Manhunt focused on Dundee harbour as sailor quizzed over brutal murder

came to her house and she had left him there while she went for some chips but was only gone for about 15 minutes and they later went to bed together at about 11.30pm.

The coroner asked her about a murder in Voller Street some years before when a sailor had murdered a woman and was never caught.

He said he knew she had lived next door to the victim on Voller Street which he suggested was strange and the woman replied: “Yes, I am the victim of circumstance.”

The coroner asked the woman if a sailor had been staying with her that night to which she replied “yes” but it wasn’t the same sailor she had spent the night with when Mary was murdered.

“Are we to understand that it is simply a coincidence that you lived next door to both women?” he said.

“Yes, it is a bit of a shock,” she said. A young woman called Lilian Watts said she recognised a mouth organ found in Mary’s house after the crime as one given to her friend Olive Tullett to a fair-haired sailor three days before the crime.

Two days before the crime, this sailor was in the company of Mary when witness heard him threaten to “do Mary in”.

The inquest concluded with a verdict of wilful murder against a person or persons unknown.

To determine whether or not it was a serviceman the Royal Navy arranged an identity parade of 3,500 sailors – the biggest identity parade ever held.

It was reviewed by a woman who saw Mary with a sailor just before she died.

On March 5 1923 two detectives from Scotland Yard travelled to Dundee to meet a ship in order to question a suspect.

The sailor had been traced through the medium of wireless to the streamer Baberton which later arrived at Camperdown Dock from Windau.

As a result of the reply received from the Baberton, with which the police got in touch on her way to the Baltic, the Scotland Yard authorities felt justified in dispatching two officers to Dundee to await the streamer’s return for the purposes of interrogating a man who joined the ship at Leith about six weeks earlier.

Wireless messages from the Baberton indicated the approximate time of her arrival at Dundee.