Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. At 3.45 a.m. on a morning in 2003, police cars raced down a street in a small, sleepy English village.
A detective inspector stepped out of his car and approached an old house that was connected to a butcher shop.
The man was still in shock from the call he'd gotten.
An 83-year-old man had been brutally murdered inside of this house.
This type of violence was just not something that ever happened in villages like this.
The inspector walked up to the door and knocked.
And as soon as the door opened, things only got stranger from there.
Because the victim's wife, who came to the door, had seen the men who killed her husband.
And the image of one of them was burned into her mind.
It was a young man in bright white pants and a hat that looked just like the one the famous fictional English detective Sherlock Holmes wore.
Soon the inspector and his team would find themselves involved in a case where they had no idea what was real and what was simply the imagination of a scared 81-year-old woman.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, just before it rains, sprinkle instant mashed potato powder all over the follow button's front yard.
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In the early evening of August 28, 2003, 83-year-old Eric Hingston was sitting up in bed trying to catch his breath in the small village of Plimpton in the southwest of England.
Eric's 81-year-old wife, Audrey, fluffed up a pillow behind him to make sure he was as comfortable as possible.
She kissed her husband on the cheek, walked across the small upstairs bedroom, and opened up the window.
A cool summer breeze blew in, and Eric instantly seemed to relax.
For the past three years, Eric had been dealing with a series of health issues.
He could only walk short distances with the help of two canes, he had heart problems, and he had a catheter.
But despite these health issues, his wife, Audrey, had worked hard to give Eric as active a life as possible.
And for years, together, they had managed to do just that.
But recently, Eric had also begun to suffer from severe asthma, and so he struggled to breathe a lot of the time.
He had tried different medicines and treatments, but sitting upright in his bed with the window open seemed to be the only thing that brought him any relief.
Audrey turned from the window and looked back at her husband on the bed, and she smiled.
She could see his breathing had started to slow down, and he had a calm look on his face now.
Eric gave a little smile back to his wife, but it was obviously forced.
He hated that he was stuck in bed so much of the time lately.
It was just not how he'd imagined his life playing out.
And a big reason for that was because Eric had spent the early part of his life in peak physical condition, facing dangers that most people couldn't even imagine.
When he was a young man, he joined the Royal Air Force, and he had become a highly decorated World War II pilot who flew covert missions into occupied France.
After leaving the military, he no longer risked his life on a regular basis, but he still pushed himself to work hard all the time and to accomplish any goals he set for himself.
Eric got married to his first wife, they started a family, and he opened and ran a very successful neighborhood butcher shop that was located below the house where he still lived.
And so for decades, Eric had been a highly respected war hero, business owner, and beloved member of the community.
But now, he just felt like a burden. Eric's second wife, Audrey, sat down in a chair near the bed and took his hand.
The two of them had gotten married later in life, when they were in their 60s, after both of their first spouses had passed away.
Audrey knew Eric hated the situation he was in now, but she reminded him that they had shared almost 20 wonderful years together and she wouldn't trade that for anything.
Audrey asked Eric if he needed any more help, but he just said he just wanted to know how the butcher shop was doing.
Audrey shook her head and sighed. One of Eric's sons now ran the family business and he ran it well, but Eric just could never quite let the shop go.
Audrey told him she was sure everything was just fine, but she told him she would head down to look into the shop just to check in on things.
And so she patted Eric's hand, stood up, walked out of the bedroom and down a flight of old wooden stairs and stepped outside of the house.
The street where Audrey and Eric lived in the suburban village of Plimpton had barely changed in decades.
The butcher shop was connected to the house, but it had its own entrance, and right next door was a popular old neighborhood pub.
Stone houses lined the little neighborhood, and Audrey could see the spires of St.
Mary's Church, which dated back to the 1300s, rising up in the distance.
Audrey walked just a few feet to the entrance of the butcher shop.
A bell rang above the door as she stepped inside, and right away she saw Eric's son, James, standing behind the counter and slicing into a piece of meat for a customer.
James waved at Audrey, and she walked over, and the two spoke for a few minutes.
Eric's children and Audrey's own children had been adults when the couple first got together, so Audrey hadn't played any part in raising Eric's kids.
But she'd always gotten along well with all of them, and she was thankful that James had dedicated himself to keeping the family shop up and running.
A few more customers walked in, and so Audrey said she didn't want to get in the way of business, so she said goodbye to James and walked back outside.
She smiled at a pair of young men who were heading into the pub next door, and she could see the street starting to come to life as people got off from work and headed out for the evening.
Audrey took a breath. She missed the days when she and Eric would duck into the pub for a pint and end up talking to their friends for hours, and she knew Eric missed that too.
She walked back to the house and put on a smile.
She didn't want Eric to see that she was feeling a bit sad about how their lives had changed since he'd gotten sick.
Audrey walked upstairs to the bedroom and checked on her husband.
He was still sitting up in bed, feeling the breeze on his face.
He told her he felt like his breathing was much better, but he was feeling a bit tired, so he might just go to sleep.
He asked Audrey to keep the light on, which she almost always did anyways, in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night.
Then Eric gave his wife a kiss and closed his eyes.
Audrey told him to sleep well, then she walked to the bedroom door, but she stopped before she walked out.
She could hear loud noises coming from the pub next door.
She thought about closing the window to block the noise, but she knew Eric could sleep through loud sounds, and having the window open meant he got fresh air.
So she left the window open, glanced back at her husband one more time, who was already falling asleep, and then she walked out of the room.
At 3.45 a.m. on the following day, August 29th, so several hours after Eric had gone to sleep, Audrey was back in his bedroom.
But this time she just stood there in the doorway, trembling.
She looked at the open window and then down at the floor, and she felt confused and scared. she slowly walked across the room, picked up the phone on the bedside table, and took a deep breath.
With her hands shaking, she dialed 999, the emergency number in the United Kingdom.
Minutes after Audrey's call, police and paramedics sped down the small village street towards Audrey and Eric's house, their sirens waking up people all around the quiet neighborhood.
Detective Inspector Tony Carney of the Devon and Cornwall Police parked on the street and followed several paramedics to Audrey and Eric's front door.
Carney knocked on the door, and within seconds, Audrey answered.
The sight of the small, frail-looking older woman in her bathrobe hit Carney hard.
She looked terrified, and when Carney introduced himself to her, he could tell she was confused and struggling to put words together.
Carney made sure the paramedics could get inside the house and head upstairs to the bedroom, but Carney stayed at the door with Audrey.
Carney's first thought was that this poor woman should not be here while the police searched her house.
She should be somewhere else where she felt safe and calm.
Carney also knew he was dealing with a crime scene here and he didn't want Audrey to accidentally touch or move potential evidence.
So he asked her if there were any family members she might be able to stay with while the police were inside of her home.
Audrey looked up at him and slowly nodded.
She said her son was a retired police inspector and he lived not too far away.
Kearney signaled for another officer to come to the door, and he arranged for him to drive Audrey to her son's house.
Once Kearney felt sure that Audrey would be looked after, he put on his gloves, stepped inside the home, and walked upstairs to the bedroom.
And when he got up there, he felt like he'd stumbled into a TV crime drama or something.
Because on the floor of the bedroom, he saw all the paramedics gathered around Eric Kingston, who had clearly been dead when they got there.
And Eric had been brutally stabbed in his collarbone.
On several British TV shows, murders took place in small English villages every week.
But in reality, murder cases in places like Plimpton were virtually unheard of.
And specifically, the murder of an older man in his 80s like Eric was just really not something that ever happened anywhere near here.
Carney glanced around the bedroom. All of the dresser drawers had been pulled open and clothes covered most of the wooden floor.
He looked over at the open window and on the windowsill, he saw a black plastic bin liner, the British term for trash bag.
He walked over to the window, looked in the bag, and saw several pieces of expensive jewelry inside.
And something outside the window also caught his eye.
Carney leaned out, and in the glow of a single outdoor light, he saw a metal ladder perched against the house just below the bedroom window.
Just then, Carney heard someone calling his name.
He leaned back inside from the window, turned, and saw a small team of forensics officers entering the bedroom.
Carney asked the paramedics to clear out, and he gave the forensics team a few minutes to search the room without getting in their way.
And soon, it was pretty clear that all the investigators and first responders believed the same thing.
This had to have been a robbery gone bad.
Someone must have climbed up the ladder into the bedroom, stolen some jewelry, and then Eric must have woken up, tried to stop them, so they killed him.
But if that was the case, Carney wondered why the thief had left the jewelry behind.
Did they just panic or did Audrey catch them in the act?
The thief killed Eric, but maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to kill a woman who probably looked a lot like their grandmother.
The forensics team continued their work in the bedroom and Carney headed back downstairs and outside.
Police officers had cordoned off the house with crime scene tape and the neighbors had come out of their homes and had started to ask questions.
Carney had worked cases in a number of other small villages, and he knew that even residents with the best intentions could end up slowing down an investigation.
News about crimes in these small towns, especially a violent crime, spread fast and led to wild rumors and speculation and misinformation.
And people would start calling the police, claiming they saw dangerous criminals on every street corner and in every pub.
Carney walked back to his car and called into the station.
He said he wanted a mobile command unit set up near the house and he wanted officers on site whose sole purpose would be to answer questions from the community and provide as much transparency as possible.
After that, Carney walked away from his car and informed the officers outside that they would have help soon.
But before Carney could go back into the house, he saw another uniformed officer leading a middle-aged man towards him.
The man looked almost as dazed as Audrey had.
The man introduced himself as the victim's son, James, and he said he ran the family butcher shop connected to the house.
A friend who lived nearby had called him to tell him what was going on, and James said he had spoken to the uniformed officer, so he already knew his dad was dead.
Carney eyed James and then looked over at the shop.
He wondered if it was too much of a coincidence that James worked at a butcher shop, presumably with knives, and his father was the murder victim who had been stabbed to death.
James told Carney he still needed to call the rest of his family to let them know what had happened.
Carney said he understood, however, before he left, he wanted to know if anyone who worked at the butcher shop, or anyone who might have worked there in the past, could possibly have had a grudge against his father.
James shook his head and said no. He said police could talk to anyone who had ever worked for his dad, or anyone in the neighborhood for that matter, and they would all say they loved Eric, like family.
Carney said how sorry he was again, and then told James he would follow up when he needed to, and then Carney walked back inside the house.
Up in the bedroom, Carney found the forensics team combing over every inch of the floor, and also bagging jewelry and clothing as potential evidence.
One of the officers told Carney that they had pulled blood samples from Eric's body, but they hadn't found that much blood on the floors or the walls.
They believed the stab wound had been deep enough to puncture Eric's lung and kill him, but it hadn't actually caused a lot of bleeding.
The forensics officer said the puncture spot on Eric's body was deeper than it was wide, which most likely meant the blade was very, very sharp.
The officer also said that they still had not found the murder weapon or any usable fingerprints in the room or outside of the window, but they would keep on looking.
Carney hoped the team would eventually find usable prints, but he thought he might not even need them, because he believed there was a good chance Audrey had interrupted the robbery and gotten a good look at her husband's killer.
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On August 30th, so a day after the discovery of Eric's body, Carney and his partner, Neil Treeby, knocked on the front door of a small house in a town not far from Plimpton. a man in his mid-50s answered.
He told the investigators that he was Audrey's son and that yes, he was a retired police detective sergeant.
Carney and Treeby felt lucky their potential main witness's son was a former cop.
He could help them explain what was happening in the investigation to his mother and also maybe make her feel safer and more comfortable when she was speaking to them.
Audrey's son led them into the front room of the house, where Audrey was sitting on the couch.
Somehow, she looked even smaller and more frail than the day before, when Carney had met her.
But Audrey smiled and politely asked if the officers wanted a cup of tea or coffee.
They thanked her, but they said they were fine for now, and then Audrey's son sat down next to his mother, and the investigators sat in chairs across from them.
Carney said how sorry he was for her loss.
He knew this must all be frightening and confusing.
Audrey nodded, but she said she would not let fear or confusion get in the way of helping the police.
And then, without any prompting, she said she had seen the men who killed her husband in the bedroom.
Carney leaned in and asked if he'd heard her right.
There was more than one killer? Audrey nodded and said there were two young men.
Treeby quickly asked if she knew these men, or if she could at least give a clear description of them.
Audrey turned and looked at her son, and he told her she should tell them everything she knew.
Audrey turned back to the investigators.
She told them she had been sleeping in the guest bedroom, and she said she usually did that because Eric liked to keep the window open and the light on at night, which made it difficult for her to fall asleep.
And so the other night, or early in the morning, she had woken up when she heard noise coming from the main bedroom where Eric was sleeping.
It sounded like someone was groaning and something banging against the wall.
Audrey said she figured it was just Eric trying to fumble for his canes to try to stand up and get out of bed, and so she got up and walked down the hall.
And at this point, Audrey sort of trailed off.
She seemed like she couldn't go on with her story.
The investigators didn't want to push her, but her son gently encouraged her to keep going.
And at some point, Audrey did begin talking again.
She said when she got to the bedroom, her husband was lying on the floor, bleeding, and there were these two young men standing over him.
One was holding a knife, and the other was holding a plastic bag.
She screamed, and when she did, they ran for the window, climbed out, and disappeared.
However, the one that had been holding the bag dropped the bag on the way out.
But Audrey said before they escaped, she did get a good look at them.
She said she didn't know their names, but she definitely recognized them from the village, and they were really distinct looking.
She said one was kind of short, maybe 5'8", and the other was at least 6'1", and he wore bright white pants and a deerstalker hat, just like the one Sherlock Holmes wore.
Carney glanced over at his partner. He didn't say anything, but a killer wearing bright pants and also wearing a Sherlock Holmes-style hat seemed really bizarre, sort of like he was on some fictional TV crime drama.
Carney asked Audrey if she wouldn't mind giving a detailed description of these two men to a police sketch artist.
He also said that he didn't want to pressure her, but if she was willing to go on TV and speak directly to the public about what these men looked like, it could be helpful.
Audrey turned and spoke to her son for a few moments, and then after that, she turned back to the investigators and nodded her head.
She agreed to do anything that would help get her justice for her husband and bring some closure for his kids.
On September 4th, so five days after Eric's murder, Inspectors Carney and Treeby stood next to Audrey in a large conference room filled with newspaper and television reporters.
Police had already started to circulate the drawings of the suspects around town, but Plimpton was just one of several small villages that surrounded the much larger city of Plymouth, so the investigators believed getting the description out on television was key to reaching more people across the entire area.
The investigators also believed if people just saw Audrey telling her tragic story, they might be more willing to help.
Carney conveyed the basics of the case to the press, and then he introduced Audrey.
She stood there for a second in silence, just staring out at the cameras pointed directly at her.
She tried to keep her composure, and she spent a minute looking at some notes she had written down.
Finally, in a soft voice, she thanked the community for all the love and support they had shown her and her family in the wake of this tragedy, and then she gave a detailed description of the two men she believed killed her husband.
Afterward, Audrey stopped and looked down at the piece of paper shaking in her hands.
She swallowed and closed her eyes, trying to fight back tears.
After a few seconds, she opened her eyes, looked right into one of the cameras, and said very dramatically that there was no need for these men to have done this to Eric.
Even if he had tried to fight them off, he was no threat to these two young men.
They could have just pushed him aside and left with whatever they wanted.
They didn't have to kill him. This press conference sparked an even bigger outpouring of sympathy for Audrey and the family, but it also led to a level of tension and fear that was totally foreign inside of Plimpton.
People were now too scared to go out at night, and shopkeepers considered closing their doors early just in case these two murderous young men were out stalking their next victim.
However, within just a few days, Audrey's press conference would prove to have been the right decision.
On an afternoon in early September, Carney and Treeby were working together in Carney's office when a uniformed police officer opened the door.
He told them that two men had come to the station saying they needed to speak to the investigators who were handling the Eric Hengston murder case because they said they were the men that Audrey had identified as being the killers.
Inspectors Carney and Treeby rushed through the station and they found these two young men standing with several officers. and they did look exactly like the two young men Audrey had described.
The inspectors felt a huge rush because it was like the solution to their case had just fallen right into their laps.
Carney and Treeby brought the two young men into an interview room, and Carney asked them flat out if they had come to turn themselves in for Eric's murder.
But both young men immediately just shook their heads and said no.
The taller of the two men said they'd seen Audrey's press conference, and they immediately knew she was describing them. but they had nothing to do with her husband's murder.
Treeby said if they knew immediately that they were the men Audrey was talking about, why had they waited several days to come in?
The young man looked at each other for a second, and then the tall one kept talking for both of them.
He said they were scared. Not only did they match Audrey's description, but they also thought people in the village would decide they were guilty right away no matter what they said because they happened to live in a bail hostel in town.
A bail hostel was a place where people who had been charged for crimes but had been released on bail could live if they didn't have a permanent residence of their own.
Essentially, a bail hostel allowed law enforcement to know where they could find these people if they needed to until their case went to trial.
Carney and Treeby exchanged a look. They knew these young men were right.
A lot of people in the village would assume they were dangerous criminals and decide they were guilty of murder regardless of the truth.
But this didn't change the fact that Audrey had clearly described both of them, so Carney wanted to know how they could explain that if they were not the men Audrey had seen in Eric's room.
The shorter of the two men finally spoke up.
He said he didn't mean any disrespect, but the old woman might just be confused.
They had seen her that day, but not in her house.
Instead, they had seen her when they were walking into a nearby pub.
The taller man then quickly joined in and said after going to that pub, they went back to the bail hostel and stayed in all night.
And they said the inspectors could speak to the people in charge of the hostel because the hostel had strict curfews and kept track of when people left and came back.
Carney and Treeby got the details of this bail hostel, then excused themselves and left the interview room.
And immediately, Carney called the hostel, and the person who answered was able to confirm that both of those men were at the hostel at the time of Eric's murder.
And so any rush of adrenaline the inspectors had felt when these two men came to the station had now quickly disappeared.
Now, there was a chance that these young men could have snuck out of the hostel and made their way to Eric and Audrey's without anybody noticing, but that was not the most likely scenario.
Especially considering that these two men had literally sought out the police.
And if Audrey really had seen them at the pub that day, there was a chance that in her shock and confusion, she had just remembered these two guys when she was trying to picture the men who were inside of her house.
Carney and Treeby returned to the interview room.
They let the two young men go, but made it clear they would follow up with the bail hostel, so the men should make sure not to leave the village anytime soon.
But once the young men were gone, Carney and Treeby admitted that if Audrey had confused these two guys with the actual killers, the investigation basically had nothing to go on.
With two potential suspects off their list for the time being, Carney and Treeby decided to head back to Eric and Audrey's neighborhood.
At the mobile command center the police had set up near the house, the inspector spoke with shop owners, old family friends, and delivery drivers and paper boys who might have seen something while they were on their routes early in the morning when Eric was killed.
But nobody seemed to have seen or heard anything unusual.
And so with very little to go on, Carney and Treeby couldn't help but keep coming back to the idea that their victim ran a butcher shop and he had been stabbed with what forensics officers believed was a very sharp blade, something that would be in a butcher shop.
So maybe two men from the shop had broken into the house and killed Eric with a butcher knife.
They most likely would have had easy access to the home working so close.
But when they spoke to Eric's son James and the few other people who worked at the shop, all of them appeared to have very strong alibis, so the inspectors could not directly tie any of them to the break-in or to Eric's murder.
On September 11th, two weeks after the murder, Kearney and Treeby started to feel like the case was already slipping away from them.
Their interactions in the community had not yielded any new evidence, forensics officers had returned to the house but still had not found any usable prints, and test results from the blood samples taken from Eric's body and the bedroom floor only matched Eric.
And to make things even more bleak for the investigation, several people connected to the bail hostel had now officially corroborated the young man's alibi.
So it seemed like the killer in the bright white pants with the Sherlock Holmes hat was really just a product of Audrey's fear and confusion.
That day, while Carney and Treeby continued to look for anything they might have missed in their case files, they suddenly got a call from a police officer in a nearby town.
They put the call on speakerphone and they could both tell right away that this officer sounded upset.
He said he had been dispatched to Audrey's son's house because Audrey had attempted suicide by overdosing on pills.
The officer said that paramedics had gotten Audrey to the hospital fast enough to save her life.
But he also said he had found a suicide note on site and the note read, please catch the terrible people who ruined my life.
I cannot live without Eric. As soon as Carney and Treeby hung up, a sense of guilt hit both of them.
They knew their investigation had not really been going on that long, but the fact that they still had not found the killers had clearly taken a toll on Audrey.
Carney and Treeby left the station and headed right to the hospital to check on Audrey in person.
When they arrived, they learned that Audrey was okay, however, for now, she just needed to rest and recover on her own.
So the inspectors, instead of speaking to Audrey, spoke briefly with a social worker who had met with Audrey when she was first brought into the hospital.
And after this conversation, the inspectors decided they needed to start from scratch.
There had to be something inside of Audrey and Eric's house that they and their team had simply missed.
And they had to make sure they found it before anything like this suicide attempt happened again.
Not long after this hospital visit, Carney and Treeby led their investigative team back to Audrey and Eric's house.
And this time, they wanted to recreate the robbery and murder as best as they could, hoping this might lead to hidden fingerprints or some new idea about what could have happened.
They started by having two police officers place the ladder outside against the house, scale it, and then try to climb into the bedroom window.
And what they discovered is because of the way the window was designed and where it was situated in the house, it meant that somebody would have to awkwardly stretch up from the ladder, grab onto a small piece of cement, and pull themselves up and over the windowsill and into the bedroom.
This proved to be so difficult that even the youngest, most fit cop on the team couldn't do it.
And so the only other option for the killers, assuming they were using this ladder, would have been to use the ladder to climb onto the roof of the house and then scale down from the roof and sort of swing themselves into the bedroom.
And this scenario, much like the first one, required a lot of strength and to some degree a level of fearlessness because the risk of falling was quite high.
And even with all that, it still would have been really hard to pull off.
So police wondered if maybe the killers had somehow practiced this maneuver beforehand.
After the investigative team tried several more times to run through various ladder scenarios, they headed back inside the house to do another complete search.
Now, Kearney and Treeby had no idea if during this search they would find anything new.
The house had already been searched on three separate occasions.
But they still encouraged their team to literally look everywhere in this house, even in places where it didn't even seem possible that a clue could turn up.
And after another lengthy search, when Carney and Treeby had both become convinced that they were going to come up short again, they heard an officer shouting their names from the kitchen.
Carney and Treeby ran through the house.
In the kitchen, they saw an officer standing by an open drawer with his back to them.
Carney asked what was going on, and the officer said he'd found something that was stuck in the small space between the drawer and the counter the drawer was in.
Carney and Treeby just stood there with bated breath as this officer jimmied the drawer to try to free what was stuck there.
And then finally, the officer got it free, and he turned around, and in a gloved hand, he showed them what was stuck.
It was a knife with a red handle and a sharp 7-inch blade.
It was the type of knife that would most likely be used by a chef or a butcher.
That knife was immediately sent to the crime lab for testing, and when the results from those tests came back, it only confirmed what Carney and Treeby already knew.
This knife had cracked Eric's murder case.
Based on test results from the crime lab, forensic evidence, and interviews conducted during the investigation, the following is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Eric Hinkston.
In the early morning hours of August 29, 2003, the killer dragged a tall metal ladder from Eric and Audrey's back garden to the side of the house.
It was dark, except for a couple of house lights on the street, and the neighborhood was completely quiet.
The killer placed the ladder against the house beneath the bedroom window, and as they placed it there, the metal of the ladder clanged against the concrete of the house, and the killer froze.
They looked around nervously, but there were no signs that the noise they had just made had attracted any attention.
So after that, the killer, instead of walking up the ladder, walked around to the front door of the house and went inside.
And they headed up the stairs, holding a sharp 7-inch blade in one hand and a plastic bin liner in the other.
Each step they took on the staircase made the house creak, so the killer moved slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible.
The killer reached the top of the stairs, walked down a short hallway, and entered the bedroom where Eric was sleeping.
The light was on and the killer saw Eric sitting up in his bed.
However, he was fast asleep. The killer placed the plastic bag down on the floor, then took a breath, gripped the knife tight, and walked across the room.
They stood over the side of the bed staring down at Eric.
Then they raised the knife up and slammed it down into Eric's collarbone.
Eric woke up wheezing and trying to scream.
Blood began running down his shirt and he used all of his strength to pull himself up out of bed.
But as soon as he was up, he just collapsed and fell to the floor.
The killer just stood there watching Eric as his breathing got slower and more strained until Eric went still.
He had died. The killer then walked to the dresser, opened up the drawers and began tossing articles of clothing all over the floor.
When they had almost emptied the dresser, they stopped, went over and grabbed their bin liner, and then walked over to a jewelry box that was sitting on the bedroom vanity, and they dumped most of the jewelry that was inside of it into the liner.
The killer carried the now full bag across the room and placed it on the windowsill.
Then they looked outside through the open window to make sure the ladder was still in place, and it was.
Satisfied, the killer left the bedroom, went downstairs, but instead of going outside, they went into the kitchen, and they calmly hid the murder weapon in the space between a kitchen drawer and the counter.
After that, the killer walked to the front room, sat down on the couch, and waited almost two hours before they called the police to report a robbery and murder that had taken place inside of their own home.
81-year-old Audrey Hingston had murdered her husband.
It turned out that Audrey had grown tired of having to take care of Eric full-time.
She missed her old life of going out, visiting the pub, and spending time with her friends.
Over the years, Eric's health issues had started to make her feel completely trapped, so she came up with a plan to kill him and make it look like a robbery.
Audrey went as far as to pick the two young men she would pin the murder on.
She often saw these two young men walking around the neighborhood and visiting the pub, then she knew they lived in the bail hostel, so she thought they would look guilty.
But even after these suspects that Audrey identified came to police and provided strong alibis, Carney and Treeby didn't turn their attention to Audrey and think she was guilty.
Instead, they truly believed that Audrey had just been confused and that she really had seen two young men robbing her house and killing her husband, just not these two young men.
However, following Audrey's suicide attempt, the inspectors met with a social worker who'd been speaking to Audrey.
And the social worker said it was so strange, but despite what Audrey's notes said about the reason she had attempted suicide was because of her grief over her husband's death, that this social worker's experience with Audrey had been that Audrey had almost no grief or sadness about her husband being dead.
And so after hearing this, the inspectors did not immediately believe this 81-year-old woman was a murderer, but they thought she might not be telling them the whole truth about what had happened.
And so it was at that point that they tried to recreate the break-in using the ladder outside to get a better idea of what Audrey might have witnessed, but the inspectors quickly discovered that it would have been incredibly difficult, if not downright impossible, to pull off the break-in using the ladder.
So when police found the knife hidden in the kitchen, they felt confident that there had not even been a robbery at all, that nobody had used the ladder to break in, and that instead, very likely, someone close to Eric had simply entered his house through the front door and killed him.
Now, at this point, the inspectors suspected that either Eric's son, James, or maybe one of the other workers at the butcher shop were the killer.
However, the only DNA found on that knife discovered in the kitchen was Audrey's.
The inspectors had followed up with James, and when he heard about this knife that was found in the kitchen, he was in complete shock.
Because he said just a week before the murder, Audrey had come into the butcher shop and asked him to sharpen that specific knife.
After Carney and Treeby confronted Audrey with all of this evidence, her son, who was the former policeman, was sure his mother had killed Eric, and he convinced her to confess.
At the time, Audrey became one of the oldest women in British history to be jailed for murder.
But because of the circumstances and her age, she actually only served seven months in prison.
After her release, she was banned from returning to Plimpton or contacting Eric's family for several years.
Audrey died in 2016. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
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Hey listeners, Mr. Ballin here. What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light.
And it's called Lawless Planet. Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
From activists who vanish in the Amazon to whistleblowers uncovering billion-dollar environmental crimes, these aren't just stories about the environment.
They're real-life thrillers about people caught between powerful forces willing to kill to keep their secrets buried.
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