Minnie Stott

November 1940. The blackout has put Bolton's lights out, and at seven minutes to midnight a constable's lamp finds a seventeen-year-old girl lying strangled in a garage yard off Bradshawgate.

Minnie Stott, Peggy to everyone who loved her, had told her mother she was going to the pictures.

What follows is one of the strangest cold cases in Greater Manchester's history: a soldier traced and cleared, a photograph of somebody's children lying unclaimed beside her body, her picture projected onto the town's cinema screens, a girl in a red scarf who was never identified, and a woman at a bus stop whose story the coroner called wicked.

Nobody was ever charged. Eighty-six years on, it is said to be the oldest unsolved killing on Greater Manchester's books.

As mum to an 18 year old girl, this case gave me chills. Minnie – Peggy – seems a lot like my 21st Century daughter. Hard working, friendly, keeps herself to herself. I can’t even imagine what her parents went through.

The wartime setting and the blackout also made this one really atmospheric for me – my dad would have been 8 years old when this story takes place, living in London (though probably evacuated by this point). He’s long gone but I remember his stories from wartime.

What is frustrating with this story – as with some others we cover – is that someone KNEW the answers. People kept quiet. Who was the girl in the red scarf, who was the woman at the bus stop? Someone commented on this on YouTube and wondered why people don’t at least confess on their deathbeds – I suppose that they don’t want to change the good opinion their loved ones hold of them at the last moment. But taking secrets like this to the grave when you could have finally given a family peace? That feels wrong.