Ten Days Apart

June 27, 1946. Twelve-year-old Muriel Drinkwater was walking home from school through woodland near Penllergaer, South Wales. Her mother watched her enter the trees. She never came out. The following day, her body was found. She had been raped, bludgeoned, and shot twice in the chest with a World War I-era Colt .45.July 7, 1946. Eleven-year-old Sheila Martin was playing on a swing behind her home in Fawkham Green, Kent. She was strangled with her own hair ribbon and left half-buried under nettles in the woods. The coroner called it a diabolical assault.250 miles. Ten days. Both girls. Both woods. Both within half a mile of home. Both sexually assaulted.In 2009, South Wales Police formally requested Sheila Martin's case file from Kent to examine whether the same man killed them both. In 2008, scientists had extracted a DNA profile from a semen stain on Muriel's coat, circled in yellow crayon by the original investigators and then stored, unseen, for sixty years. The profile ruled out the man who had lived under suspicion since 1946. In 2019, it ruled out the man theorised as the killer for over a decade.Nobody has been charged with either murder.Muriel Drinkwater's file is closed until 2037. Sheila Martin's until 2045. Both cite health and safety. Both cite third-party personal information.Someone in those files is still considered worth protecting.