Author Description

In the nineteen months, leading up to August 1967, three young school girls were murdered in Staffordshire. The last to be found (22nd August 1967) was 7-year-old Christine Ann Darby. Indeed, the earlier tragic discovery of the bodies of Margaret Reynolds (6) and Diana Tift (5), in January 1966, had already sparked one of the biggest murder investigations in British criminal history...Known at the time as the Cannock Chase (or A34) Murders, the huge and lengthy investigation involved 150 detectives visiting 39,000 homes in the West Midlands area, interviews with over 80,000 people, many by door-to-door, and checks on 1,375,000 car forms, culling 25,000 Austin A55 and A60 vehicles during the exhaustive search. The door-to-door enquiries included questioning people's whereabouts during periods relevant to the murders and as a result - as such important information was very hard to accurately recollect - Gwen Clement decided that, in order avoid any such lapse in memory in the years to come, she would record as many daily activities as possible in personal diaries...when she died, on the 4th March 2014, there were 48 such diaries, containing almost daily entries. These entries gained in momentum as the years passed by and ranged from trivial occurrences, such as hairdresser appointments and dog shampoos, through essentially local and/or family matters, to records of births, deaths and marriages and, occasionally, more auspicious and historical events of the time.