Little Red Riding Hood murder that shocked a post-war Wales
Ed McConnell and Jessica Walford look into the unsolved murder of a 12-year-old girl brutally abused and killed on her way home from school more than 70 years ago – and wonder if her killer could still be alive today
IT WAS like any other normal June afternoon in Swansea. The year was 1946 and Muriel Drinkwater started walking home after a day at school.
The 12-year-old had taken the bus home, singing as she headed for remote Tyle Du farm where her parents, Percival and Margaret, lived. But she never made it home. The events of that afternoon would lead to one of Wales’ most horrific murders – one that remains unsolved to this day.
Little Muriel was raped in Penllergaer Woods, before being shot with a World War I-era Colt 45 weapon.
Some who were involved in the search for the missing girl still remember the woods around the farm – lit up by glow worms – and the cries of Muriel’s parents on the night of June 27.
It was the next morning when the Gowerton County School pupil’s body, still in school clothes, was found in undergrowth by Pc David Lloyd George.
One of her hands was raised and her eyes were still wide open.
She had been raped, beaten and shot twice in the chest.
The gun used was found two days later near where her body was found.
Glamorgan Police and men from the 169th Bomb Disposal Unit searched with a detector for a second weapon believed to have been used in the attack.
Police started to investigate the brutal killing, which would become known as the “Little Red Riding Hood murder”.
At the time of Muriel’s death, officers visited every farmhouse and cottage within 150 square miles, and interviewed 20,000 men in Swansea, Aberdare and Carmarthenshire.
Police also circulated a poster of the American army gun used in the attack as they pleaded to “good” citizens to come forward. Stunned by the tragic crime, 3,000 mourners attended Muriel’s funeral on July 7 at St David’s Church.
Hundreds gathered around the little girl’s grave as she was lowered into the ground.
Police believed the killer would have been between 18 and 25 when the murder was carried out.
Back in 2008, more than 60 years later, the family of the murdered schoolgirl said they wanted the killer jailed “no matter how old he is”.
Claire Phillips, the Swansea schoolgirl’s great-niece, said: “This turned the family upside down and has been talked about through the Muriel Drinkwater generations. We realise whoever did this might be dead, but if he is alive and in his eighties or even nineties we would like to see him behind bars.
“This was a terrible, terrible crime that someone has got away with for many decades. We would like to have justice for Muriel at long last.
“Bringing someone to justice could finally bring an end to the mystery of who killed Muriel and could help the family come to terms with what happened, though it is too late for Muriel’s devastated parents, who died not knowing who had taken Muriel’s life.”
She added that Muriel’s parents “who had been avid churchgoers, never went to church again after what happened to their daughter.
“Somehow, they could never bring themselves to go.”
The case was re-opened in 2003, and in 2008 a group of retired detectives investigating cold cases retrieved her clothes from storage and got DNA from a semen stain on Muriel’s coat.
No matches were found but the tests did put a 13-year-old schoolboy who was under suspicion in the clear.
In 2009, police began investigating any link with the murder of 11-yearold Sheila Martin.
The schoolgirl was raped and strangled in Sun Hill Wood, Fawkham Green, Kent, in July 1946, 10 days after Muriel was killed, more than 200 miles away. But Muriel’s murder now still remains unsolved 72 years later.
However, one Welsh true crime writer, Neil Milkins, believes that Harold Jones, a convicted child killer from Monmouthshire who died in 1971, was guilty.
Jones had been jailed for 20 years in 1921 after admitting murdering 11-year-old Florence Little and eight-year-old Freda Burnell.
He is convinced the same killer was behind two cold-blooded Valleys child sex murders some 25 years before. He believed that the killings have striking similarities and that Jones, who was responsible for killing two young girls in Abertillery in the early 1920s, was out of prison by the time Muriel met her brutal end.