I was playing armchair detective – then I found out the horrific secret which had haunted my family for decades

WHEN Anna Allan decided to trace her family tree, the last thing she expected to uncover was a shocking family secret.

Days after joining the site Ancestry.com, Anna, from Bridgwater, Somerset, was stunned to discover her aunt, Patricia Cupit, had been murdered on her way to school when she was just six.

After teaming up with a historian who delved deeper into Pat’s case, Anna has uncovered the full story of what happened to her aunt.

Anna, 56, said: “I started looking into my family tree because I didn’t know much about my mum’s side of the family.

“My parents split when I was four and I had limited contact with my mum.  

“I was absolutely devastated to find out what happened to my aunt – I cried while reading her story.

“Now, I’m determined to keep her memory alive.”

Anna was soon contacted by another family member, who revealed Anna’s aunt, Patricia Cupit, had been murdered in the 1940s by a soldier.

She googled Pat’s name, and discovered a website dedicated to ‘Little Pat’ – run by local historian Darren Norton.

Darren, from Brandon, Suffolk, had come across Pat’s story, and has spent more than 20 years painstaking researching what really happened.

He said: “I was amazed that I’d never come across the story before and I couldn’t believe it wasn’t better documented. 

“My own child was about the same age as Pat, so it really hit home for me.

“The more I found out, the more I was determined to uncover what really happened to Pat.

“It was amazing to hear from Anna and have her help uncovering the story.”

Born in October 1935, Patricia Cupit was doted on by her parents, Leonard, who was in the RAF, and Anne, a housewife, and had a happy life at their home in Mitcham, South West London.

When war broke out in 1939, Pat was evacuated to live with her parents’ friends, Albert and Flo Pask, in the tiny hamlet of Riddlesworth, Norfolk.

On Tuesday, May 5, 1942, Little Pat was walking the mile from her home to the local school, when she was spotted by Private James Wyeth, working at a nearby army camp.

He had a violent past, with previous convictions for assaulting two women, and was serving a sentence at Borstal when he was recruited for the army.

He had never seen Pat before, but would later tell police he felt compelled to follow her.

When Pat failed to come home from school, her panicked foster parents started frantically searching, before eventually discovering her bloodied body lying underneath a tree.

Police quickly focused on Wyeth as a suspect, after other soldiers said he had disappeared from camp and come back looking flushed and red-faced.

He initially told cops he had taken a detour to collect a newspaper, spoken to a colleague, then read the paper for 30 minutes – but he eventually confessed to stabbing and strangling Pat.

Wyeth was sentenced to hang for Pat’s murder, although the Home Office later revoked his sentence on the grounds of insanity, and he was sent to Broadmoor secure unit, until his death in 1983.

Although Pat’s parents went on to have another daughter after the war – Anna’s mother – the trauma took its toll on her mother, and she was regularly taken home by police after being found in the middle of the night, wandering the graveyard in her nightdress.

Anna added: “I can see why the family didn’t talk about what happened for so long.

“But now I know about Pat, I think it’s important that we commemorate her life. 

“I discovered there was no headstone where she is buried, in Streatham cemetery, so I arranged for one to be put in this summer. 

Anna and Darren now plan to hold a small commemoration for Pat at the cemetery in October this year, on what would have been Pat’s 90th birthday.

Anna said: “In a way, I owe my life to Pat’s death. If she hadn’t been murdered, her parents probably wouldn’t have had another child and I probably would have never been born.

“That makes it even more important to me that she is never forgotten.”