THERE may be no significant anniversary attached to it, but we feel the grisly – and unsolved – murder of Garnant shopkeeper Thomas Thomas in February 1921 is a tale worth re-telling.

Contemporary reports in the Amman Valley Chronicle leave no doubt as to the horror which swept through that closeknit mining community upon the discovery of the unfortunate man’s body.

What makes the ‘Star Stores Murder’ particularly notorious, of course, is the fact that the killer escaped justice – and thereby the noose – and remains undetected to this day.

It may be a long shot, but could there still be people living in the locality with information (perhaps handed down by descendants) that could give a clue to the identity of the perpetrator of this dastardly deed?

● FROM the brutal killing of a harmless shopkeeper in the Amman Valley to the slaying of the English King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth over 400 years previously… Local historian Terry Norman provides compelling evidence that the muchmaligned monarch possibly met his own grisly end at the hands of a Llandeilo landowner named Sir Rhys ap Thomas – certainly that is what his descendants always maintained.

When bones unearthed under a Leicester car park were revealed as those of the last of the Plantagenets, it ranked among one of the most amazing archaeological finds in recent times.

The unearthed skeleton revealed damage and wounds to the body and skull consistent with the manner of the king’s death.

What it could not show conclusively, alas, was the person who administered the mortal blow.