Eighty-year-old Emily Pye owned a grocery store on Gibbet Street, Halifax, West Yorkshire, England, and she’d been running it for thirty years. She was a long-established fixture in the community and well-loved by the locals.
Saturday, June 8th, 1957 was a public holiday, and the store had been open as normal. Emily had plans later that afternoon to go out with her niece and her niece’s husband. But when the pair arrived at the shop to collect Emily, they found the door locked tight and no answer to their knocks. Concerned, they tracked down a nearby police officer and asked him to force his way through the door.
Once inside, the family’s worst fears were realized: Emily Pye lay dead on the floor of the living quarters at the back of her shop. She had been severely beaten, then bludgeoned in the head with what was probably a fireplace poker.
A small amount of money had been stolen from the till, leading authorities to conclude that the motive had been robbery. They also theorized that the attacker had locked the front door after the crime, and then exited the store through the side door.
One local witness claimed that they had seen Emily alive at approximately twelve-twenty p.m., but no one saw her or the killer afterward, as a bad storm hit and drove everyone inside. The coroner estimated that the victim had been murdered between noon and three p.m.
A single fingerprint, presumably belonging to the assailant, was recovered from the scene but was never matched with a suspect.
Despite a massive investigation, no one was ever charged with the crime, and the case very quickly went cold.
Then, in 1988, an anonymous man phoned the offices of the Halifax Evening Courier, claiming that his father had confessed to the murder on his deathbed. The caller declined to give his father’s name, however, because the caller’s mother was still alive and didn’t know anything about the crime. Police encouraged the unidentified man to give them more information, but he refused, and that lead ultimately came to nothing.
More than sixty years later, the mystery of who killed the elderly grocer is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 