CHESHIRE police has finally cracked the county’s oldest unsolved murder – but the suspect is now dead.
Walter Albert Humphrey of Knutsford, was 71, and a widower, when he was murdered in 1953 while working as a petrol salesman at a garage in his home town.
He is believed to have been struck on the head, probably with the nozzle of the petrol pump, during an attempted robbery of the garage and later died of his injuries.
Police found fingerprints on a cash box which could not be eliminated from the enquiries. Detectives took what was an unusual step at the time in circulating the prints to all UK forces, but no match was found.
Forty years later the prints were transferred to Cheshire Constabulary’s new electronic database. Periodic searches were made across the national database to try and achieve a match.
But there was a backlog of prints stored by forces prior to computerised systems, which were transferred to the electronic database – with those prints belonging to persons convicted of more serious offences being loaded first.
Then this year, a review showed a match between the recovered fingerprints and a known criminal.
Further enquiries by the Cheshire Constabulary Force Major Investigation Team, led by Detective Inspector Jo Miller, confirmed a petty criminal, who had been in the Cheshire area at the time of Walter’s death, was the likely killer.
The man, who is not being identified, had moved to Italy, and died in recent years. Cheshire’s oldest murder had been solved.
