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Prostitute Alice Barton was discovered strangled and mutilated - with three obscene words scrawled on her torso.

The 49-year-old’s body had been dumped in a wartime pillbox in Woodchurch, Birkenhead, in September 1955.

Despite a massive police manhunt, which saw 40,000 people across Britain being quizzed, her gruesome murder still remains unsolved sixty years later.

Just before noon on Saturday, September 24, 1955, 11-year-old Peter Williams, a pupil at Grange secondary school, left his parents home at Walby Close on the Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead, and set off to pick blackberries.

Peter and his pals headed for a railway embankment on the north side of the estate, where an old concrete pillbox lay.

He looked inside and saw what he thought was a shop-window dummy. On closer inspection, he was horrified to find it was the body of a woman, with clothes piled on top of her face.

Here began the baffling case of the Pillbox Murder.

A woodsman at Arrowe Park told police how, on the morning after the murder, at 8.10am, he had found a trail of footprints in the dew-drenched grass, leading out of a wood near to the pillbox.

William Shaw, another member of the park ground staff, said that two days before the discovery of the body, he had seen a couple sitting in a shelter by the local bowling greens, and heard the woman say: “I am much older than you are”.

As the days wore on, Alice’s identity remained a mystery until the ECHO took a decision to publish a photograph of her face.

Several ECHO readers recognised Alice, who had been seen in the Kirkdale area. Her estranged husband, John Barton, who had not seen his wife since 1943, came forward to identify her body.

Police learned that she had been staying at St Winifred’s Hotel – situated at the junction of Knowsley Road and Rimrose Road in Bootle – days before her murder.

It emerged that Alice had drifted into the murky world of prostitution after leaving her husband and would take her regular customers, mostly truck drivers, to the pill box.

Despite thousands upon thousands of statements taken, police never inched close to charging anyone with her murder.

The file, though dusty, is still classed as open by Merseyside Police.

Five years ago, they followed up a lead after information was posted on a website claiming the identity of the killer.

Aimee Buckley, 24, from Wirral, described her the suspicion that her late grandfather – her dad’s father – who frequented a pub just minutes away from the murder scene, was involved in the killing.

She wrote: “One night, he came home wearing blood soaked clothes demanding my nan to burn them. My nan was so horrified and in shock that she went to throw them in the wash immediately, but he ordered her to burn them there and then.”

She went on to say that a couple of days later the murder of Alice Barton was reported in the newspaper.

She added: “The killer has never been found and from my grandad no words were ever been said about it.”

A spokesman for Merseyside Police said: “The investigation into the death of Alice Barton in 1955, as with all unsolved murder investigations, remains open.

“The unit welcomes any new information about unsolved cases and would urge anyone who has information about such crimes to contact 0151-709-6010 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.”