Angela Watts arrived in the small Welsh village of Resolven, in the Vale of Neath, on a warm day in July 2021. Aside from the walking trails and waterfalls there was not much in the way of visitor attractions. That month, the district website advertised a Women’s Institute bake sale and a small outdoor musical performance. No matter. Watts hadn’t made the two-hour journey for fun. She was there to get a feel for the scene where a man’s skeletal remains had been discovered on a nearby hillside, back in 1979.
Watts was the embodiment of pragmatism, in her early sixties, sensibly dressed, with gold-framed glasses and greying black hair, cut short in a no-fuss style. She had come to Resolven with her friend Margaret Vale to seek new leads on the case of the dead man and distribute flyers calling for information. She had all sorts of questions. The hills around Resolven were steep — she couldn’t imagine scrambling up them herself. And the man had walked with a limp. So how had he got up carrying a holdall and a briefcase? Was he driven to the top and rolled down?
She went to the post office, the kind typically found in a small village, where the woman behind the counter seemed to know everyone but couldn’t remember anything about a skeleton being found in the area 40 years before. Watts approached the vicar with a possible name for the deceased. He walked up and down the cemetery looking at gravestones, and trawled records going back more than 100 years, hoping to discover family connections. But everyone she spoke to drew a blank. It seemed that the death had simply never been talked about.
It is easy to forget that “whodunnit” is not always death’s greatest mystery. In the case of the man found in Resolven, the question was more basic: who was he? Watts has been intermittently investigating the case of “Glamorgan Man”, named for the Welsh county where his remains were found, for the past three years, setting about the task methodically as she would with her favourite pastimes, puzzle solving and cryptic crosswords.
Watts is not a police detective, or a “true-crime influencer”, but a volunteer investigator at Locate International, a charity founded in 2019 by two former policemen to trace missing people and unidentified bodies. She manages a team of workers and pensioners whose aim is to discover the names of people who died anonymously, generally of natural causes, and trace the relatives who might be missing them. These are the kind of cases that fall between the cracks, thanks to depleted police budgets and resources.
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