Post #643602 by Limbo Lizard on Wed, Jul 11, 2012 10:38 AM

Those links, posted above, are no longer functional, but I think I found the same material by writer Tom Slemen, posted or archived here. Here's an excerpt (emphasis added):

Balmer, the deputy chief constable of Liverpool was enlisted in the search for the killer, and his investigations led him to consider that Mrs. Dutton had been killed by members of a Polynesian cult called Tiki-worshippers. Balmer and other detectives had come to this bizarre possibility after interviewing scores of people who had visited the Dutton home in recent months. Many of these people claimed they were members of a strange South Seas Cult who made sacrifices to Tiki during the winter solstice - and Balmer discovered that Mrs. Dutton had been murdered during this period.
Balmer and his men read up on the activities and customs of the Tiki cult, and learned that Tiki-worshippers had a reversed swastika tattooed on their upper left arms. Shortly afterwards, reports came in of a man who was visiting women who, like Mrs. Dutton, had recently given birth. This man professed to be a doctor and had just visited a Halewood woman at her home and had told her to undress so he could examine her .... The bogus doctor was finally captured, and was found to have a reversed swastika on his upper arm - the sign of a Tiki member. He turned out to be a male nurse, and was subsequently found not guilty of murder at Liverpool City Magistrate's Court...

Most of this info seems to come from Tom Slemen, who writes about the paranormal, along with unsolved crime. On his website, at the bottom of this page, is the following (emphasis added):

The Bureau, Rodney Street
Tom Slemen has an archive of the many thousands of tales and reports on supernatural phenomena stored in a room at his private office on Rodney Street, which he calls the Bureau, accessed by a secret sliding door in the panel of his library. Amongst the thousands of reports and 169 unpublished stories and rare photographs of Liverpool, there is a collection of intriguing articles and artifacts that include old statues of the Polynesian god Tiki (used by members of the 1960s Liverpool Tiki cult), the alleged skull of a vampire,... "

Here's another article about the crime, in the Liverpool Echo, but it has no additional facts.

Coming back to this: *"Many of these *[scores of interviewed] people claimed they were members of a strange South Seas Cult..."! Really?

So,... WAS there actually a Liverpool "tiki cult", active in 1961? What tiki cult-related information is in those police interviews?
As mentioned earlier, we need a Liverpool agent to review the police files (if possible), or at least to contact Tom Slemen for more details of the "Tiki Cult".

"The rum's the thing..."

[ Edited by: Limbo Lizard 2012-07-11 11:06 ]