Eighty-three-year-old Warren Wheeler had spent twenty-seven years as a stoker in the Royal Navy, and later worked as a postman. He lived with his seventy-nine-year-old wife Elizabeth in a house called Yatscombe Cottage in Boars Hill, Oxfordshire, England. The couple had lived in the home for nearly three decades, but it had fallen to rack and ruin and had recently been condemned. It had no running water and no electricity.
On October 9th, 1973, the Wheelers’ neighbor Lily Berry became concerned when she noticed that neither Warren nor Elizabeth had brought in the milk delivery or the newspapers that lay outside the front door. When police arrived in response to her call, they found that a tragedy had indeed occurred: the Wheelers were both dead inside their residence.
Both victims had been brutally beaten in the head and face with an unknown weapon. It was an assault so severe that one investigating officer claimed he had “never seen a more savage attack,” claiming it was the worst he had witnessed in twenty-seven years.
From a forensic examination, it seemed clear that Warren had died nearly twelve hours before Elizabeth, suggesting that the woman had watched her husband be battered to death.
Robbery was initially suspected as the motive, even though £300 in cash was discovered in the house untouched.
A massive inquiry was undertaken, but it wasn’t until January of 1974 that authorities got what they thought was their big break: a thirty-four-year-old chef named Kenneth Nairn confessed to the crime. He was placed on trial that July, but it took the judge less than a week to suspect that Nairn had simply made up the story of his involvement, possibly for attention. He was subsequently released.
Since then, there have been no further updates, though a new plea for information was released in October of 2023, on the fiftieth anniversary of the crime.
Crime Immemorial 