On the 15th of November 1912, two young cousins, ten year old Amy Collinson and seven year old Frances Nicholson were brutally murdered on their way home from a rehearsal for a Christmas concert. Amy had also been raped. A 24 year old man called Walter Sykes was soon arrested, tried and hanged for the murder, but local people thought that he was innocent and that Amy’s foster father, Arthur Collinson, was the perpetrator of this horrendous crime. More than a hundred years later, local people still believe that to be true. In this book, I examine all the evidence to try to answer the question as to who committed the crime. Was it Walter Sykes? Was it Arthur Collinson? Or was it someone else who murdered them and got away scot-free. Examine the evidence and see what you think.
After publishing this book, I was contacted by a man whose father had heard a deathbed confession, I was also contacted by a relative of the dead girls who got startling messages from a psychic, An updated version of the book, detailing the alleged confession, and "voices from the grave" has been published this year.