However, despite the fact both strong physical and circumstantial evidence existed attesting to his guilt, because no body could be found, Nodder could not be tried for her murder, but was instead convicted of Mona's abduction and sentenced to seven years in gaol.

[2] On the afternoon of Tuesday 5 January 1937,[3] 10-year-old Mona Lilian Tinsley disappeared after leaving the Guildhall Street Methodist School in Newark-on-Trent.

That evening, Wilfred and Lilian Tinsley reported their daughter missing to the police, who promised to launch an intense manhunt for the child at daybreak.

[1] In response to extensive police and media appeals, two eyewitnesses came forward on 6 January to say they had seen the girl at a bus station in the company of a middle-aged man.

[6] A neighbour of the Tinsley family also informed the police that she had seen this former lodger of the theirs standing alone, loitering on a street corner close to Mona's school, staring in the direction of the entrance to the premises on the afternoon of her abduction.

[13] The Tinsleys explained that after Hudson left the Grimes household in October 1935, he had briefly lodged with them, but that they had evicted him from their home after just three weeks for non-payment of rent.

[10] Grimes described Nodder as being a brutish and squalid drunkard with poor personal hygiene and few friends,[11] who worked primarily as a motor mechanic and lorry driver in Retford.

One of these neighbours claimed to police she had seen a young girl matching Mona's description at Nodder's premises earlier that day; another neighbour was able to confirm to police that at midday on 6 January, a young brunette girl wearing a blue dress had been standing in the back doorway of his house, watching Nodder digging in his garden.

Also discovered inside the house were scraps of paper depicting a child's drawings and writings,[23] and fingerprints upon crockery in the kitchen were quickly matched to those taken from materials Mona was known to have handled at her home.

Ominously, an opened packet of sweets, two soiled handkerchiefs, and a tin of Vaseline were discovered beneath a pillow in the front bedroom of these premises, indicating a likely sexual motive for the child's abduction.

Confronted with both these positive identifications and the successive pieces of evidence being discovered at his home, Nodder changed his story as to his actions on 5 January.

Reluctantly, he had agreed to Mona's request, as he had expected to see Mrs. Grimes the following day (the pair having an agreement to meet once a week in their affair).

[21] Both local and national media devoted extensive coverage pertaining to the investigation, publishing a photograph and physical description of the child and appealing for assistance from the public.

On 25 January, Chief Inspector Leonard Burt and a Detective Sergeant Skardon arrived in Hayton, and the two immediately organised an extensive search of every house, drain, ditch and pond within three miles of Peacehaven.

She gave me a picture of a house, with a water-filled ditch on one side, a field at its back, a church close by, and an inn within sight.

Just days after the disappearance of Mona Tinsley, a renowned spiritualist medium named Estelle Roberts contacted the Chief Constable of Newark, offering her assistance in locating the child upon the condition her involvement remained confidential[23] and adding that if the chief constable accepted her services and conditions, to mail her some clothing the child had worn.

Roberts stated the child had been strangled to death in an upstairs bedroom of these premises, before her murderer had placed her body in a sack and transported her remains to a river beyond the field which existed behind this house.

In his summary to the court, Justice Swift paid reference to Nodder's refusal to testify at this trial, stating: "Nobody knows what has become of that little girl ... Whatever happened to her, how she fared, who looked after her, where she slept.

[12][39] Upon closer inspection, this family discovered that the object was the partially decomposed body of a child, with the head and upper torso embedded in silt and trapped in a drain below water level.

Several hundred people lined the streets as her coffin was led from the Methodist Church to Newark Cemetery, where her body was interred.

On 28 June, Frederick Nodder was formally charged by a Superintendent Burkitt of having committed the murder with malice aforethought of Mona Lilian Tinsley.

[43] Among the many prosecution witnesses to testify was the bus conductor, Charles Reville, who testified that a young girl matching Mona's description had boarded his bus in the company of a man whom he positively identified as Frederick Nodder, and that Nodder had purchased a return ticket for himself, but only a single ticket for the girl.

[52] When given the opportunity to speak after hearing the jury's verdict, Nodder stood before the judge, before declaring in a low but firm tone: "I shall go out of this court with a clear conscience.