William Fish

At just after 4pm on the afternoon of 27 March, Emily Holland (7), disappeared as she walked down Birley Street, Blackburn, after telling a friend she was going to fetch some tobacco for an adult. After a search lasting several days, the child's dismembered body was uncovered in a trunk, wrapped in a copy of the Preston Herald. The autopsy revealed she had been raped and had her throat cut prior to the dismemberment. Fish, a father of three, who ran a barber shop in Moss Street, was arrested and immediately confessed to the crime which had horrified the whole town. (Birley Street was to feature again in Blackburn's dark history over seventy years later, when child killer Peter Griffiths was arrested outside his house on the same street).