The scene was wartime London. And it was around 10 p.m. on Sunday, OCTOBER 12th, 1941, while waiting at a bus stop near Charing Cross station, that Maple Church probably met the soldier who killed her. Next day her partially clad body was found by children in a bombed-out house in Hampstead Road. She had been strangled.

The death of Maple, 19, was one of four killings in London that week, giving rise to the idea that she might have been an early victim of the sex-killer and soldier Gordon Cummins, who mutilated and killed at least four women in 1942. Maple’s body, however, was not mutilated, thus leaving room for any alternative theories.