Anne Dunwell: 60th anniversary of one of South Yorkshire's most brutal and unsolved murders

One of South Yorkshire’s most brutal murders has now gone unsolved for 60 years.

On May 6, 1964, a 13-year-old girl was found naked and strangled with her own stockings on a country lane the night after she had failed to return home.

Anne Dunwell had been visiting an aunt in the village of Bramley, but had decided to return to the home she shared with her grandparents in the nearby village of Whiston, located between Sheffield and Rotherham.

She had decided to return to keep her grandmother company, because her grandfather was working a night shift, but never caught the bus.

A lorry driver, named Thomas Wilson, was heading along Slade Hooton Lane on his way to work early the following morning when he spotted Anne’s body.

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Describing the experience at the time, he said: “I was driving down the lane when I saw what I thought was a tailor’s dummy with its feet in the hedge and back on the manure heap. I thought it was a practical joke and drove on. When I got to work, I told my brother-in-law what I had seen and to make sure we drove back. We went within two yards of the body, which had a stocking round its neck, and noticed that the legs were badly bruised. There were also bruises on the face. The arms seemed as if they had been placed behind the back.”

A post-mortem would later reveal that Anne had been strangled with her own stockings and viciously sevually assaulted.

Police immediately launched a murder probe and it was quickly established that Anne had never caught the bus.

Her family said that she would never have willingly climbed into a vehicle with a stranger, so it was assumed that she had been abducted from the roadside.

A subsequent appeal for ‘courting couples’ who were in the vicinity of where the body was found to come forward, revealed that a young woman matching Anne’s description was seen struggling with a man in a mini-van at around 11pm on the night she died.

But despite the police having several suspects at the time and a photofit of the killer, no arrests were ever made.

In 2002 the investigation was reopened and the case appeared on crime show Crimewatch, but despite advancements in DNA - the killer’s semen was found on the stockings - the killer could not be identified on the national database, and Anne’s murder remains unsolved.