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A missing teenager
The night of 2 November 1940 was cold and damp. 15 year-old Mary Hagan was running an errand for her parents, getting them a copy of the Liverpool Echo and a packet of cigarette papers.
When Mary failed to return, her family contacted the police, who immediately began to search for the missing teenager.
The scene of the crime
The next day Mary Hagan’s body was found lying just inside an unmanned wartime pillbox, on the bridge close to Mary’s house. Among the people called to the scene was Dr James Firth, head of the
Home Office forensic science lab at Preston. Scouring the area for clues, he saw that as well as a newspaper and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a small piece of fabric lay near to the body. It was a muddy and bloodstained bandage. He could also see a bloody thumbprint on one side of the young girl’s bruised neck. The post mortem revealed that Mary had died as a result of asphyxiation.
The bloodstained bandage
A woman came forward to say that late on the night of the murder she had been asked the way to the barracks by a soldier. She had noticed that there were scratches on his face.
When the police questioned officers at the Royal Seaforth barracks, they came up with a suspect. Samuel Morgan was a local man and a private in the Irish Guard. He was already suspected of being involved in an attack on a woman, but had deserted two months earlier. Morgan’s family were questioned and admitted to harbouring him while he had been AWOL from the army. He had stayed with an older brother and his wife.
Crucially, she told police she remembered that Morgan had cut his thumb on 31 October, two days before the killing of Mary Hagan. She had dressed this wound, applying a bandage and zinc ointment taken from Morgan’s army field dressing kit. Laboratory tests established that the piece of bandage found at the murder scene matched it exactly. Morgan was found guilty of murder and executed on 4 April 1941.
The murdered grandfather
The second case involves the murder of Walter Dinnivan Senior in 1939, who was found battered to death, discovered by his grandchildren Hilda and Walter when they returned from a night out. It was firstly thought that he was the victim of a botched burglary, but due to the presence of beer bottles and whisky, and no sign of a break-in, it was then assumed that Dinnivan had known and entertained his attacker.
