Psychic Detective
Each month, ex-cop and psychic Nicky Alan teams up with her spirit guides to investigate an unsolved mystery. Here she looks into the murder of 12-year-old
Muriel Drinkwater sang with friends on the school bus before the driver dropped her off, a mile from home, in the village of Penllergaer, five miles outside Swansea, in South Wales.
It was 27th June 1946 and, on the meandering track to the isolated farmhouse where she lived Muriel, 12, exchanged hellos with Hubert Hoyle, 13, who’d just bought eggs from her mum, Margaret.
At around 4.30pm Margaret herself looked out of her kitchen window and spotted Muriel, who waved before disappearing from sight into thicker undergrowth.
Less than 500 yards away, she should have been home within minutes.
She never arrived.
That evening a search party of local men walked through the surrounding woods, calling Muriel’s name, but it wasn’t until the following morning that a police constable spotted her red woollen glove in a bush. Muriel’s body was found just 100 yards off the track. She’d been sexually assaulted, beaten about the head and shot twice at close range.
Cigarette butts and sweet wrappers near the crime scene suggested Muriel’s killer had lain in wait for her.
A bright girl, Muriel had passed her 11plus and got into the local grammar school. The youngest of four girls and a keen singer, she’d hoped to be a teacher when she grew up. Now, someone had snuffed out that dream.
The little girl snatched from the woods by a monster was like something out of the very darkest fairy tale and the press soon dubbed Muriel ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
The investigation was led by Scotland Yard, headed by Chief Inspector ‘Bulldog’ Chapman and he had what seemed a strong lead. The gun that killed Muriel had been found near her body – a modified American Colt 45, standard issue for American soldiers in World War I.
There was some suggestion a similar weapon had been used in the murder of a cinema manager in Bristol and photos of the gun were circulated in the UK and America. Did anyone recognise it? Did anyone remember selling their service weapon to a local?
These appeals came to nothing and the location of the crime meant there were few witnesses – Muriel’s nearest neighbour lived a mile away.
Hubert Hoyles said he hadn’t seen anyone else on the path that day, though did he recall an odd incident a few weeks earlier, when a man with ‘fluffy’ hair wearing corduroy trousers and a sports jacket had emerged from the bushes on the track.
The man, who’d looked to be in his thirties with a local accent, had seemed agitated as he’d asked Hubert what he was doing before telling him to get going.
Every house in 150 square miles was visited and 20,000 men interviewed, but no one was captured for the crime.
Suspicion ran riot in the small community. Some thought it strange that Muriel’s mother hadn’t heard gun shots or her daughter’s screams. Was she protecting someone – Muriel’s father John ‘Percy’ Drinkwater perhaps?
Others suspected Hubert of being the murderer, as he’d been one of the last people to see Muriel alive.
It wasn’t until the early noughties that a cold case unit started looking into the murder once more.
By then the gun had been handled too much to be of any real forensic use, but Muriel’s blue school mac was still sitting in police storage – the killer’s semen stain circled in yellow by the original investigators.
Unbelievably, despite the stain being almost 60 years old, scientists were able to get a partial profile from it. It meant any male relatives of the killer whose DNA was on the police database would be a match.
No match was made, though possible new links were explored, such as the murder of 11-year-old Sheila Martin, who’d been killed just two weeks after Muriel, hundreds of miles away, in Kent. Like Muriel, Sheila had been sexually assaulted and killed in woodland close to her home.
Was the same man responsible for both crimes?
Muriel had wanted to become a teacher
In 2007 crime writer Neil Milkins suggested notorious child killer Howard Jones might have killed Muriel.
Twenty five years before Muriel’s death Jones, then 15, had been convicted of the murders of eight-year-old
Freda Burnell and 11-year-old Florence Little. While in jail Jones stated that voices had commanded him to kill. Freed in December 1941, had he gone on to kill Muriel?
In 2008 Hubert was happy to give his DNA to finally rule him out. He later said the finger pointing had ‘blighted’ his life.
Police announced in 2019 that the re-examined forensics had ruled Howard Jones out too.
Then, in Autumn 2020, a
BBC documentary re-examined the case and suggested another potential culprit.
In 1953 Ron Harries, then
24, had bludgeoned his ‘aunt and uncle’ (actually more distant relatives) Phoebe and John Harries to death with a hammer.
He’d buried their bodies in a kale field on their own farm. Horribly, tests suggested Phoebe had still been alive when she was buried.
A newspaper cutting revealed that Harries had once worked on Muriel’s family farm.
Harries’ cousin gave his DNA to the programme makers, who passed it on to South Wales Police, so Ron could be ruled in or out. As yet they haven’t revealed the results.
There was one further mystery that emerged in the programme. A book with Muriel’s name in recently turned up in a Camarthen charity shop. Her family moved to England two or three years after the crime. So how had it got there?
Had the killer taken the copy of Little Playmates from Muriel’s satchel as a trophy, the programme-makers wondered?
As the 75th anniversary of the murder approaches, can my guides provide some answers about this heinous crime?
Theory 1
Despite the police apparently ruling him out, some still believe Howard Jones, who died in 1971, might have been the culprit. Even though the energy and motive of Muriel’s killer feels different, could Jones have done it?
Theory 2
Ron Harries murdered his aunt and uncle in a rage. Muriel’s murder on the other hand seems to have been planned, obsessed over and particularly aimed at a young child near to her home. Was the killer someone who knew the area but was just there for a short time?
Theory 3
Muriel’s mum was so used to hearing gunshots due to poachers and gamekeepers in the surrounding countryside they would barely have registered with her. But was she covering for her husband – was he responsible for this monstrous crime?