https://www.thespec.com/news-story/...-housewife-bludgeoned-in-her-own-living-room/
[h=1]COLD CASE: Brampton housewife bludgeoned in her own living room[/h] [h=2]A 71-year-old murder mystery[/h] News Aug 08, 2017 by Pam Douglas
As cold cases go, the mysterious murder of Brampton housewife Mary Pillsworth is probably one of this city's coldest.
Pillsworth, 30, was brutally beaten to death inside her Mill Street South living room while her two young children were asleep in their beds.
It was Jan. 12, 1946, and Canada's murder rate was the lowest it would be compared to the decades that followed. So, in Brampton, population 5,000, the young mother's killing was unusual, and cause for alarm.
Now, 71 years later, it's still not known why Pillsworth was killed, or who did it.
According to accounts, she had already gone upstairs to bed. She was in her bedclothes, and her daughter Linda, four, and son Donald, seven months, were tucked in their beds asleep. But something brought her downstairs, just before 10 p.m. She either heard a noise, or someone had knocked on the door or rung the doorbell.
Whatever brought her to the living room, someone came inside the house and she was hit repeatedly on the head. According to the pathologist at the time, her skull was fractured in several places.
It is believed her attacker than went to the side door of the house and ran out, leaving it open.
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.
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."