“Phyllis, I have gone for a walk. Shan’t be in for tea,” said the note Mrs. Phyllis Welch found from her husband when she came home on the afternoon of NOVEMBER 18th, 1947.

They lived near Potters Bar golf course in Middlesex, and true to his word, Albert Welch, a railway linesman, didn’t come home for tea. He didn’t come home at all, and his dismembered body was found six months later in a pond at the seventh fairway of the nearby golf course.

The discovery was made by two schoolboys looking for golf balls, when they saw a human arm protruding from the pond.

After the body parts were pieced together, the remains were seen to be those of a short man in his early 40s. The dismemberment had been performed with a saw by someone who knew nothing of anatomy, and the victim appeared to have been left-handed.

Only two short men reported missing during the past eight months were left-handed, and Albert Welch was one of them. The other had a deformed little finger, and the recovered body had no such deformity. A photo of Albert Welch’s head, enlarged to life-size, fitted perfectly when it was superimposed on a same-size photo of the corpse’s skull, and this convinced an inquest jury that the remains were Mr. Welch’s.

But who killed him and why? That remains a mystery.