Seventy-year-old Glenda Chambers lived in a maisonette on Onley Road in Walworth, London, England. She had two grown daughters.
In 1996, Glenda’s older daughter began dating a Ugandan taxi driver whom she met at church. She was keen to get married, but her boyfriend was not, and eventually the couple broke up over it. Tempers flared when the man then began dating Glenda’s other daughter, who was four years younger than her sister.
Eventually, that couple also called it quits, and reportedly there was bad blood between the man, Glenda, and the sisters over the soured relationships.
On December 14th, 2001, a fire was deliberately set at Glenda’s home. One of Glenda’s daughters and her nephew were both in the house at the time, but managed to escape by jumping off a balcony. Glenda herself, however, was trapped inside.
When the fire brigade arrived, they extinguished the flames, and Glenda was transported to the hospital, where she languished for a week before dying from severe burns and smoke inhalation.
The Ugandan taxi driver was picked up for questioning after investigators discovered his history with the Chambers family. He had actually returned to Uganda the day after the fire, but had come back a month later and was arrested at Heathrow Airport.
The suspect insisted that he had been driving a fare from London to a village in Bedford at the time of the blaze, but when pressed, he could not remember the name of the village, since he claimed he had never been there before and it had taken far longer to get there than he had anticipated.
Although his story seemed suspicious, there was very little solid evidence against him, and though he did stand trial, he was acquitted of the crime.
The arson murder of Glenda Chambers, then, stands as officially unsolved as of May 2025.
Crime Immemorial 