A torn milk bill with chimney soot on it and an address – that was the only clue left at the murder scene when police discovered the bodies of Mrs. Anne Wiseman, 65, and her 17-year-old niece strangled with flex in their suburban home in Melbourne on Sunday, November 13th, 1938. The milk bill, detectives reckoned, had been inadvertently dropped by the killer.

Checking out the address, they asked the occupier, “To whom did you give this scrap of paper?”

“I never found out his name, but he was an odd job man,” she explained. “He was looking for work. I wrote down the address because that was the place I was about to move to. One of the jobs he said he did was sweeping chimneys.” A search through the list of chimney sweeps in the city brought investigators to George Green, 40. “I gave that address to two other sweeps, but I don’t know their names,” Green said. But a forensic test of his clothes yielded white hairs in his trouser turn-ups that matched Mrs. Wiseman’s hair.

Green’s haul from the burglary was just £1, which the women were going to put on the Sunday collection plate. He was convicted of the double-murder and hanged on Monday, April 17th, 1939, at Pentridge Prison, Melbourne.