Not every crime writer has personal experience of murder in their family but this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the unsolved murder of my great aunt, Martha Giles. And it is one mystery that it appears I will never be able to solve. Over the last year, I have been piecing together the evidence of the Martha Giles murder which hit the headlines in the national newspapers in 1959 but I’ve finally hit a brick wall after being denied access to certain ‘closed’ files in the National Archives. In the fifty years since Martha’s death the case has never been re-opened, despite requests from the family, and no one has been brought to justice for her murder. Martha Giles was the mother of five children, the youngest of whom was only five at the time of her death. She was a nurse at New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton. On the evening of 11 February 1959 she left her home to go on night duty but she never showed up for work. No one questioned why, or where she was. Her body was discovered the ...
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