Fifteen thousand males in the Cannock, Staffordshire, area were due to be fingerprinted after a print was found on the door inside a murder house. But after only 1,000 of them had been checked, the print was traced, and there was a perfectly good explanation for it to have been there.
So no one was arrested for the murder of housewife Elsie May Taylor, who was found strangled on her kitchen floor in Longford Road, Bridgetown, near Cannock, with a clothesline, on Monday, April 15th, 1957.
Her hands were bound behind her back and her feet were tied. She was then beaten around the head with fists and a blunt instrument before she was killed. There was no sexual assault, and nothing was stolen from the house.