Detectives investigating the murder of Warren Wheeler and his wife Elizabeth described the killing as savage, brutal and among the worst they had seen in policing careers that began at the Second World War’s end.
Five decades later, the couple’s murder in their Boars Hill cottage in October 1973 remains unsolved – despite the confession of a drunkard so notorious for his false claims he was dubbed ‘Kenny the Confessor’.
Ex-Royal Navy stoker Warren Wheeler, 83, was found lying on his back at the home he shared with his wife, Yatscombe Cottage, a condemned property that had neither running water nor electricity.
His face was covered in blood from a gash to his forehead; it was clear he had put up a fight. His wife Elizabeth, 79, was lying nearby, having been badly beaten.
READ MORE: Special report into the unsolved murders in Oxfordshire from 1970s until the 1990s
Despite finding £300 in cash – equivalent to around £3,600 today – in an unlocked case in the couple’s home, detectives’ early theory was that the couple had been murdered by a would-be robber.
The man leading the investigation from Oxford’s central police station, Detective Chief Superintendent Cyril Jones, said: “The money was there to be taken, but obviously the intruder panicked and in my opinion left without his spoils.”
He described the murder as savage, brutal and the worst he had experienced in almost 30 years as a policeman.
The alarm had been raised by a neighbour, who noticed that milk bottles and a newspaper had been left untouched.
She told people at the shop, who called-in the police when they knocked at the Wheelers’ door and got no reply.
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A creature of habit, Navy veteran Mr Wheeler, who after leaving the armed forces forged a career with Salter’s Steamers at Oxford’s Folly Bridge, was last seen on the morning of Monday, October 8, walking towards The Fox public house.
No one in the pub could remember seeing him at the hill-top boozer, where he habitually stopped off for a morning drink.
His body was found near his wife’s at 2.30pm on Tuesday, October 9, more than 24 hours after he had supposedly last been seen.
Hunt for a killer
At least 100 police officers were involved in the hunt for the Wheelers’ killer.
A roadblock was set up around the couple’s cottage, with police officers stopping drivers in the hope someone would remember seeing the bloodstained killer.
The police circulated 1,500 leaflets to residents in the area of Boars Hill.
They warned that the killer might strike again, warning householders to double-check people’s credentials before admitting strangers to their homes.
Within a week of the murder, the police had launched a nationwide search for the couple’s foster son, then 37 years old and a former member of the Territorial Army.
Detectives also sought to speak to two strangers spotted in Boars Hill, near the cottage where the couple were killed.
The first of the two men was seen near Yatscombe Cottage at around 7pm on the Sunday.
Aged 25 to 30, he appeared to be waiting for a bus near the cottage.
The second man was spotted by gas board workers late on Tuesday morning. He was said to look frightened and was walking quickly towards the village of Sunningwell.
Another man sought by police had been seen on the day of the killing, walking towards Oxford from Boars Hill.
Ruddy-faced, he was said to have rough, long dark hair and had scratches down the side of his face.
DCS Jones said he wanted to hear from anyone who may have stopped to give the man a lift.
“They can contact me or any of my detectives at Oxford police station,” he said.
READ MORE: The unsolved murders in Oxfordshire since 2001
Stumped
As the trail went cold, police employed tracker dogs in their hunt for the murder weapon and other clues.
Officers began the painstaking process of taking fingerprints from thousands of men in Boars Hill, Abingdon, Wootton and Sunningwell areas in the hope of finding the killer.
The day after the Wheelers’ funeral in Kidlington in November, a month on from the murder, DCS Jones urged anyone with information about the fatal attack to come forward.
“I believe there could be a mother or a wife somewhere who may be holding information back about the identity of the killer,” he told reporters.
“Someone has lived with this brutal murder on his conscience for five weeks.
“It could be that someone returned home heavily bloodstained or in a shocked condition and that their relatives know this.”
‘I did it’
The apparent breakthrough came in January 1974, when chef Kenneth Nairn called a police station in Manchester and confessed to the murder.
Before the month's end he was in front of the magistrates at Abingdon charged with double murder.
Opening the case against Nairn, then 33, at Oxford Crown Court in July, prosecutor Douglas Draycott QC said the attack was so ferocious that a piece of wood used to batter the couple to death had split into three pieces.
“In a moment of panic or desperation what was intended as stealing was turned into one of the most brutal murders that had ever occurred,” the Crown’s advocate said.
One of the Crown’s witnesses, Ronald Murray, said he saw Nairn at The Fox pub on the Saturday evening – two days before the murder was thought to have been committed.
“He told me that he hadn’t got much money on that night but would have plenty of money on Monday,” Mr Murray told the jury.
Edith Cooper, who saw him at the Barton community centre bingo session, said: “I noticed that he seemed to be flashing his money about.”
Problems
Nairn’s supposed confession started to unravel during the trial.
Its shaky foundations became clear even during the evidence of the prosecution witnesses.
DCI Dennis Wilson told the jury that Nairn initially denied murder when he was remanded by the Abingdon magistrates in January 1974.
He said: “As I was about to leave by the back door of Abingdon police station, Nairn was on my right about to go into a cell.” Nairn shouted after him: “Just a minute.”
Mr Wilson added: “Nairn then said ‘look boys, can I have a word with you?’”
The suspect shrugged off a reminder that his solicitor had told him to write down anything he wished to say, the court was told.
However, he went on to tell them a story at odds with his earlier confession.
Instead, he said he had taken the coach from Oxford to Harrow on the Sunday night, the day before the murder, and asked for lodgings in a pub in the London suburb.
He went to a Bovis office the following morning to collect wages from a job he had worked in Solihull, he said.
Nairn claimed he had then gone to a different Bovis office and was taken on for a job in Yorkshire.
Asked why he had confessed to the murders if, in fact, he had been in the capital, Nairn was said to have told detectives: “My mind has been going round and round.”
After six days of evidence, the prosecution was stopped by the judge and the jury was directed to return not guilty verdicts.
Mr Justice Davies, said Nairn had confessed to a murder in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1971 that he could never have committed and had previously been convicted of making false statements to the police.
He branded the defendant ‘an habitual liar, an habitual romancer and false confessor’.
There was insufficient evidence beyond Nairn’s unreliable confession to prove the case against him, he said.
‘Kenny the Confessor’
In a tell-all interview following his acquittal, Nairn told the Reading Evening Post that his police confession was given under duress and branded some of the police evidence at his trial ‘absolute nonsense’.
“I did not know what I was saying when I was interviewed by the police. I am an alcoholic and when the police picked me up I had just drunk two-and-a-half bottles of whiskey,” he said in a broad Scots brogue, speaking to the reporter outside his mother’s home in Mather Road, Barton.
So notorious was he in his hometown of Dundee, the press clippings proclaimed of the habitual liar, ‘they call him Kenny the Confessor’.
- Thames Valley Police confirmed that the murder remained unsolved, one of a number of files on the force cold cases team’s books. No one has been arrested in connection with the Wheelers’ killings.
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