Weird Coincidences in Crime

C. A. Asbrey

On 12th October, 2000, forty-eight year-old Mary Henderson Morris left her home in Houston to go to work and was never seen alive again. She had failed to answer her husband’s call throughout the day, and three days later a body was found in a burned-out car. It was identified as her, and police could find no motive for the murder, and due to the condition of the body, it was hard to establish how she died. Her wedding ring was missing.

Three days later, the body of thirty-nine-year-old Mary Morris was discovered in her car in nearly the exact spot under extremely similar circumstances. The first Mary had been a bank worker, the second was a nurse practitioner and was in charge of a number of clinics. Neither woman knew the other, and there seemed to be no connections between the two. Police began to investigate their backgrounds and found that the second Mary had experienced worrying behaviour from a man working with her, and her husband had been concerned enough to get her a gun. She had told a friend in a phone call that a man had given her “the creeps” in a drugstore, and she was going to go back to work to sign off her computer before returning home. Twelve minutes later, she made a frantic call to 911 begging for help during an apparent attack and abduction.

Her husband’s alibi was that he was at the movies with their daughter, but police found that she had had an affair, that their marriage was in difficulty. The second Mary also had a large life insurance policy. The husband was the main suspect, and refused to take a polygraph test, as did the co-worker she had been having problems with. The second Mary’s wedding ring was also missing at the scene, but the daughter was later seen wearing it, and the family claimed that they’d ‘found it’. Notably, contract killers often take the wedding ring as evidence of the kill to get paid.

Is that why the wedding ring went missing from both bodies? Was the first Mary Morris was a victim of mistaken identity due to the similarity in names? The murders remain unsolved.

On May 27, 1817, in Erdington, Birmingham, England, at 6:30 a.m. on May 27, 1817, a man on his way to work found a bundle of clothing, a hat, and shoes near a water-filled pit. He raised the alert as this was not a swimming hole, and the pool was dragged. They found the bruised body of Mary Ashford, presumably raped before her death. They found footsteps of a man and woman found in a nearby field, but in the days before forensics, they had to follow a more basic trail of evidence.

The victim had been a popular young woman who had attended a local dance the night before with friend, and changed at her house before the festivities. She and her friend had spent the latter part of the dance with Benjamin Carter and Abraham Thornton. The foursome left the dance at midnight, with her friend, Hannah Cox, walking along Chester Road until Hannah returned home and Mary and Abraham stayed out. Carter returned to the dance, which commonly finished at dawn at that time.

Mary was last seen back at Hannah’s house at 4AM, changing out of her dance clothes to the everyday dress she’d previously left there when dressing for the dance with her friend. The victim was happy betrayed nothing to be concerned about in general conversation, and was seen alone along the road soon after by witnesses. Her body was discovered a few hours later, and she was confirmed to have died by drowning.

Abraham Thornton was arrested and told police, “I cannot believe she is murdered; why, I was with her until four o’clock this morning.” Abraham told detectives he had been intimate with Mary and that they talked and gazed up at the sky. Abraham claims to have walked her part of the way back to Hannah’s house and to have for her outside, but Mary told Hannah none of this. Abraham then claimed to have left when Mary didn’t return to him.

Thornton’s trial started on 8th August, and three witnesses confirmed his alibi. That and a lack of any concrete evidence led to him to being acquitted, despite a showy challenge to her brother that was a hangover from feudal law; who didn’t rise to the provocation. The murder was never solved, but Abraham Thornton was so reviled by the public that he fled to the USA.

Exactly 157 years later to the day, 27th May 1974, another woman was raped, murdered and found in a watery ditch in Erdington Park. Barbara Forrest was a nurse at nearby at Pype Hayes Children’s Home. She, too, had gone missing on Whit Monday. Statements say that Barbara was with her boyfriend Simon Belcher at several bars on the evening of her death. Belcher’s said he walked her to the bus at 1 a.m. and never saw her again. Detectives zeroed in on a co-worker of Barbara’s, Michael Ian Thornton. Thornton lived on Chester Road and the police found bloodstains on Thornton’s pants and uncovered a false alibi from his mother. They apprehended him and charged him for the slaying, but was acquitted for lack of evidence.

True crime experts read through the Ashford murder of 1817, and compare it to the one in 1974. Whit Monday had been on 26 May both in 1817 and 1975 (a lunar date. It’s not always the same date). Both victims were found within 300 yards of one another, shared the same birth date, visited their best friend on the evening of the Whit Monday to change into a new dress for a local dance party. After each murder a suspect was arrested whose name was Thornton, and in both instances, this Mr Thornton was charged with murder but subsequently acquitted.

Both murders remain unsolved.

But there have been crimes solved by coincidences too and strange means too. A parrot was the only witness to the murder, of Max Geller im 1942 in the appropriately named “Green Parrot Restaurant” in New York. The bird repeatedly squawked “Robber” to the police, but the detective didn’t dismiss that as many would, and learned that the bird was trained to call regular customers by name. None of the regular patrons were able, or willing to help the police. Going purely on a hunch, the detective wondered if the parrot was actually saying, “Robert”, and found out that a regular customer, Robert Butler, 28, had left Manhattan shortly after the murder. When police tracked Butler down in Maryland he confessed that he shot the victim in a drunken argument, and got fifteen years.

And then there was the murder solved by accident. In 2011, Laura Giddings went missing from her home in Georgia. Cops attending the report parked outside her home as they searched her apartment and confirmed that there was no trace of her. The garbage truck was unable to empty the trash cans the police had blocked, but he emptied the rest of the street and carried on. Her body was found in one of those unemptied bins, and if the police had parked anywhere else, she may very well have gone off to landfill, perhaps forever, and certainly damaging the forensic evidence.

But that wasn’t the only coincidence in this case. The case attracted the local news, who interviewed the neighbours, as they often do in such cases. One such neighbour, Stephen McDaniel was on camera when he was told that Laura’s body had been found. His reaction at realising that he was probably about to be arrested for murder can be found on this video at around 1.27.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIroLgiCyP8&t=1s

And then there was the case of Zephany Nurse who made a new friend, Celeste, at school. The two girls got on famously, and were struck by how alike they looked, and they weren’t the only ones. Zephany’s father was also taken aback by the similarities; especially as the family had been the victims of one of the cruelest kinds of thefts. Their baby girl had been stolen from the hospital by a woman dressed as a nurse. Mr. Nurse did a DNA test that confirmed the truth. Unbeknownst to the family, that baby girl had been brought up only a few miles away for the last seventeen years, and Celeste was reunited with her real family. Her kidnapper, Lavona Solomon was jailed for ten years and was released in August 2023

Coincidences are everywhere, but that doesn’t make them less strange or perplexing when they do. On a finish note, it’s worth noting that the first and last British soldiers killed in WW1 are buried next to one another. They were John Parr, killed 17 days after Britain declared war, and Private George Ellison, who died 90 minutes before the armistice. Ellison’s gravestone gives his age as twenty, but he was actually only seventeen, having lied about his age to join up. The war was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The license plate number of Archduke’s car, in which he was killed, was A III118. The official end of WWI was Armistice Day, 11/11/18.