Eighty-nine-year-old May Richards had lived alone in her residence on Sportside Avenue, Salford, Greater Manchester since the death of her husband and son. Her neighbors described her as a quiet woman who kept to herself, but quite friendly, and fond of a stray cat named Susie that roamed the area.
On Thursday, April 30th, 1987, friends phoned police to do a welfare check on May, as no one had seen or heard from her for several days. Inside the home, officers discovered the elderly woman dead, tied to a chair behind the front door. She had evidently perished of a heart attack during the course of a home invasion.
There was no sign or forced entry, and though the rooms did look partially ransacked, it was not clear whether anything had been stolen.
Authorities had few clues as to who would have done such a thing to such a well-liked, harmless woman. The only lead they had was the witness description of a middle-aged woman with dark, shoulder-length hair and a head scarf who had been selling trinkets door to door in the area. Neighbors thought they had seen this woman on May Richards’s doorstep nine days before May was found dead, between ten and eleven-thirty in the morning. The mysterious woman has never been found.
The case remains open and unsolved as of August 2024.
Crime Immemorial 