired on national television and ran in all major newspapers. A month went by with no progress on the case, but then, on May 10th, a man named Clifford Newsham was arrested in London for vagrancy. Because he resembled the identikit sketch and was also homeless, Worcester police arrested him for the murder of Patrick Mulligan.
Clifford Newsham insisted that he had never been to Worcester in his life, and his defense attorney also argued that the accused was significantly shorter and twelve years younger than the suspect witnesses had described at the scene. Although two witnesses positively identified Clifford as the man loitering near the toilets from a photograph of him published in the papers, detectives found no forensic evidence at all tying him to the crime.
Clifford Newsham was arraigned for the homicide, but after a senior officer testified that he had seen the accused at a train station in a completely different city at the time of Patrick Mulligan’s murder, the case fell apart, and the judge withdrew it before it went to the jury. Clifford Newsham was released, and the murder of Patrick Mulligan remains unsolved more than sixty years later.
Crime Immemorial 