The Unsolved Murder of Gertrude O'Leary - Stokes Croft - 1949 
Gertrude O'Leary 1949 Murder Unsolved It is a sad fact of life that some murders go unsolved and that sometimes killers get away. However, nowadays new scientific techniques such as genetic finger printing offer a way of tracing the killers. In the summer of 1949 the vicious murder of a well-liked, 66-year-old local licencee - Gertrude O'Leary - shocked the residents of Stokes Croft to the core. Her killer was never found. Fred Dibble wasn't a happy . man. At the close of what had been a warmday he had called at his local off-licence in Thomas Street to buy a quenching bottle of beer only to find the Stokes Croft premises closed. But his initial annoyance turned to apprehension when he found that the door leading to the kitchen of the tiny shop was open. He looked inside, called out: 'Are you open Gert - it's well-past seven', but received no reply As time went on he became more perturbed and eventually decided to call the police. Despite the mess they soon established that a gold wristwatch and a hand-worked gold pendant set with amethysts and pearls were missing. Theft, they soon decided, seemed to have been the killer's motive. Bristol CID - believing that the killer could strike again - decided to call in Scotland Yard, who sent newly-promoted DS Frank Long down on the afternoon train.
He soon had a profile of the victim, described by neighbours as a 'well-liked, friendly soul'. A devout Roman Catholic who attended mass at St Mary on the Quay, she was known for playing the piano at church social events. Until her sister, Kathleen's death in 1940, the two had run The Bell pub together in Hillgrove Street, but by 1949 unmarried Gertrude had established her own business at 13 Thomas Street, where the animal-lover was said to have lived a quiet life together with her cats. George's Brewery, who owned the off-licence, described her as 'a very popular tenant'.
The killer, police decided, had entered by a side door that afternoon and slipped upstairs in search of valuables while Gertrude was busy in the shop. As he came downstairs he must have been Busy: Officers on the case surprised by the licencee, panicked, and hit her with a beer flagon. He had then strangled her. About mid-afternoon a neighbour, Elizabeth Sealey, had heard a stifled scream and shortly afterwards seen a man wearing a trilby hat leave from the rear entrance of the off-licence and walk away across-some nearby wasteland. She was puzzled, she told police, by the fact that the back entrance, which Gertrude usually kept locked, was open.
There was no doubt, said neighbours, that in recent weeks she had become frightened by the behaviour of a man who had called at her premises several times over a short period of time. One of her customers. Pat Fowler, said that she had seen a short, shabbily-dressed man, with a swarthy complexion, being served in the shop. When he had gone Gertrude had told her that 'she did not like the look of him'. Detectives also questioned people about a man who had called at the shop some time previously whom she had, apparently, 'some difficulty getting rid of. It could very well have been the man, they thought, who had been going from door to door asking for lodgings in the area earlier that day.
Slowly a picture built up of a 'prowling stranger' that police were keen to interview. He was thin featured, aged about 45, five feet three inches tall, and was wearing a dirty mackintosh, down-at-heel shoes, and a dirty old trilby. He was well-spoken - but with an accent no one could place. Police believed that they would soon close in on the killer, when, after conducting a house-to-house inquiry, they found a pair of blood-stained trousers in a working men's boarding house nearby. But those inquires led nowhere. Then word came from Highbridge, near Burnham-on-Sea, about a foreign-looking man, who sitting drinking tea in a local cafe, had talked about the murder just eight hours after it had been committed. Customers said that he seemed to be well-informed about the incident, but had said that that was because he had been outside the shop when it took place. The man was never traced.
There was just one echo of this unsolved murder, when, seven months later, 46-year-old waiter, Allan McGough, was taken to Torquay police station for questioning by two Bristol detectives. He was held for 23 hours but finally released after police verified that he had been working in a Torquay hotel at the time of the murder. After solicitors had taken up his case Mr McGough was awarded £50 for wrongful arrest.
When, together with Fred, the officers entered the shop at about 10.45pm, they discovered the battered body of Gertrude O,'Leary lying in a ransacked room. She had been brutally beaten about the head with a flagon beer bottle and then strangled with a cord. 
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