Some answers arrive in weeks. Others take more than fifty years.
Five cases. Five victims. Five investigations in which the truth arrived late — or not at all.
In 1967, an elderly widow is murdered in her own home in Bristol. The intruder leaves behind a single partial palm print, and detectives take the prints of some 19,000 men and boys. The answer, when it comes, is more than half a century away.
In 1943, four boys trespassing in Hagley Wood find a skull inside a hollow tree. What follows becomes one of Britain's most enduring murder mysteries — a woman who was never named, and a question that appeared on walls for years: who put Bella in the wych elm?
In 1945, a respected teacher sets out on her usual Saturday-night walk to her mother's and never arrives. Her body is found the next morning in a steep, wooded hollow near the North Wales village of Coedpoeth.
Then come two of the most notorious murders of the 1910s and 1920s: the Crumbles Murder of Emily Kaye, and the Green Bicycle Murder of Bella Wright.
Detective Files #4 follows the evidence, the detectives, the suspects and the courtrooms — without inventing conversations, and without turning speculation into fact.
Because the evidence does not always arrive when the detectives need it.
