Dark Land: Hunting the Killers

Maureen Mulcahy was a 23-year-old single mother of two, living with her parents on a council estate in Aberavon. On Saturday 21 February 1976, Maureen went out drinking with a friend. At 11:30pm, she was dropped off outside the Green Meadow pub to meet somebody. What happened next is unknown, but Maureen’s body was found the following morning by a man walking his dog behind Aberavon Rugby Club. Maureen had been strangled, and although her clothes were disturbed, there was no evidence of sexual assault. Initially, the investigation was focused on the pub, which was full of migrant workers and local men celebrating the Welsh rugby team’s recent victory over Ireland. In total, the police interviewed over 1,000 men, but few suspects emerged, and the case went cold. In this episode of Dark Land, the team attempts to solve the crime that has cast a shadow over Aberavon for many decades. In a major breakthrough, the team discovers clues that suggest Maureen may have been the victim of a serial killer. And a new witness comes forward and breaks a silence of 30 years with a shocking new testimony.

A quiet Cardiff community was devastated in 1959 by the abduction of six-year-old Carol Ann Stephens, last seen getting into a car with a mysterious, dark-haired stranger. A nationwide recovery effort was launched, but two weeks after her disappearance, Carol Ann’s body was found in a brook, 60 miles from where she’d been taken. It was a shocking murder that left her family distraught, and one that also had wider ramifications for a nation still basking in the twilight of the prosperous 1950s. As automobile ownership boomed, it brought with it a new set of dangers – and a terrifying new kind of predatory killer, one who prowled the streets preying on vulnerable children. Carol Ann’s killer was never caught, but her death alerted authorities to the sinister reality of modern Britain. In this episode of Dark Land, the team reinvestigates the murder of Carol Ann Stephens, making one bombshell discovery that leads them to identify a new prime suspect, and takes them to the brink of cracking a cold case that has long cast a shadow over Wales’ capital city.

The murder of Muriel Drinkwater remains one of the most infamous unsolved murders in Welsh criminal history. Muriel was a 12-year-old schoolgirl who, whilst walking home from school one day in 1946, was brutally assaulted in the woods near her home in Penllergaer, before being shot dead. Her body was discovered the following day, just a few hundred yards from where her parents had anxiously awaited her safe return from school. Over the decades, although the culprit has never been caught, several key discoveries have been made to advance the investigation. But due in part to the scientific limitations of the day, such discoveries failed to produce major breakthroughs. In this episode of Dark Land, the team applies modern day forensic techniques to the available facts. What they uncover edges Muriel’s killer closer to being identified and provides answers to at least some of the questions that her family have been asking since the day she died.

Not a great deal is known about the murky, itinerant life of George Shotton. One certainty is that by the time of his death in 1958, he had manged to get away with the murder of his first wife, Mamie, in 1919. The question the team is asking in this episode of Dark Land is: did Shotton go on to kill again? Shotton was a naval engineer who wed Mamie Stuart in 1918, despite already being a married man, only to be caught and convicted of bigamy two years later. Though suspected of Mamie’s disappearance around this time – not least because of a trunk full of her possessions found dropped off at a Swansea hotel – he managed to evade conviction. It wasn’t until 1961, when divers discovered human remains in a cave near Caswell Bay, that he was posthumously sentenced for the crime. The case that the investigative team are looking at in conjunction with Mamie’s death is a 1934 incident known as the Brighton Trunk Murder, in which a dismembered body was found split between two trunks in train stations in Brighton and London. Given the similarities between this murder and that of Mamie Stuart, the team believes that Shotton could be a prime suspect for this murder too.