POSTSCRIPT
A sad, but interesting, report is found in newspapers of August 1951. Six hundred girls from Burton-on-Trent High School had just finished for the summer and Miss Winifred Mulley, who lived in a house in the school grounds, was just completing on a new home in Burton and planning to leave on holiday. She felt unwell and decided to delay her departure and rest. When her domestic help, Mrs Plummer, arrived the next day she received no answer. Mrs Plummer entered and found the bedroom door locked and a cup of tea with a spoon on the kitchen table. Miss Mulley never used a spoon.
Miss Winifred Mulley was murdered on 30/31st July 1951.
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The Evening Standard reported: “The police today were mystified by the murder of a 52-year-old headmistress who was found in her pyjamas, stabbed to death with a white-handled penknife.” It continues: “She was found in her bed yesterday with the knife in her neck. She wrote books of fairy tales. Scotland Yard men were told that a stocky man was seen on Sunday trying the school windows. They are looking for a man who, last Wednesday, attacked the headmistress of another school 40 miles away. Miss Mulley lived alone in a ten-room house adjoining the school. Her friends said that she never recovered after her colleague and friend, the head master of the Burton Grammar School, Mr H S Moodey May, killed his wife, son and daughter and then threw himself under a train in 1950”.
Twenty year old John William Fenton, an army absentee, was accused of also using a tin of sausages as a blunt instrument against her and convicted of her murder on 29th November that year. He was sentenced to death but this was commuted and he was released on life licence on 28 February 1961.
A final note to this sad story is that he committed suicide on 17th July 1962.
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Liz White
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