Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders Read Online Free Page A

even lived with him twice for three weeks at a time, but after one especially violent assault, she fled and went to live in nearby Bethesda with her father, John Parry.
    Gwen evidently stayed in touch with William Murphy. When he took a temporary laboring job in Yorkshire, he periodically sent her money. Unbeknownst to him, however, in early November, 1909, she left her father’s house and went back to Holyhead to live with a man named Robert Jones at 51 Baker Street. It was a poor area of town, and Gwen was often seen selling cheap goods door to door or simply begging for bread money.
    In mid-December, Murphy returned to Holyhead, suspicious because he had not heard from Gwen in so long. He went to her father’s house, but the older man lied, saying she had gone to Llanddona to live with a female friend.
    Murphy suspected he was being misled, and reddened in anger. He told John Parry that if he found Gwen with another man, he would kill her. Then he stormed away, saying he was going to get a drink.
    At the Bethesda pub near Parry’s house, one of the regulars told him that Gwen had actually gone to live with another man in Holyhead. The former soldier exploded and hastened to the town, where he tried to track her down. He even asked police officers about her, saying that she had used him and that he would, in his words, “give it to her.”
    Finally, he found her. Their reunion must have been tumultuous. Probably to appease him, she agreed to start seeing him again, behind Robert Jones’ back. He moved into a room at 40 Baker Street, and they saw each other every day for the entire week before Christmas. When he pressured her to leave Jones, she showed a rare defiance and refused. As a witness at the murder trial later but it, Murphy “thrashed her until she was black on the Thursday.”
    On Christmas Day, Gwen had recovered enough from her injuries to go for a drink at the Bardsey Inn in Newry Street with her friend Lizzie Jones. She had agreed to meet Murphy at 7:00 p.m. but reneged, making him furious. By some accounts, she and Lizzie saw Murphy through the window as they were on the verge of entering the Bardsey Inn and turned to leave, but one of his drinking cronies saw them first. Other versions say that the two women were already there when he arrived. The latter is probably true, because Gwen was definitely drunk by that point. All sources agree on what happened next.
    Murphy followed her outside and demanded, “Where have you been?”
    Gwen tried to say that she’d gone to the rendezvous point and failed to see him, but he knew she was lying. He’d waited for her for over half an hour.
    “Well, will you come with me now?” he demanded.
    “Yes,” she said, presuming that Lizzie Jones would accompany them. Murphy, however, turned to the other woman and said darkly, “On our own.”
    Lizzie hesitated, but when the burly ex-soldier’s scowl deepened, she slipped away. She probably believed that Gwen would be beaten again at worst, and had no idea that she would never see her friend again.
    ******
    “We had a walk by Captain Tanner’s house,” Murphy would later say. As they went along, Gwen kept stumbling against him and slurring, “I like you.”
    If she were trying to placate him, it was a case of too little too late. When they reached an isolated section of Walthew Avenue, he stopped and touched the fur muff around her neck.
    “Why don’t you pull this thing off?”
    “It’s hooked underneath,” she demurred.
    Those may have been her last coherent words. Murphy seized her by the throat with his left hand, threw her down on the freezing ground, and squeezed until she stopped moving. Then he drew a knife out of his pocket, cut her throat, and dragged her limp body toward a drain.
    “She was still alive when I got her into the drain, so I started to cut her throat again from ear to him,” he testified over a month later. “Then I turned her face downwards and shoved her underneath the water to