Patricia Holmes

Patricia Holmes was a thirteen-year old girl who was befriended by a lonely Lucille Hewitt in July 1961. Lucille had dropped her schoolbooks on the pavement of Rosamund Street outside Swindley's Draperies when the strap broke and she asked a passing Patricia for help. When questioned, the girl told Lucille that she had come from Crewe to visit her sick grandmother who lived on "Buxton Street", a thoroughfare that Lucille had never heard of and she offered to take her back to 7 Coronation Street to look it up in a street guide. Hearing that no one was in the house, Patricia - or "Ricia" as she liked to be called - happily accepted.

Back at the house, Lucille offered her new friend a glass of pop and Patricia took the opportunity while the girl was in the kitchen to look over a vase on the mantlepiece for money. Lucille was oblivious to her strange behaviour and helped her look through the map book, seeing that a Buxton Street did exist but was some miles away. Patricia only had 3d for the bus fare and pushed Lucille to lend her more until the weekend, grabbing a handful of change from her piggy bank. She was offered the use of the upstairs toilet before she left and the wily Patricia accepted, refusing help to find it and going up by herself.

When Harry Hewitt came home, Lucille chatted to her father about her new friend as he browsed through the evening paper. He suddenly spotting a report about the girl saying she was in fact a runaway from an approved school and the stories she had told Lucille had been a tissue of lies. When the police were informed, Harry was asked to check if any additional money was missing from the house as a sum had been found on the girl when she had been picked up. Harry checked and denied anything was amiss but after the policewoman had gone, he angrily told his daughter that 10/- club money had been stolen from upstairs and he berated her for taking strangers in against his explicit instructions.