Pillsworth was losing consciousness, but she managed to crawl to the hallway telephone and called the operator, asking her to “get a doctor.” The operator, Elsie Collis, called Pillsworth's husband, Elbert, at work at a nearby radio and electric shop on Main Street. She patched the call through to him, and he couldn’t make out what his badly injured wife was trying to say, but he rushed home.

The family dog, a cocker spaniel, had wandered outside the house when he got there, and inside he found his wife on the hallway floor in a pool of blood.

“I found my wife on the floor, unconscious, but still clutching the receiver,” Elbert was quoted as saying in one newspaper account.

Pillsworth was rushed to Toronto General Hospital where she died the next morning.

“Why this thing happened I don’t know,” her husband told a newspaper reporter at the time. “Sitting beside her in the hospital, I tried to think of anyone we might have unintentionally offended or any enemy she may have had. I couldn’t think of anyone. She didn’t have any. Everyone here and in Orangeville (where they used to live) liked her very much.”

The couple had been married for 5 ½ years and had lived in Orangeville before moving to Brampton two years before the attack.

Police followed up on the few leads they had, but no one was ever even identified as a solid suspect and the murder weapon was never found. Nothing was taken from the home, and nothing inside had been disturbed, leading to the theory that she had been surprised by the attack, and may have known her killer and opened the door to him or her.

A reward of $3,000 then offered by the town didn’t help solve the case, and it eventually turned cold.

Some thought Elbert had killed his wife, despite witness accounts from customers and employees that he had been at the store the entire night.

Police concluded the couple were very happy, and there was no insurance policy on her life.

Elbert and the children eventually moved to the U.S.

Their daughter Linda, who now lives in Texas, spoke to The Guardian last year about growing up without a mother and away from her country of birth.

“I often think what my life would have been like if that hadn’t happened,” she said. “Growing up in Canada…. It would have been a completely different life.”