The 83-year-old murder mystery captured imaginations across the world.

But the truth about teenage servant Emma Alice Smith was brought a step closer yesterday when police revealed they do not believe she was ever killed.

Sussex Police, who began investigating in 2009 after a community play raised questions about the case, believe she in fact eloped to Ireland with a married man.

Emma Alice, of Waldron, near Heathfield, was the subject of a short film, Finding Esther, which suggested she had been attacked by a Horam villager who objected to her relationship with an Irishman.

The piece had been prompted by a claim from a Smith family story that Emma Alice’s sister, Lillian, had received a deathbed confession in 1953 from a man who said he had killed her.

Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Bowles, of Sussex Police’s major crime branch, decided to investigate to find the body. Officers searched a pond in Horam and made inquiries with people living in the area.

They discovered Emma Alice had gone missing in 1928, not 1926 as previously thought – at about the same time Irish road worker Thomas Wells left his wife and four young children.

Her disappearance was reported in the press and reported to police.

Present-day detectives concluded he and Emma Alice had eloped after learning of a public row at a Sunday School outing between Emma Alice’s mother and Mr Wells’s wife some time between 1933 and 1936.

Sussex Police said the investigation had been treated as “low priority”.

DCI Bowles said: “We have done our very best to establish the truth for the family of Emma Alice, who had been unable to have any certainty around her fate.

“Had her body been lying unburied in the Waldron area, I was determined that we should find her and enable her family to give her a proper burial.” He said he was now satisfied she was not murdered.

Police did not pursue her whereabouts any further and they did not find conclusive proof that either of the couple arrived in Ireland.

If she was still alive, Emma Alice would be 101.

Valerie Chidson, who wrote Finding Esther for Waldron Community Players, said the story had attracted attention as far away as Canada.

On hearing Emma Alice had eloped, she said: “It is very intriguing.

I wonder whether anybody has investigated where they got to and whether there are any records to show she had died?

“I was amazed that police reopened the case but it was unsolved and new evidence had come forward, so they were honour bound to try to examine it.”

Councillor Peter Newnham, the chairman of Heathfield and Waldron Parish Council, said: “It was an extremely good play. It certainly captured the imagination.

“I think it is very good that the police have finished their investigation into it and have found nothing untoward.

“I hope that puts the relatives’ minds at rest.”