On the morning of Monday, February 14, Dr George Evan Jones, assisted by his partner Trefor Hughes Rhys, began the gruesome task of carrying out a post-mortem examination on the body of the shopkeeper.

Jones was a North Walian by birth though his mothers family hailed from Cheshire and it was here he spent his schooldays before undergoing medical training at Edinburgh University, where he was a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Rhys was originally from Kidwelly some 30 miles east of Garnant on the River Gwendraeth. He earned the rank of Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Great War, and seen his share of bloodshed and death in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1918 having arrived in Baghdad the previous August. After the war, Rhys came home to Wales and the fiance he had left behind. He married his childhood sweetheart Dora in Pembroke in the spring of 1920 and the young couple immediately moved to the Amman Valley and a new life where the now 30-year-old Rhys has taken up the position alongside Dr Jones.

The two men set about the examination with a grim stoicism. Both had experienced the worst of injuries, whether from the battlefield or the pit, but the mutilated body of the frail shopkeeper bore witness to a unique tragedy.

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