Muriel Drinkwater

The murder of Muriel Drinkwater , also known as the Little Red Riding Hood murder, is an unsolved 1946 child murder case from Wales. Drinkwater, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, was raped and shot in the woods in Penllergaer, Swansea. It is one of the oldest active cold cases in the United Kingdom. In 2008, a DNA profile of the suspect was extracted from Drinkwater's clothes, possibly the oldest sample in the world to be successfully extracted in a murder investigation. In 2019, the DNA was used to rule out notorious Welsh murderer Harold Jones as a suspect.

The police found one of the case's murder weapons, a World War I-era Colt .45 pistol.

Murder and investigation Muriel Joan Drinkwater was the youngest of four daughters born to John Percival and Margaret (née Morgans) Drinkwater. On 27 June 1946, Muriel took the school bus home from Gowerton Grammar School. She was last seen at 2:30 p.m., singing as she began the one-mile walk to her family's home, Tyle-Du Farm. The path she walked home on curved in and out of the woods; her mother saw her walking home along the path and into the woods, but not come out again. The last person who reported seeing her was Hubert Hoyles, then 13, who passed her on the path returning from her family farm, where he had gone to buy eggs.

The next day, Drinkwater's body was found in the woods by a police inspector. She had been raped, bludgeoned about the head and shot twice in the chest. Two days later, police found one of the murder weapons, a World War I-era Colt .45 pistol. Detectives from Scotland Yard came to Swansea to assist in the investigation.

Police visited every house within 150 square miles and interviewed 20,000 men in Swansea and in neighbouring Aberdare and Carmarthenshire. Hubert Hoyles, who saw Drinkwater after buying eggs at her parents' farm, was cleared by the DNA evidence after living under a "cloud of suspicion" for decades.

For more than a decade, Welsh true crime author Neil Milkins theorised that notorious child murderer Harold Jones (1906–1971) was responsible for the murders of both Martin and Drinkwater. There is evidence that Harries was employed by Drinkwater's father, John, at the time of her death.

Public access In 2010, the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on National Records and Archives closed off public access to the case, acting at the behest of Scotland Yard. The public can no longer access the Drinkwater files by Freedom of Information Act requests or in person at the archives office in Kew. The reason given for sealing the files was that it could help the police catch the perpetrator.