Emily Frances Armstrong (c. 1880 – 14 April 1949) was a British victim of a murder that remains unsolved. She was 69, a widow and described as bespectacled, frail and friendly. She was also a devout Catholic and had been looking forward to the Easter services at St Joseph's Church in Wealdstone.[1]
On 14 April 1949, the dry-cleaning shop which Emily Armstrong owned, on St John's Wood High Street in London, failed to reopen after lunch and a queue began to build up outside. After a while, two women went round to the back of the shop to try to find out why it was closed and discovered her body.[2][3] She had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument; police later determined she had been killed roughly an hour before her body was found at around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. A postmortem examination also showed that her skull had been shattered by at least 22 blows, later believed to have been inflicted with a claw hammer.
Initially, police thought Armstrong was the victim of a botched robbery. Her handbag was missing at the crime scene and the till was open and empty. The handbag was later found nearby with a bloody handkerchief bearing the laundry mark H-612, although no leads resulted from that piece of evidence. Police believed that Armstrong's killer had followed her back to her shop at about 2.10 pm.[3]
While authorities pursued several theories, they failed to find a suspect. Witnesses reported having seen a "suspicious man" around 30 years old and between 5'5" and 5'6"; however, police were unable to identify the individual. A murderer who had recently escaped from Broadmoor Hospital was also considered before witnesses failed to identify him in a police line-up. Several Army deserters were questioned too, but all ended up being released.
Police eventually concluded that Armstrong's murderer was either a tramp or "a man who had fled to Ireland".
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ "London Widow Murder - Police Seek Man". Belfast Telegraph. 16 April 1949.
- ^ Michael Newton (2009). The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes. Infobase Publishing. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-4381-1914-4. Retrieved 28 March 2012.
- ^ a b "Murder at Cleaners as Queue Waited". Daily Herald. 16 April 1949.
Further reading
edit- Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes. New York: Facts On File Inc., 2004. ISBN 0-8160-4980-7