Murder which is still unsolved today
The gun police believe was used, and left, Glamorgan police and men of the 169th Bomb Disposal Unit take a break for a meal during their search with a mine detector for a second weapon believed to have been use by Muriel Joan Drinkwater’s assailant. murdered schoolgirl said they wanted the killer jailed “no matter how old he is”.
Claire Phillips, the Swansea schoolgirl’s great-niece, said: “This turned the family upside down and has been talked about through the generations. We realise whoever did this might be dead, but if he is alive and in his 80s or even 90s we would like to see him behind bars.
“This was a terrible, terrible crime that someone has got away with for many decades. We would like to have justice for Muriel at long last.
“Bringing someone to justice could finally bring an end to the mystery of who killed Muriel and could help the family come to terms with what happened, though it is too late for Muriel’s devastated parents, who died not knowing who had taken Muriel’s life.”
She added that Muriel’s parents: “who had been avid churchgoers, never went to church again after what happened to their daughter.
“Somehow, they could never bring themselves to go.”
The case was re-opened in 2003, and in 2008, a group of retired detectives investigating cold cases retrieved her clothes from storage and obtained DNA from a semen stain from Muriel’s coat.
No matches were found, but the tests did put a 13-year-old schoolboy who was under suspicion in the clear.
In 2009, police began investigating any link with the murder of 11-year-old Sheila Martin.
The schoolgirl was raped and strangled in Sun Hill Wood, Fawkham Green, in July 1946, 10 days after Muriel was killed more than 200 miles away.
But Muriel’s murder still remains unsolved 72 years later.
However, one Welsh true crime writer, Neil Milkins, believes that Harold Jones, a convicted child killer from Monmouthshire who died in 1971 was guilty.
Jones had been jailed for 20 years in 1921 after admitting murdering 11-year-old Florence Little and eight-year-old Freda Burnell.
He is convinced the same killer was behind two coldblooded Valleys child sex murders some 25 years before.
He believed that the killings have striking similarities, and that Jones, the man responsible for killing two young girls in Abertillery in the early 1920s, was out of prison by the time Muriel met her brutal end.
We realise whoever did this might be dead, but if he is alive and in his 80s or even 90s we would like to see him behind bars
- Claire Phillips, the Swansea schoolgirl’s great-niece