At approximately 6:00 PM on December 20, 1961, Brian Dutton returned to his home in the Knotty Ash region of Liverpool and was shocked to find his wife, Maureen, lying dead on the living room floor. She had been stabbed 14 times. Maureen had been watching over her two young sons, two-year-old David and 22-day-old Andrew. Both children were unharmed, and while it’s believed that David witnessed his mother’s murder, he was unable to reveal any clear details.
Investigators were left baffled by the crime since nothing was stolen from the house and Maureen was not sexually assaulted. However, rumors began circulating that Maureen had been the victim of a ritualistic murder perpetrated by a religious cult.
The cult followed the Polynesian god Tiki and was known for making sacrifices to Tiki during the winter solstice. An hour and a half before Maureen was found dead, witnesses reported seeing a frantic woman on a bus who muttered about needing to get to London to board a plane. That same afternoon, a suspicious young man was seen in Maureen’s neighborhood, vomiting behind a church.
The day before the murder, a man posing as a doctor called upon the Halewood home of another woman with a newborn baby. This man examined the woman, but when her husband checked into the doctor’s background, he could find no record of any doctors under the name this man provided. Months later, a male nurse was arrested for stealing drugs and equipment from three local hospitals. He had been passing himself off as a doctor and had a distinctive tattoo on his arm identifying him as a Tiki worshiper. However, police were never able to tie him to the murder. To this day, no one knows who was responsible for killing Maureen Dutton.