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shyscyberchamber.com
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UNSOLVED CRIMES |
Date
Added |
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Death in a Churchyard |
November 2002 |
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Nurse Olive
Bennett was leading a double life... and it was to bring to her a
violent death. For most of her adult life, forty-five year old Olive
had lived in the prim, starchy style expected of a midwife and
spinster. But since joining the staff of a maternity home at
Tiddington, Warwickshire, she had begun to kick over the traces.
She had taken up smoking, and was making large withdrawals from her
Post Office savings account. On her evenings off she would spend an
hour or two dressing and making up and usually take the bus to nearby
Stratford-Avon.
She became a familiar figure in the town's old-world pubs, chain
smoking and drinking large sherries. She would often arrive back at
the nurse's home by taxi in the early hours of the morning. Once she
told a colleague she had been with her boyfriend.
So nothing seemed amiss when she was still not back by midnight on
23rd April 1954.
It was Shakespeare's 390th birthday, and all Stratford was
celebrating. The Memorial Theatre was A Midsummer Night's Dream
and restaurants and pubs were packed.
That night Olive caught the 20.15 bus to Stratford. Her first call was
probably the Red Horse Hotel, where she was seen drinking until 21.00.
She was seen later in other pubs. In one she said to a man: "I've had
five schooners of sherry already. Aren't I a naughty girl?" The night
porter at the Red Horse Hotel recalled seeing her again at 23.45
standing outside the hotel. He was the last man to see Olive alive.
Next morning the gardener at Holy Trinity Church beside the river
noticed a headstone was missing. Nearby were a paid of spectacles, a
woman's brown shoe and a set of lower dentures.
Within hours police had found Olive's body in the river, weighted down
with the missing headstone. She had been strangled.
Her diary contained names of several men friends. All were questioned
and eliminated from police enquiries. Every soldier at the nearby Long
Marston camp was interviewed.
Scotland Yard was called in, and the legendary Detective
Superintendent Jack Capstick - famed for his motto 'Softly, softly,
catchee monkey' - arrived to head the case. Hundreds more people were
questioned, but still the police drew a blank. Reluctantly, Capstick
returned to the Yard leaving the case wide open.
Not until eight years later did two sisters come forward with a story
that could be linked to murder. The girls, both bus conductresses,
from Leamington Spa, said they had been in Stratford on the night of
the murder and had been picked up by two soldiers. At 23.00 the four
of them had gone for a walk in Holy Trinity churchyard.
The older girl said: 'We were standing by some graves when my soldier
began getting fresh. I told him to stop it.' The soldier said,
apparently as a joke, that he would push her into the river, with a
headstone to weight her down.
The girls had kept quiet at the time because one was married, and the
other did not want her mother to know. Perhaps if they had spoken up
at the time Olive's murderer would have been found and brought to
justice. The time lapse made it impossible.
Painstakingly the police traced and re-interviewed soldiers who had
been at Long Marston camp at the time of the murder. Again, they drew
a blank, and today it seems unlikely that the mystery of who killed
Olive Bennett will ever be solved. |
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