Eighty-six-year-old Una Crown was a retired postmistress whose husband Jack had died in 2009. She lived alone in a bungalow in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England.
She was last seen alive on January 11th, 2013, and also spoke to a friend on the phone the following day at around five in the afternoon. At some point after that, though, a dreadful fate befell her.
On January 13th, Una’s nephew-in-law John Payne dropped by her house and stumbled upon a horrific scene. Una was lying dead in the hallway of her residence, her clothing burned, a puddle of blood and pieces of scorched newspaper surrounding her body.
Even though some items had been stolen from the home, including Una’s wedding ring, her front door key, and £40 in cash, police initially believed her death was a tragic accident. They surmised that a fire must have started in the stove, and Una must have attempted to extinguish the flames with a tea towel, which only made the blaze worse. She then supposedly died of a heart attack. Though Una’s clothing and body were partially burned, the fire had not spread to the rest of the house.
Two days after her remains were found, however, the medical examiner determined that the cause of death was at least two stab wounds in her chest and neck. The fire had likely been set by the killer in order to destroy evidence.
Though authorities were quick to pivot to a murder investigation, they were hampered by the fact that the home had not been treated as a murder scene at the time of discovery, and thus crucial evidence was lost or contaminated.
Despite the setbacks, there were a few leads in the brutal homicide. A few months after the crime, a man named Dainius Stelmokas admitted to police that he had broken into Una Crown’s now-empty home and stolen some electronics on April 4th. After a thorough investigation, detectives determined that the man didn’t appear to have had anything to do with the murder, however.
Likewise, two different men were arrested and questioned in connection with the crime in June of 2014, but both were eventually released without charge.
The case went cold shortly afterward, but a decade later, in January of 2023, a forty-seven-year-old woman named Eliza Bibby was murdered in Wisbech in a manner very similar to Una Crown’s death. In this case, though, the perpetrator was subsequently arrested: he was forty-seven-year-old Jamie Boughen, and he was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Whether Boughen was also responsible for the murder of Una Crown ten years earlier is not known, and therefore her slaying remains unsolved as of July 2024.
Crime Immemorial 