On 14 December 1931, 10-year-old Vera Page was reported missing after she failed to return to her home in Notting Hill, London, from a visit to a nearby relative.

[3] Strong physical and circumstantial evidence[4] existed attesting to the guilt of a 41-year-old labourer named Percy Orlando Rush, whose parents lived in the same house as Vera.

[5][6] However, at a coroner's inquest held on 10 February 1932, a jury determined that insufficient real evidence existed to formally charge Rush with her murder.

In January 1931, the Page family moved from Chapel Road, Notting Hill (now known as St. Marks Place), to a three-storey house in nearby Blenheim Crescent.

On 16 December a milkman discovered Vera's body lying in a patch of shrubbery in the front garden of 89 Addison Road, Kensington, close to Holland Park and approximately one mile from her home.

[13] This fact led investigators to speculate Vera had likely been murdered close to the location of the discovery of her body, and that the perpetrator either lived locally or held extensive geographical knowledge of the neighbourhood.

[13][18][n 2] Vera's body was examined by an eminent pathologist named Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who concluded that she had been raped, then manually strangled to death shortly after the last confirmed sighting of her alive.

Her body bore superficial bruising and a welt mark located upon her neck had been inflicted via a ligature, although this injury had evidently occurred after death.

[22] Furthermore, Spilsbury concurred with the initial police conclusion that the section of ammonia-stained finger bandage found lodged against Vera's inner elbow had likely been dislodged from the hand of her murderer as he had deposited her body at the crime scene.

[5] A Mrs. Margaret Key informed investigators that at approximately 6:40 a.m. on 16 December, she had observed an individual whose physical appearance fitted that of a local man named Percy Orlando Rush pushing a wheelbarrow laden with a large bundle covered with a distinctive red table-cloth with a knitted fringe walking in the direction of Addison Road.

[5] The day following the discovery of Vera's body, a woman living close to Addison Road named Kathleen Short brought a child's red beret to the Notting Hill police station, stating she had found the item at approximately 9:30 the previous evening at a location investigators noted was quite close to where Vera had last been seen alive.

[27] The coal cellar in question, located close to the house on Addison Road where Vera's body was discovered, had no electric light, giving credibility to Spilsbury's theory that the child had either been murdered, and/or her body stored, in a basement or coal cellar with no electric light, and that her murderer had likely illuminated the scene via candlelight.

[5] Investigators gave strong support to the theory that the girl's body had been temporarily concealed in this cellar after her murder, then transported via wheelbarrow to the location of her subsequent discovery.

[28] Percy Orlando Rush was a 41-year-old married man who lived close to Blenheim Crescent and who had worked as a flannel washer in a launderette in Earl's Court for two years.

[32] A Notting Hill superintendent named George Cornish would later state that during their initial interrogation of Rush when he had simply been one of several potential suspects, officers had informed him of the finger bandage found at the crime scene.

Superintendent Cornish later confirmed that this procedural error had been a crucial mistake which had likely allowed Rush to dispose of any bandage of the type he had worn on the day of Vera's murder.

[41] In response to this verdict, many women in the gallery openly booed and shook their fists at Rush, vocally declaring him to be a blatant liar.