Clara Kirton was a widowed mother of four who was only a few days short of her eighty-sixth birthday. She lived alone in a ground-floor flat on Great Suffolk Street in Southwark, Central London, and though she suffered from diabetes and the early stages of dementia and rarely went out, she had family members and a home care nurse who would come by every day to look after her.
At ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday, November 16th, 1985, her son Brian and her daughter Joyce dropped by to check on her and bring her a casserole. Sometime after they left, a terrible fate befell the frail old woman.
The following morning at around eight a.m., Brian returned for another visit. When he let himself into the flat, however, he stumbled across an unimaginable horror.
His mother lay dead in the lounge of her home. Clara Kirton had been so badly beaten that her face was mutilated, and her throat had been deeply slashed with a broken beer bottle that was discovered at the scene.
The residence had clearly been ransacked, though it’s believed the only item the killer took was a red handbag with a small amount of cash in it. Clara had also kept about £700 hidden in the flat, but this was untouched.
There was no sign of forced entry, likely because Clara was in the habit of leaving the key in the door so her relatives and nurses could enter freely. A post-mortem estimated that the victim had likely been killed between four and six p.m. on the Saturday.
Authorities attempted to trace the origin of the beer bottle, a brand only sold at pubs, but were ultimately unsuccessful. A handful of arrests were made, but none of these resulted in any charges.
A new appeal for information was made in 2017, at which time a reward of £20,000 was also announced, but as of this writing in October of 2024, the savage murder of Clara Kirton is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 