Fifty-eight-year-old widow Margaret Greenwood suffered from polio, and lived alone in a house in Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear, England. On Bonfire Night—November 5th, 1985—it’s believed that two young men came to her door pretending to be collecting money for the celebration, a tradition known as “a penny for the Guy.”
However, these individuals then proceeded to force their way in, where they clubbed and stabbed the victim to death.
About a year after the murder, a mentally challenged twenty-two-year-old man named Ashley King was arrested for the crime, along with his friend Billy Waugh, who was only eleven years old at the time of the incident. Under questioning, King had confessed to beating Margaret Greenwood over the head, and also told police that Billy had been the one who stabbed her. Both King and Waugh were convicted.
In 1987, though, Billy Waugh’s conviction was ruled unsafe, and he was released at the age of thirteen. It took much longer for Ashley King, who was freed in 1999 after it was determined that his intellectual shortcomings and suggestibility spurred him to confess to a crime he likely didn’t commit.
Since the release of the two initial suspects, there have been no further updates in the tragic case, and the murder of Margaret Greenwood is still unsolved nearly forty years later.
Crime Immemorial 