Who killed Irish prostitute Peggy Flynn? “I did,” said an Irishman serving in the British Army’s Parachute Regiment and currently a patient at the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, Southampton. “Well,” said detectives when they had listened at his bedside to his confession, “we don’t think it was you.”

Peggy Flynn, 49, was found dead on a beach at Dalkey, County Dublin, on Sunday, February 6th, 1966. She had been strangled with one of her own stockings and had probably been killed elsewhere. Because she was a loner, working the streets and the bars with no particular base or pattern, the gardai were faced with a tough task. They seemed likely to be spared much leg work by the confession of the parachutist, who happened to be in Dublin at the time of the murder when it happened.

The soldier, aged 24, freely claimed that he picked up Peggy after a party and strangled her when she asked for more money than the two or three pounds he had agreed to pay her.

Although there were many holes in his story, he was brought to trial in Dublin in a case where the only real evidence against him was his own confession. That wasn’t good enough for the jury, who found him not guilty, thus putting the murder of Peggy Flynn back into the file marked “Unsolved.”