Murder in the Fog
On the 21st December 1961 a thick fog descended on Liverpool and the city ground to a halt. In a leafy suburb a killer slipped silent and unseen into the home of a young mother, Maureen Dutton. Her murder remains unsolved.
We call them pea-soupers, the thick insidious fogs that creep in from the sea and take us by surprise. The fog of December 1961 was no exception, stealthy and silent it moved in the night, swirling inland from the Irish Sea with Liverpool in its sights. By daybreak it had swallowed up the docks and the Pier Head. By mid morning it had snaked upwards along the streets of the city centre stealing away the breath of Christmas shoppers and chilling their bones. By noon it had slithered as far as the suburbs gobbling all in its path and then, satiated, it settled. The city groaned, this fog was here to stay. Buses and taxis moved like snails trying to get people home, their lights fumbling and faltering through the mist and, from the River Mersey, the haunting howl of the ferries as they headed to port sounded a death knell. There was trouble afoot.
Maureen Dutton
Maureen Dutton was looking forward to Christmas. She lived in a comfortable home in Thingwall Lane in the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash. Just three weeks earlier the 27 year old had given birth to her second child, a little brother for 2 year old David. She had barely left the house since. Like all toddlers, David was bored and a little envious of the new arrival. Maureen promised that if he was a good boy she would take him to a special children’s service at a nearby church on the 21st December. The fog had other ideas. At midday the telephone rang, Maureen’s mother-in-law had given up. She had tried to make it the mile and a half to Knotty Ash to care for the baby while Maureen and David attended the service but it was no use, the fog was too thick and the buses too slow. Maureen was probably a little relieved.
At 6:10 PM Brian Dutton arrived home from his job as an Industrial Chemist in a nearby town. He was tired and the journey home had taken longer than usual because of the fog. As he walked up the path he was surprised to see his house was in total darkness. From inside he could hear the new baby screaming hysterically. For a few seconds he fumbled for his key in the dark before giving up and knocking on the door. Maureen did not answer. Instead he heard the voice of little David;
“Its Daddy, oh its Daddy, my Daddy.”
Something was clearly very wrong, Mr Dutton frantically retrieved his key and entered the house. Inside he found his toddler son sobbing hysterically next to his mother’s body. She had been stabbed at least 14 times. The baby was distressed but safe in its crib. Maureen’s half eaten lunch was on the table. The children had been alone for hours.
Hunt for a Murderer
The people of Liverpool were bewildered and frightened in equal measure. There appeared to be no motive for the killing. Knotty Ash was a pleasant leafy suburb, Maureen had not been sexually assaulted and nothing was stolen from the house. Mr Dutton was never a suspect and had a cast iron alibi. The police searched the house and found the sheath belonging to a narrow bladed knife but no weapon. Only one person could give a clue to the identity of the murderer of Maureen Dutton and that person was two years old and incoherent with shock. All police leave was cancelled as hundreds of officers undertook a fingertip search of the area and took thousands of statements from the public.
Leads to Nowhere
Police immediately suspected that a patient at nearby Thingwall Hall may be responsible. At the time people with mental illness were treated in the building. When this proved fruitless they turned their attention elsewhere. A young man wearing a leather jacket had been seen running in the area. A local woman claimed that he had knocked on her door on the day of the murder. When she asked him what he wanted he didn’t respond but instead tapped the fingers of his right hand in the palm of his left and stood staring at her in silence. He never came forward. Neither did the ‘strawberry blonde’ seen boarding a bus at the end of Maureen’s road in an agitated state. The blonde woman was seen by a number of witnesses and spoke with an Irish accent. She told other passengers she had to get away from Liverpool and was heard to repeat the same phrase over again;
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…….”
Perhaps the most promising lead was that of the bogus doctor. At the time a man was contacting schools in the Liverpool area calling himself Dr. Hughes. His modus operandi was to advise the school that a female pupil had been in contact with someone with a serious disease and he must examine her immediately. On the day before Maureen’s murder someone pretending to be a doctor had knocked on the door of a woman in nearby Halewood and told her that he needed to perform an intimate examination as a matter of urgency. She permitted him to make the examination.Both she and Maureen had recently given birth and announced the arrival of their child in the local paper. Did Maureen open the door to this bogus doctor and realise very quickly that something was wrong? In a stunning move, the police were to abandon this theory in favour of another far more bizarre and intriguing.
The Disciples of Tiki
Maureen had been stabbed at least fourteen times in the chest, back and neck. The exact details of her injuries were kept secret from the public but something about their pattern led the police to believe that Maureen may have been murdered by an underground Polynesian cult. They began to search for men and women with a tattoo of a reversed swastika, an indication that they were members of the cult. To support their theory the police pointed out that Maureen’s murder had taken place close to the Winter Solstice when members of this cult, they claimed, made a blood sacrifice to their Tiki god. The following extract appeared in the local newspaper;
Tiki worshippers keep carved wooden images of the god in their homes and necklaces of polished shells found in the South Seas are used in the rituals.
During the religious ceremonies men and women worshippers abase themselves before the 8 inch high idol and burn incense. After they have a small insignia tattooed on their bodies.
On the night of the full moon and during the solstice a blood sacrifice is demanded by the island’s god and a high priest plunges a dagger into the heart of an animal or bird and smears the blood across the faces of the worshippers.
Liverpool Echo- January 5th 1962
The police spent weeks chasing this lead up what eventually proved to be a blind alley. Maureen’s case went cold and the people of Liverpool began to forget.
A Second Murder
It was almost a year to the day and a mile away from Maureen Dutton’s home. On Childwall Valley Road a young girl was babysitting. Lesley Hobbs was just 12 years old but sensible and old beyond her years. At 9:30 pm on the 9th December her parents decided they would go to a local Social Club for a quiet Sunday evening drink. Lesley’s three younger siblings were asleep upstairs and when they left, their eldest daughter was listening to her small transistor and completing her homework. Lesley’s parents were certain that the children were perfectly safe; there was a telephone in the house and neighbours close by.They were wrong. At 11:30 pm the couple returned home to find Lesley stabbed and bludgeoned to death on the living room floor. Her brother and sisters slept peacefully upstairs, blissfuly unaware their sibling was dead. Once again a massive police hunt was launched but this time, within days, police had a solid lead.
Peter Rix
Peter Rix was a troubled 15 year boy who lived nearby. Although he was bright and charming, popular even, there was something disturbing about him. His parents had been so worried about his behaviour as a young child that they had asked for a psychiatric evaluation, which in the Liverpool of the 1950s was an astonishing thing to do. At 12 he was expelled from grammar school and by 13 he was stealing, lying and displaying an unhealthy interest in knives and blades. When an officer asked to see the coat he was wearing on the night of the murder, Rix was evasive and uncooperative. When his mother produced the coat it was clearly stained with a red liquid. Rix explained that it was paint not blood which he had tried to clean off with turpentine. The officer didn’t believe him and when the boy tried to bolt, he was arrested.
Rix was taken to a nearby police station and encouraged by his mother he confessed.
“I don’t know what made me do it but I went and rang the front doorbell. She opened the door and I pushed in. I stabbed her and she screamed. I told her to be quiet and put her hands behind her back. I tied her hands with a tie I picked up from the couch.
I then picked up the poker and hit head a lot of times. She ran up against the door. I picked up a stand from the grate and hit her with it. She fell on the floor. I hit her a lot of times with the stand.
When I tied her hands I put gags round her mouth to stop her shouting because I was going to batter her but I don’t know why. I don’t know what came over me. I wanted to do it for a long time.”
The murder weapon was found hidden behind Rix’s wardrobe. When asked if he owned another knife, Rix claimed that he had owned another long bladed sheath knife but his father had taken it off him. When asked to produce it Mr Rix, a sailor , told police he had dumped it overboard whilst at sea. Was this an extreme overreaction or did Rix’s father have suspicions of his own?
Rix was charged with murder and his trial set for February 1963.
The Trial
Rix’s trial was short. His family managed to secure the services of one of England’s top barristers, the Liverpool lawyer Rose Heilbron. She convinced the family that it was futile to deny the killing of Lesley. Instead Heilbron offered the defence of ‘ manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility’. Before his trial Rix was examined by a number of psychiatrists who commented on his unemotional and detached state and the fact he showed no empathy for his victim. In a statement to the court, Dr Stephens the defence psychiatrist said the following;
“For the past two years when Rix sees a sex film or book he experiences a desire to kill directed against women of 14 to 25 years of age. He cannot explain why this should be beyond saying ‘They just get on my nerves.I don’t like them at all’. He is suffering from a gross disorder of the emotional side of his development which has persisted for two years. It is a disability of mind which amounts to a psychopathic disorder.”
Rix was found guilty of ‘manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility’ and confined to a mental institution. He has since died.
Did Rix Kill Maureen?
The burning question is; Did Peter Rix also murder Maureen Dutton? Did this 14 year old boy walk the mile or so in thick fog to Thingwall Avenue on December 21 1961 and stab to death a young mother in front of her children? The two crimes are startlingly similar but it is unlikely that we will ever know and the police are not convinced.
Today, the murder of Maureen Dutton remains unsolved. Only one person holds the key to its solution, the little boy Peter Dutton. But as one fog lifted and drifted back to the Irish Sea on that dreadful day, another descended: the fog of forgetfulness that saved a little boy from living over and over, the terrible slaying of the person he loved most in the world, his mother.
Sources
The Liverpool Echo
The Daily Mirror
liverpoolmuderblogspot.com
reddit.com unsolved mysteries
unsolved-murders.co.uk
National Archives
Wikipedia
