Crime Immemorial

Susan Southgate was born in the very house where she would meet her end: The Mill House on Writtle Road just a stone’s throw from the bustling city of Chelmsford in Essex, England. She was the last of a long line of millers who had tended the grinding wheels of the River Wid since the early nineteenth century. The Tudor-era cottage, a Grade II listed gem built around 1810 with ten cozy rooms, stood sentinel beside a now-silent watermill that had ceased operations just a year prior in 1957. For nearly three decades, Susan had lived alone there, known affectionately by the locals as Miss Susie.

Weakened by age and confined indoors for a full year, she hobbled on a stick but never lost her zest for life. An avid animal lover, her garden teemed with six cats that roamed freely and two geese that honked greetings to visitors. She baked bread twice weekly in her flag-stoned kitchen, paid for everything in cash, and drew a modest private income from local properties. She was known to keep valuables in her home: £1,300 in bank notes, as well as silverware and sovereigns hidden in a table lamp base, and £320 in a strongbox. Despite this, the back door of her home was always ajar, a testament to her open-hearted nature.

Thursday, April 17th, 1958, dawned unremarkable in Writtle. By evening, eighty-three-year-old Susan was winding down. At around nine fifteen p.m., her neighbor popped in to prepare her bed, tucking hot-water bottles beneath the sheets, laying out her nightie on an electric warming pan, and chatting about family. The neighbor glimpsed a shadow on the side path but dismissed it upon checking. Susan, ever the gracious host, waved her off as she prepared for slumber.

It was the last time anyone saw her alive.

Between nine fifteen and nine thirty p.m., a 1952 black Humber saloon car idled ominously 150 yards from The Mill House, its two male occupants shrouded in the gathering dusk. Earlier that evening, around seven thirty p.m., a “dark stranger” had slunk into the Cock and Bell public house—a swarthy, Gypsy-like figure with nicotine-stained fingers, eavesdropping on local chatter before vanishing by eight p.m. He had been spotted in the village all week, asking probing questions.

Sometime after nine fifteen p.m., the intruders slipped through the unlocked back door of The Mill House. What they sought remains unclear; perhaps rumors of Susan’s hidden wealth drew them like moths to a flame. The house was ransacked: drawers upended, trunks rifled. But in their frenzy, they were interrupted. Susan, roused from her routine, confronted them. In a panic, the men bound her to her beloved old family heirloom chair and attempted to haul it (and her) up the narrow stairs to continue their search undisturbed.

Tragedy struck at the turn: the chair jammed fast. Desperate to silence her, they crammed a duster into her mouth and sealed it with black insulation tape wound tightly around her head. Left to suffocate in the dim stairwell, Susan fought briefly; a red alarm clock, its back missing, suggested she may have hurled it in defiance. By the time her muffled struggles ceased, the burglars had fled, empty-handed despite the fortune in plain sight. No forced entry marred the scene; only a new cold chisel (11¾ inches, marked “Footprint, England”) and two reels of the telltale tape betrayed their presence.

Around ten forty-five p.m., witnesses spotted a dark-colored car tearing through the village toward Ongar and the Epping London Road.

Just before midnight, as the clock ticked into April 18th, a chilling 999 call came in to Scotland Yard. From a public phone box at the corner of Gascoigne Road and Bifrons Street in Barking, Essex, a calm but urgent male voice delivered a cryptic message: “You had better get this down right the first time. I am not going to repeat it. We have broken into an old house, a millhouse, near Chelmsford. We have left an old lady tied up. You had better go and release her.”

The line went dead. Alerted, Essex police scrambled, but in the pre-digital haze of 1958, tracing “millhouses near Chelmsford” proved vague. They checked several sites but overlooked The Mill House until one thirty a.m. Bursting in, officers found they’d arrived too late: Susan was slumped halfway up the stairs, the chair wedged immovably, her face a mask of terror. She had asphyxiated from the gag obstructing her airways, her body cold for hours. The cats mewed plaintively amid the chaos; the geese honked in the overgrown garden.

The investigation sprang into action. Chief Constable J.W. Hurrell dubbed it a “diabolical crime,” vowing to leave “no stone unturned.” Police theorized at least two perpetrators: a brutal “gangster type” who bound and gagged her, and a “nervous, compassionate thief” haunted by remorse—the likely caller. They possessed local knowledge of her wealth and a getaway car, possibly the Humber or a faded green Standard Vanguard with side scratches.

Door-to-door inquiries engulfed Writtle: over 1,000 villagers were grilled on alibis between nine fifteen p.m. and midnight, as well as on suspicious vehicles, or strangers. The 999 box was dusted for prints. Photos of the tape and tool blanketed newspapers.

A few suspects captured police attention, including the duo from the Humber, the pub’s “dark stranger,” and a thirty-five-year-old man in a herringbone raincoat and gloves, with greasy black hair, who had been quizzing locals days prior with two younger men in their early twenties.

Whispers linked the murder to other crimes: the strangling of Muriel Maitland in 1957 or Joyce Green in August 1958. Even a Broadmoor inmate was questioned in November. Yet, leads evaporated. Susan’s £13,299 estate passed to relatives, her four-poster bed and home to a niece who inherited the cats and geese too.

Nearly seven decades later, Susan Southgate’s murder remains a frustrating mystery.