Qualla: Murder of June Anne Devaney

Murder of June Anne Devaney: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She was three years and eleven months old. She had been admitted to Queen's Park Hospital in Blackburn ten days earlier with pneumonia, and on the night of 14 May 1948 her mother had been told she could come home in the morning. June Anne Devaney never came home. She was taken from her cot at some point after midnight, carried in the arms of a stranger across the hospital grounds, and killed against a sandstone wall. The case that followed turned a Lancashire mill town into the site of the first mass-fingerprinting operation in British history, and the search for her killer changed how the United Kingdom investigates murder. Tell this story carefully, because at its centre is a small child and a family who lost her.

Murder of June Anne Devaney: A Child in Ward CH3

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

June Anne had come into Queen's Park Hospital on 5 May to recover from a mild bout of pneumonia. By 14 May the worst was over and her bed in the children's ward was being made ready for someone else. The night nurse, Gwendolyn Humphreys, was in the kitchen preparing the children'...

Murder of June Anne Devaney: The Search and the Wall

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Staff searched for half an hour before calling the police, who arrived at 1:55 a.m. and began combing the hospital grounds. At 3:17 a.m. they found her, face down in the grass beside an eight-foot sandstone boundary wall, three hundred feet from the ward. The injuries told a stor...

Murder of June Anne Devaney: A Single Set of Fingerprints

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Winchester bottle near the cot bore an unidentified set of prints. After eliminating all hospital staff and every tradesman, electrician, ambulance driver, and nurse's boyfriend who had been in the ward over the previous five years, one set remained. The head of the Lancashire ...

Murder of June Anne Devaney: 46,253 Sets of Prints

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two months of door-to-door work produced over 40,000 sets of prints and no match. By late July every name on the electoral register had been checked and eliminated. Then investigators turned to men who would not appear on the register: ex-servicemen recently discharged from the w...

Murder of June Anne Devaney: What Was Done Afterwards

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Weeks before Griffiths was executed, the fingerprint cards collected from the men of Blackburn were taken to a local paper mill and pulped in front of invited journalists. The promise had been kept. The case is remembered now as the moment British policing learned that mass foren...