Thirty-year-old Tom Hewitt owned a garage on Bright Street, Bury, Greater Manchester, England, and was only weeks away from marrying his longtime partner Sylvia, with whom he had a son. Sadly, though, he would never get the chance to walk down the aisle.
Tom was working in his garage on September 7th, 1974, when an unknown assailant approached him and beat him over the head with an iron bar. The victim was taken to a hospital in Salford but later died of his injuries.
As police investigated the murder, they uncovered an intriguing lead concerning a possible motive. It turned out that a year prior to the slaying, a man named Mr. Williams—the father of a Greater Manchester police officer named Alan Williams—was involved in a minor car crash. The other driver was Tom Hewitt.
At the time of the collision, said Williams, Hewitt seemed nice enough, and told Williams not to worry about the damage to his automobile, which Williams described as an “old banger.” The two men apparently went their separate ways.
However, a week after the incident, Williams received an invoice from Hewitt, requesting the sum of £45 to pay for the damage to Hewitt’s car.
In a strange twist, though, police looked into the matter, and discovered that Hewitt had actually sold his car and that there had been no damage reported. Tom Hewitt was therefore arrested and charged with attempting to obtain money under false pretenses.
At the trial, which took place only five months before he was murdered, Williams’ son Alan, the police officer, made an offhand comment that he hoped he could sort Hewitt out one day. Thus Alan Williams became a person of interest in the investigation, though again oddly, he wasn’t aware of the suspicions against him until long after he retired from the force in 1989. The elder Williams had been interviewed by detectives at the time of the slaying but had been cleared of any involvement, as Alan Williams would eventually be as well.
The case was reexamined in 2001, along with renewed pleas in the media for more information, but as of this writing in May of 2024, the mysterious murder of Tom Hewitt is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 