Beatrice Wilson was a seventy-four-year-old widow and retired lunch lady who lived alone in a flat in Poole, Dorset, England. On the evening of July 21st, 2000, she was asleep in her home when someone evidently climbed through her window, likely intent on robbery.
The following day, which was a Saturday, Beatrice’s son-in-law and grandson entered the flat and found the bedroom walls splattered with blood, and the elderly woman dead in her bed. She had been viciously stabbed seven times in the chest, throat, and brain; she had died of shock and blood loss. She also had numerous injuries on her arms and legs that suggested she’d desperately fought her attacker.
Not long after the brutal crime, police arrested a fifteen-year-old boy on suspicion of the murder. The boy allegedly confessed the crime to a friend the next day and told his friend to keep his involvement secret. However, the friend eventually reported the confession to the authorities.
At the boy’s trial in April of 2002, the prosecution laid out a hypothetical series of events, stating that the boy, by his own admission, had been wandering around the area the night of July 21st, looking for a bike to steal. Then, according to prosecutors, he had spotted Beatrice Wilson sleeping through her flat window and had climbed in to rob her. In the course of the robbery, though, the woman had awakened and seen him, so the boy fetched a seven-inch knife from the kitchen and began stabbing her before fleeing the scene. Witnesses did report seeing a teenager fitting the boy’s description running down a nearby road at around eleven p.m. on the night of the murder.
The prosecution further declared that the boy had tried to wash off his bloody shirt in a nearby lake, then had returned to the flat to retrieve the knife that he had left in the victim’s body. After hearing shouting, though, he allegedly ran from the scene again, leaving behind a musical jewelry box that had belonged to Beatrice Wilson. He then, according to the prosecution’s scenario, discarded the knife blade down a drain and dumped the knife handle and bloody shirt in a green box on a stretch of waste ground.
Evidence presented at the trial included the aforementioned knife handle and shirt, which were discovered months after the crime by someone walking their dog, and the knife blade, which was found in a drain that the suspect’s friend led them to. The prosecution also argued that black fibers recovered from Beatrice Wilson’s left hand and bedroom curtains matched a pair of the boy’s tracksuit pants.
The boy pleaded not guilty to the charges. He admitted being around Beatrice’s building on the night of the slaying, and of planning the theft of a bicycle. He even conceded he’d confessed the murder to his friends but said he only did so as a joke after they teased him about it. He denied entering Beatrice’s flat and denied killing her, stating that he wasn’t capable of that level of violence. He said that he’d actually been unsuccessful in the night’s planned thievery and had headed home empty-handed shortly after eleven p.m.
Despite circumstantial and forensic evidence, the jury felt the case against the boy was not compelling enough for a conviction, and he was found not guilty on the last day of April 2002. His release meant that the murder of Beatrice Wilson officially reverted to unsolved status, where it remains to this day.
Crime Immemorial 