Seventy-nine-year-old Edna Waller lived in a modest home on Bramwell Gardens in Netherthorpe, a neighborhood on the fringes of the bustling city center of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England.
On the fateful summer evening of June 18th, 1993, Edna stepped out, possibly for an errand or a stroll, when she was set upon by an assailant or assailants. The attack was opportunistic and ferocious: a potential mugging gone fatally wrong. She suffered catastrophic injuries to her skull, succumbing to them shortly after.
Eyewitness accounts, if any existed, never surfaced publicly. The crime scene, mere yards from her doorstep, yielded little forensic bounty in an age before DNA databases were commonplace. South Yorkshire Police launched an immediate investigation, canvassing neighbors and appealing for information, but leads dried up almost immediately.
The 1990s were a turbulent time for British policing, marked by high-profile miscarriages of justice and a backlog of unsolved cases. Edna Waller’s murder fit uneasily into this landscape; it was too mundane for tabloid frenzy, yet too brutal to ignore. Detectives suspected a local perpetrator, given the targeted nature of the robbery in a familiar neighborhood, but no arrests were made. A trial loomed briefly when a suspect was charged, only for them to be acquitted, deepening the wound for Waller’s loved ones.
By the mid-2000s, the case had cooled, yet it refused to be forgotten entirely. In 2016, as South Yorkshire Police formed a dedicated cold case squad, Edna Waller’s name resurfaced among twenty-six unsolved homicides spanning decades. Three years later, in 2019, a major incident review team took up the mantle, scrutinizing thirty-six such cases with fresh eyes and modern forensics. Advances in genetic genealogy and digital reconstruction offered glimmers of hope, but as of late 2025, Edna Waller’s killer (or killers) remains at large.
Crime Immemorial 