The summer of 1946, the first since the end of World War Two, was a chance to appreciate the benefits of peace alongside the work of rebuilding the battered nation. Swansea had suffered catastrophically at the hands of the Luftwaffe, especially in a three night blitz in February 1942 in which over half of its town centre was destroyed . It was a time to at last look forward to the future. However, the tranquility of the nearby village of Penllergaer was disturbed in that hopeful June by a sadistic crime that remains unsolved and remembered to this day.

On the cold and rainy 27th afternoon of that month, 12 year old Muriel Drinkwater began to walk the last mile of her journey home from where the school bus had left her off, singing as she went. At the railway bridge, she met 13 year old Hubert Hoyles who was going in the opposite direction as he had visited her parents’ remote farm, Tyle Du, to buy black market eggs and butter. It was a rough path that meandered in and out of woodland and her mother caught a glimpse of her as she emerged onto a lane about 400 yards away only to disappear into the trees. She put the kettle on but would never see her again. When her daughter did not return home, she and her husband went to the village to search for her, assisted by a policeman and a dozen men as glowworms sparkled in the gathering gloom and mounting panic of the twilight forest.

The next morning, PC David Lloyd George found the red glove in the undergrowth that led him to Muriel’s body, her eyes open and one hand raised in a final, pleading and defensive action. She had beaten about her head, raped, and shot twice in her chest. Two days later, the police discovered the murder weapon close to where it had been used, a 1911 Colt .45 pistol that was found to have been manufactured in 1942 and issued to US forces in Europe. It was distinctive in that it had modified perspex grips. American troops had been billeted in a local mansion during the war and the police theorised that one of them may have been the source of the firearm. Food remains in the vicinity of the gun were evidence that the killer had lain in wait for his victim.

Scotland Yard detectives were brought in to support the investigation which was not uncommon in those days. Hubert Hoyles recounted seeing someone in the woods the week before the attack who was:- "30 years of age. Thick fluffy hair, stern looking and appeared agitated, had a menace about him...a wickedness. He was smart looking, wearing a brown corduroy trousers and a light brown sports jacket". The police visited every house in a 150 square mile area and interviewed 20,000 men. More than 3,000 mourners attended the schoolgirl’s funeral. The numbers are large but so far have added up to nothing as far as identifying the killer is concerned.

Strategic bombing had created an air of fatalism and a relaxation of inhibitions among some who existed in targeted, rearranged cities. There was a glut of guns available to those who wanted to further their criminal careers, whatever their objectives, whatever their needs. In February, George Orwell’s essay “Decline of The English Murder” had appeared in which he bemoaned the scarcity of the “perfect murder” to read about in one’s News of The World i.e. one committed by a solicitor or dentist whose outward respectability masked his decision to enlist poison to conceal his adultery and illicit financial affairs. Homicide was changing.

The author Neil Milkins suggests that the murderer could have been Harold Jones who killed two young girls in sexually motivated acts in Abertillery in 1921. He had been found not guilty of the murder of Freda Burnell, aged 8, and had been given a hero’s welcome on his return from his acquittal. Fifteen days later, he murdered Florence Little, aged 11. He pleaded guilty to both murders, most probably to save his neck as his 16th birthday and the gallows were fast approaching. He was released from Wandsworth Prison in 1941.

A team of retired detectives led by Paul Bethell, a former Detective Chief Inspector with South Wales Police, was set up to re-examine unsolved murders and decided to consider this case despite it being well outside its period of interest. As a result, a DNA profile was obtained from semen on the victim’s mackintosh in 2008 and it is believed that this is the oldest case in the world in which such a profile has been secured. To date, there has been no match in the UK National DNA Database, or to members of the murderer’s family in that database, but a link was established to the killing of 11 year old Sheila Martin who was raped and strangled with her own hair ribbon in woodland near the Brands Hatch Motor Racing Circuit in Kent on 7 July 1946, less than a fortnight after the death at Penllergaer.

In 2010, a decision was made by the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on National Records and Archives to remove the Muriel Drinkwater files from public view until 2032, to prevent the murderer, if still alive, finding out what the police knew 64 years after his crimes had been committed.

The point blank execution of a girl by an unknown assassin with a powerful handgun in a secluded place long ago was an act of brutal excess that still resonates in our own age of murder, regrettably accustomed as we have become to regular news of predation on children.

Muriel’s family left the area and their isolated smallholding has become subsumed by a modern housing development. This coldest of cold cases maintains a troubled presence in the minds of the elder inhabitants of the village while the mute witness of Penllergaer Forest continues to keep its secrets.