26 Murder Most Foul Was Flora Thrown From The Window – Or Did She Jump?S
OME MURDERS raise questions
that have no logical answer, riddles
like the one that puzzled detectives
probing a York murder in 1953. Why,
having raped and beaten his victim
unconscious, had the killer carried her
upstairs to throw her to her death from
her bedroom window? It seemed an
awful lot of unnecessary trouble to go
to, so what was the reason?
The first sign of anything wrong
in Diamond Street on March 10th,
1953, was spotted at 6 a.m. by George
Laughton when he opened his back
door at number 32 and realised
there had been a prowler in the
neighbourhood. The wooden shutter
which he fixed to his scullery window
every night had been taken down and
propped against the wall.
His first thoughts were for his
next-door neighbour, 76-year-old Miss
Flora Jane Gilligan, who lived alone at
30 Diamond Street. He noticed that her
back bedroom window was open, but
he wasn’t particularly worried as he’d
heard no suspicious sounds in the night.
So he went off to his employment as a
machinist.
Three-quarters of an hour later his
wife Edith was leaving for work when
she saw that Flora’s upstairs window
was open with the curtains blowing out.
The sight was unusual enough to cause
Mrs. Laughton a niggling worry, and on
returning home in the mid-afternoon
she saw that Flora’s windows on the
ground floor were also open.
Very worried now, Mrs. Laughton
enlisted the aid of a Mrs. Barrett, who
lived nearby, and they peered through
Miss Gilligan’s next-door neighbour
on the other side to the Laughtons, Mrs.
Bertha Harrison, said she heard a bump
in the spinster’s house at about half-past
one that morning but had not been
alarmed because the old lady had told
her not to worry if she heard her making
noises as she often got up in the early
hours to make herself a cup of tea.
The police learned that Flora, who
was also known as “Miss Lillian” or
“Aunty Lillian,” had lived in Diamond
Street for as long as most people could
remember.
She had been alone since her sister
died about five years previously, and
this lent support to a suicide theory.
Furthermore, there was no disorder in
the house and no evidence of robbery.
But there was no suicide note
found, and the footprint of a man was
discovered in a flower border that ran
down the side of the concrete yard. A
similar footprint was also found in the
dining-room.
Another sister of the dead woman,
Mrs. Maud Fisher, who also lived in
Diamond Street, told the police that
Flora had been having her house
decorated in anticipation of a visit from
a woman friend she had known while
working as a cook in private service in
London.
Mrs. Fisher also said that her sister
had been receiving medical attentionthe keyhole of the locked door in the
wall that led from Flora’s back yard
into a lane. “What can you see?” Mrs.
Barrett asked.
“Just a pile of something, blankets or
old clothes,” Edith Laughton replied.
Then she suddenly straightened up,
white-faced and trembling.
She realised that what she had at first
taken to be a heap of clothing was the
body of Flora.
Panicking, the women ran up the
lane where they found labourer Ernest
Hodgson working and told him what
they had seen. He went to see for
himself and one look through the back
door keyhole confirmed the women’s
story. He ran to a telephone box and
dialled 999.
When Inspector Paley arrived,
accompanied by two detectives and a
pair of uniformed constables, Hodgson
climbed over the wall into the yard and
unbolted the door to admit the officers.
They found the spinster lying dead- completely naked. Her injuries were
consistent with having fallen 14 feet
from the bedroom window, which was
open and with a light still burning in the
room.
for dizziness. While this suggested a
reason for her fall, dizziness would not
explain why the window was wide open.
And it did not cover several other odd
discoveries.
What were described by
Superintendent Carter as “many
puzzling features” in the case includedCase recalled by
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