Florence Lewis was a seventy-seven-year-old widow who lived alone in a bungalow on Cambridge Road in Wigmore, Kent, England. Neighbors described her as pleasant and friendly, a woman who largely kept to herself. But on Saturday, April 17th, 1965, the day before Easter, someone with ill intent apparently came knocking at Florence’s door.
At around noon on Monday, an insurance agent came calling and discovered the bloody, lifeless body of Florence Lewis, slumped in an armchair in her front room. She had been beaten to death with a heavy, blunt object, later determined to be a hammer or a fireplace poker. A post-mortem examination discovered at least fourteen savage blows to the woman’s head.
Because there was no sign of forced entry, it was assumed that the killer or killers had talked their way into the widow’s home before going into a murderous frenzy. The perpetrators may have believed that Florence had a large sum of money stashed in her residence somewhere, though it was unclear if anything of value was stolen.
During the investigation, witnesses reported that they had seen two individuals, a man and a woman, separately knocking on Florence’s door a short time apart. These same witnesses also claimed to have seen a small gray van they didn’t recognize in the area. This all occurred, they said, at approximately eight-thirty p.m.
Several other witnesses, though, stated they saw Florence being driven around in a car on Sunday afternoon, which according to the coroner was after her estimated time of death.
Whatever the case, detectives threw everything they had into the investigation, questioning and fingerprinting thousands of people, scouring the area for the murder weapon, and making national pleas for information in the newspapers and on television. In spite of their efforts, however, the inquiry sadly went nowhere, and the brutal beating death of Florence Lewis remains unsolved nearly sixty years later.
Crime Immemorial 