# List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (1980s)

| Year | Victim(s) | Location of body or bodies | Notes |
| January 1980 | Mohammed Arif | Attacked in Nelson, Lancashire, died in hospital | 18-year-old Arif was beaten with a stick in Southfield Street on 4 January 1980. Four people interrupted the attack and the assailant then began to move away from the scene, but he went back to strike Arif one more time before running off between some flats. No arrests have taken place over this killing. |
| February 1980 | David Thomas | Liverpool | Thomas, a 24-year-old former boxer, was battered over the head with a metal instrument with sharpened edges after leaving a wine bar in Hardman Street, Liverpool, on Friday 1 February 1980 at about 10:30 p.m. His body was found a week later on derelict land off St Bride Street. |
| February 1980 | Tracy Main | Glasgow | Main, 13, was stabbed seven times in her home in a Gorbals tower block when she was off school due to illness on 5 February 1980. Both of her parents also lived there but were at work at the time. A neighbour of theirs – a man in his 40s but with a mental age of eight – was charged but acquitted after the court was made aware that he was not told while under arrest that he had a right to remain silent. |
| February 1980 | Elizabeth McCabe | Dundee | McCabe, a trainee nursery nurse aged 20, was strangled after parting company with a friend and leaving a nightclub on Monday 11 February 1980. The killer dumped her naked body in Templeton Woods. In 2007, a former taxi driver was arraigned for the crime, but he was found not guilty by a majority decision at the conclusion of the trial. A suspect in the initial murder inquiry, an apparent DNA link to him was later discovered, with the odds of the DNA belonging to someone unrelated to him being 1 in 40 million. Following the verdict the police said that they were not looking for anybody else, although after the rules on double jeopardy were changed in 2011, allowing the possible retrial of a previously acquitted suspect, the case was reviewed again. Similarities between the cases have led to speculation that McCabe's murder is linked to that of Carol Lannen in 1979. |
| February 1980 | Gertrude Gray | Bradford, West Yorkshire | 71-year-old Gray had been stabbed but was still semi-conscious when she was discovered mortally wounded at her residence on 23 February 1980. A man was charged with her murder in July 1996, but legal action against him was discontinued. |
| April 1980 | Douglas Drake | Leeds | 64-year-old Drake died in hospital in early April 1980 as a result of suffering a brutal but weaponless nighttime assault in York Street, Leeds, on 29 December 1979. His assailant was described as a slim man aged 18 to 25 wearing a dark leather-type jacket and flared trousers. |
| April 1980 | Lillian Wright | Body not found | Wright disappeared from Lowestoft in Suffolk when she was 55, having last been seen in Lovewell Road. A frequenter of the town's bingo hall, it was believed that she left her home on 17 April to visit the then Hippodrome in Battery Green Road, but she did not enter the building that day. Police started treating Wright's disappearance as a no-body homicide in 2004. |
| May 1980 | Jessie Earl | Beachy Head, East Sussex | Earl disappeared from Eastbourne on 15 May 1980 at the age of 22, and her skeletal remains were found in 1989 in a thicket on nearby Beachy Head. British serial killer Peter Tobin became (and remains) an official suspect in Earl's murder, as he lived about 25 miles (40 km) along the coast from Beachy Head at the time she went missing. The killing is believed to be linked to the disappearance and suspected murder of Louise Kay, in whose case Tobin is also an official suspect. Kay disappeared from Eastbourne in 1988. |
| June 1980 | Patsy Morris | Hounslow Heath, London | 14-year-old Morris was choked to death with a ligature after she left her school during the lunch break. Serial killers Peter Tobin and Levi Bellfield – the latter of whom did not live very far from the victim when she was killed – have both been suspects in her murder even though Bellfield was only 12 at the time. Morris was Bellfield's childhood girlfriend and she was killed a year before his first conviction, for burglary, at age 13. Bellfield has reportedly boasted of killing Morris in prison and police said in 2008 that they would be investigating him for the murder after he allegedly confessed to an associate. |
| August 1980 | Kevin Mison | Fulham, London | 18-year-old Mison had his hands tied behind his back, a gag in his mouth and superficial knife wounds on his neck when he was found dead in an empty house in Hartismere Road, Fulham, on 6 August 1980. The gag had caused him to die of suffocation, with an attempt to burn his body then following. Despite no evidence of sexual interference being discovered, the murder was nevertheless thought to have had a sexual motive. A suspect seen in Hartismere Road on the night of the crime was said to have spoken to people in the area who were never traced and never came forward. |
| August 1980 | John Greenwood and Gary Miller | Attacked in Whiston, Merseyside, died at Walton Hospital in Liverpool | Greenwood and Miller were 11 years old when they were found beaten and hidden under a mattress in a disused quarry in Whiston. A dog walker found the injured boys at 7:20 p.m. on 16 August 1980 at a site which is now Stadt Moers Park. Both boys died in hospital from head injuries. A local man who knew the boys, John Cheeseman, was acquitted of the murders despite revealing knowledge that apparently only the killer and police would have, but he has remained the only official suspect ever since and police attempted to charge him again in 2019. This attempt failed, but a statement released on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions said: "…in the event that the ongoing police investigation yields sufficient compelling new evidence, he would reconsider his decision." |
| October 1980 | Jenny Ronaldson | Isle of Dogs, London | The body of Ronaldson, a 19-year-old student nurse, was found dumped in the River Thames by a bargeman at the Isle of Dogs on 24 November 1980. Ronaldson had disappeared a month earlier, having last been seen leaving Guy's Hospital in central London after saying she was going to visit the street market on Petticoat Lane. Her purse was subsequently discovered by a riverside pub a mile from the area. After Ronaldson was found in the river it was discovered that she had been beaten, gagged and strangled, and police also believed she had been sexually assaulted. Police stated that they thought that the killer may be the type who would strike again. In 2001 alleged links between Ronaldson's case and killers John Duffy and David Mulcahy were investigated. |
| November 1980 | Derek Grain | Bristol | 39-year-old Grain was kicked and had his head struck repeatedly with a sand-filled traffic cone in the early hours of 1 November. A nurse walking to work discovered his body close to Berkeley Square. Police believed it was possible that there was more than one attacker, and very likely that theft was the motive, in view of money being missing from Grain's jacket pocket. Though its owner was traced and was not in or even near the city at the time of the murder, a red Jaguar seen in central Bristol by no fewer than two people that night turned out to have been registered in the Hertfordshire town of Hitchin, where Grain moved to Bristol from two months before his death. |
| November 1980 | Ahmed Mustafa | Manchester | Mustafa was a 32-year-old Libyan studying at Manchester University. He disappeared on 26 November 1980 and was discovered murdered on 29 November in a vacated flat never owned or rented by him, and the killing (in which he was stabbed repeatedly) was suspected to have been ordered for political reasons. |
| November 1980 | John Welch | Newcastle | Welch was beaten to death in Room 101 of the Swallow Hotel on 26 November 1980. Two men were charged in 1990 over the 45-year-old businessman's murder, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided against putting either of them on trial. |
| December 1980 | Eric Carver | Nottingham | A man jailed in 1982 for Carver's murder had his conviction quashed in 2006 because appeal judges ruled that lack of evidence against him together with questionable tactics used by the police to get him to confess meant that his conviction was not safe. 66-year-old Carver was bludgeoned to death at his Lenton home while he was asleep. |
| February 1981 | Henry Carr | West Brompton, London | The 51-year-old former British spy had been stabbed and mutilated with a knife when his body was found at his flat in Cathcart Road on 28 February 1981. A number of sex workers were quizzed over his death. |
| April 1981 | Caroline Harris-Reed | Stockwell, London | Student-teacher Harris-Reed was murdered in the flat she was sharing with a 22-year-old nurse. Police issued an artist's impression of the perpetrator, who forced his way into the property before holding the two young women at knifepoint and stabbing Harris-Reed (who was also 22) to death. |
| May 1981 | Anthony Donnelly | Hackney, London | Donnelly was a youth stabbed to death in Glyn Road, Hackney, in the early hours of 8 May 1981. Four black youths were convicted over the attack, despite a witness statement suggesting that the assailants were all white. (The statement also suggested that Donnelly was targeted by them for mixing with black people.) One of the four youths was convicted of murder, the other three of perverting the course of justice, but appeals resulted in the overturning of all the verdicts in March 1982. |
| May 1981 | James Adams | Bradford, West Yorkshire | 46-year-old Adams received 22 knife wounds in public toilets in Manningham after stopping to use them on his way home from work on 26 May 1981. A trail of the bespectacled killer's own blood was present and went on for about a mile from where he had committed the offence. |
| July 1981 | Parveen, Kamran, Aqsa and Imran Khan | Walthamstow, London | Pregnant Parveen Khan, 31, and her children Kamran, 11, Aqsa, 10, and Imran, two, died in an arson attack believed to have had a racist motive. Petrol was squirted through the letterbox and lit during the early hours of 2 July 1981 at their home in Belgrave Road, Walthamstow. |
| July 1981 | Vishal Mehrotra | Rogate, West Sussex | Eight-year-old Mehrotra was last seen by his family on 29 July 1981 on a crowded street near his home in Putney, southwest London. His remains were found in February 1982 fifty miles away at Durleigh Marsh Farm, Rogate, West Sussex. Mehrotra's father said he was called by a man who told him that his son's disappearance was connected to a paedophile ring whose members frequented Elm House guesthouse in Barnes. Police have on several occasions investigated possible links to notorious paedophile Sidney Cooke and his infamous "Dirty Dozen" paedophile ring. |
| August 1981 | Nude in the Nettles | Yorkshire | A woman's naked and decomposed body was found dumped in bushes next to a country road near Sutton Bank on 28 August 1981 after police received an anonymous tip-off from a "well-spoken man" who refused to give his name for "national security reasons". |
| September 1981 | Kenneth Jewell | Luton, Bedfordshire | The 33-year-old was fatally injured on Saturday 19 September 1981 during an altercation in which he was knocked to the ground in Luton's High Town Road. |
| September 1981 | Jillian Matthews | Clapham Wood, West Sussex | Matthews, a 37-year-old homeless woman with schizophrenia, was sexually assaulted and strangled. She had gone missing around six weeks before the discovery of her body. |
| October 1981 | Unnamed baby girl | Weymouth, Dorset | A baby's body was discovered washed up on the beach near to Weymouth Pier's bandstand on 15 October 1981. The baby had been strangled and her body was within a Jersey wine merchant's carrier bag. It is believed that the baby was on a ferry either leaving or entering the port at Weymouth and was thrown from it. Neither the mother nor the father has been found. |
| November 1981 | Pamela Hastie | Johnstone, Renfrewshire | Hastie, 16, went missing on her way home from school in November 1981. Her body was found in Rannoch Woods, close to her home. A teenager confessed to Hastie's murder and was jailed, but he maintained that he was coerced into confessing. In 2007, the verdict of his trial was ruled unsafe and he was released after spending twenty years in prison. It has been suggested that Hastie could have been a victim of Peter Tobin or Robert Black, both of whom were serial killers. Fifteen months after Hastie's murder, 11-year-old Tracey Waters was murdered in the same town. |
| November 1981 | Dolphus Smith, Sidney Hickling and Susan Ovens | Rushden, Northamptonshire | Smith, 57, Hickling, 27, and Ovens, also 27, were travellers shot to death in their caravans on Ditchford Lane, a road close to the outskirts of Rushden, on 24 November 1981. |
| 1975–1988 | Angel of the Meadow | Angel Meadow, Manchester | The skeletal remains of a woman were discovered hidden under multiple pieces of carpet in Angel Meadow, Manchester, on 25 January 2010. A post-mortem revealed the decedent suffered a fractured jaw, neck and clavicle prior to her death. Investigators believed she was most likely a Caucasian aged 18–30, and that her murder occurred between 1975 and 1988. |
| January 1982 | Ralph McIntosh | Gullane, East Lothian | Widower McIntosh, 71, was battered to death in his house on 25 or 26 January. Very little evidence of theft and nothing suggestive of a break-in would be found there. |
| February 1982 | Sarah Hill | Lees, Greater Manchester | An intruder murdered 86-year-old Hill at her home on Thomas Street, Lees, on 12 February 1982. She had lived in the area all her life and worked in the nearby cotton mills. Hill was 4 ft 10 ins tall and frail at the time of her death, relying on neighbours to run errands for her. The intruder beat her about the head and opened some drawers in her home, but police were unable to establish if anything was stolen. |
| February 1982 | Elaine Wakefield | Axe Edge, near Buxton, Derbyshire | 20-year-old Wakefield was last seen after leaving the home which she shared with her police officer boyfriend in Buxton on 25 February 1982. Her partially clothed body was found six miles from Buxton two days later close to High Edge Raceway at Axe Edge. She had died from compression to the neck. |
| April 1982 | Julie Keshmiri | Leeds | 27-year-old Keshmiri died after an arson attack on her home on 10 April 1982. |
| May 1982 | Ann Lee and Margaret Johnson | Aldershot, Hampshire | 44-year-old Lee and 65-year-old Johnson were stabbed to death on 10 May 1982 while out walking their dogs on Aldershot Common. A man told police that he was behind the double murder and served nearly 17 years for it, but appeal judges quashed his conviction when they heard that certain factors – namely having a "suggestible" personality, being a fantasist and having an alibi that seemed truthful – rendered his confession unreliable. |
| June 1982 | Jean Brook | Bedgebury Forest, Kent | Brook, a 46-year-old mother-of-three and delivery driver from Hastings in East Sussex, was battered to death and left in Bedgebury Forest on 10 June 1982. Police have not linked her murder to that of an unidentified woman whose beaten body was found in the same forest in October 1979. |
| June 1982 | Roberto Calvi | Blackfriars Bridge, London | The 62-year-old Italian banker and chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in one of modern Italy's biggest political scandals, was found hanged on 18 June 1982. The death was ruled as murder after two coroners' inquests and an independent investigation. In June 2007, five people were acquitted of Calvi's murder after a trial in Rome. A book by David Yallop titled In God's Name relates this crime and the 'suiciding' of Calvi's secretary to corruption and possibly the death of Pope John Paul I: Papa Albini. |
| June 1982 | Nicky Gerard | West Ham, London | Gerard, a former bouncer cleared along with Ronnie Knight of the 1974 gangland murder of Alfredo Zomparelli (which a third defendant was found guilty of), was killed in Mitre Road, West Ham, on 25 June 1982 by two men in balaclavas. He was shot in his car, then hit on the head with the butt of a gun after getting out of the vehicle before the final shot was fired into him at point-blank range. In another case that remains unsolved, a man cleared of 31-year-old Gerard's murder – Tommy Hole – was himself shot dead in London in December 1999. Hole was cleared after a key prosecution witness said he could not unreservedly place him at the scene of the Gerard killing. |
| July 1982 | Dora Pratt | Ipswich, Suffolk | The 76-year-old shopkeeper was struck on the head three times at her premises on Bulstrode Road in Ipswich on 9 January 1982, but did not succumb to her injuries until 6 July. Items having been stolen from the shop at around the time the attack took place suggests theft was the motive for it. |
| July 1982 | Terivia/Tervina Cameron | Sheffield | 59-year-old Cameron was found dead after a fire at her flat in Addy Close, Sheffield, on 8 July 1982. A post-mortem revealed that she had died of strangulation. |
| July 1982 | Eileen Scally | Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire | On 25 July 1982, 32-year-old Scally waved goodbye to her husband and daughters as they left the family home before going upstairs to her bedroom, where she was strangled whilst taking an afternoon nap. The house was ransacked too and over £200 in cash stolen. Someone was charged with Scally's murder but acquitted at court. |
| August 1982 | Edmund Simpson | Manchester | 58-year-old Simpson's head was hit repeatedly with a blunt object at his workplace (a bookshop near Manchester Cathedral) and £65 stolen from the premises on 9 August 1982. He died from his injuries on 11 August. An agitated-looking man was seen running away from the area of Simpson's place of work at about the time he was attacked there. |
| August 1982 | Gurcharn Singh Landa (known as "John") | Cyprus Road, Mapperley, Nottingham | The 33-year-old Nottingham taxi driver died in the early hours of Saturday 14 August, having been stabbed 87 times. The police believe he was robbed of his takings before being stabbed; most of the stab wounds were in the chest. Eleven people were arrested but no one was charged over his murder. A father of eight, Landa had gone to Peel Street at about 4:00 a.m. to pick up a passenger calling himself "Shelton", who had rung from a phone box. Police believe he picked someone up before driving to Cyprus Road, about a mile away. At 4:05 a.m. a woman living on Cyprus Road heard a vehicle brake suddenly and, looking out of the window, saw Landa's taxi rocking violently as though a fight was taking place inside. She also reported seeing a man searching the taxi's dashboard. She called the police and then went to help, but Landa died shortly after officers arrived. |
| September 1982 | Malcolm Bolt | Bristol | Bolt, 42, had been hit on the head with a blunt weapon when he was reported as having been found in his office on Alma Road, Clifton, on 21 September 1982. He had been living in fear due to enemies he had made through his business relationships, prompting him to start locking and bolting himself into the office where the attack was to occur. A man who prosecutors alleged had fallen out with Bolt over a gold deal the two of them had been planning was acquitted of murder after two trials. |
| November 1982 | Andrew Stevens | Leicester | Ratby man Stevens, 20, was attacked outside a nightclub in Leicester city centre on 31 October 1982. Police believed that the two perpetrators may have been football fans. Stevens was treated at the Leicester Royal Infirmary that night for cuts to his face and then discharged, but he died there several days later after being readmitted because he had fallen unconscious. |
| November 1982 | Patrick O'Nione | Bermondsey, London | On 30 November 1982, as he walked to his car in Bermondsey's Tower Bridge Road after visiting his daughter's nearby wine bar, 52-year-old O'Nione was shot five times in the head in a killing believed to have been a gangland crime. Sometime previously, he had been acquitted at a pre-committal hearing of murdering 39-year-old Peter Hennessey at a London hotel in December 1979. A man arrested over O'Nione's murder in March 1993 was placed in a chokehold and collapsed after lunging at a police officer and died in hospital before any charges could be laid. |
| December 1982 | Esme Hoad | Tonbridge, Kent | 85-year-old Hoad died from multiple bruises and a fractured skull in her house on Havelock Road, Tonbridge. A photofit was released of a man who had been spotted paying visits to the house in the last few weeks of her life. |
| February 1983 | Tracey Waters | Johnstone, Renfrewshire | 11-year-old Waters went missing on the evening of 14 February 1983 after leaving her house to visit a local youth club. Her body was found under a hedge in Shanks Crescent about half a mile from her home; she had been beaten and strangled. Waters's uncle was charged with her murder, but the charge was dropped. He vanished from his home in 2001 to escape vigilante attacks and police believe he may have committed suicide. |
| March 1983 | Wati Suri | Birmingham | 67-year-old Suri was beaten and strangled with a ligature by a burglar or burglars on 8 March 1983 at the house in Edgbaston where she lived with her son and daughter-in-law. Four youths were convicted of her murder in 1984, but the convictions of three of them were overturned in 1985 and the fourth had his overturned in 1994. |
| April 1983 | Mary "Molly" Willmore | Taplow, Buckinghamshire | 74-year-old Willmore's home was set on fire in the early hours of Saturday 2 April 1983. Her body was discovered in the kitchen there and had severe head injuries. Willmore's lifestyle was described as "eccentric": she lived alone with 15 cats in just a few rooms of the dilapidated house on Boundary Road. Police believed the attack was due to a burglary going wrong. |
| April 1983 | Sheila Anderson | Edinburgh | Anderson, 27, was last seen alive outside Lindean House on Commercial Street, Edinburgh at 11:25 p.m. on 7 April 1983. Her body was found just half an hour later on a track at Gypsy Brae, off West Shore Road in Granton. She had been repeatedly run over by a car. Her shoes and handbag were found a week later in a car park in East Lothian. Anderson had been a sex worker and had developed a drug habit after the death of her mother. Police obtained a DNA profile in 2009 which has not yet been matched to anyone. |
| May 1983 | Andrea Troupe | Peckham, London | The pregnant 15-year-old was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and heart in an early hours attack in Warwick Gardens, Peckham, on 2 May 1983. It was not known how she had come to be in that park, which was approximately a mile from her home. A man convicted of two other murders reportedly admitted to this one to a fellow prisoner but was not interviewed by the police about it. |
| June 1983 | Gary Hutchings | Islington, London | 23-year-old Hutchings was shot dead on 4 June 1983 near his flat in Camden Walk, Islington. Police inquiries found that the killing had followed an argument he had been involved in at a public house. |
| June 1983 | Olive Wilkinson | Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire | Wilkinson was found dead in her Montague Street home on 10 June 1983 with injuries caused by being beaten with a weapon. As her handbag was missing too, it seemed that theft could have been the motive for the slaying of the 36-year-old mother of five. A 63-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder in May 2024. |
| July 1983 | Diane Jones | Brightwell, Suffolk | Jones, 35, vanished outside the house she shared with her husband in Coggeshall, Essex when the pair had returned from a drink at a nearby pub on Saturday 23 July 1983. Her body was found with a fractured skull three months later in an area of Brightwell where someone had been seen taking a rolled-up carpet out of a car sometime during the weekend of her disappearance. Jones's husband was arrested in 1983 and again in 1990, but released without charge both times. The husband was always the only suspect in the case, but detectives were not able to obtain enough evidence for a prosecution on either occasion; after he died in 2023, police said that the case was now unlikely to ever be solved. |
| August 1983 | Eila Karjalainen | Oxfordshire | 23-year-old Karjalainen, a Finnish nursing student, was on holiday in England, and probably hitch-hiking, when she was murdered by an unknown perpetrator in the summer of 1983. Karjalainen was last seen alive on Sunday 7 August 1983 in London. Her decomposed body was found on 25 November 1983 in Barnham Woods on the Blenheim Estate at Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Her rucksack was found five miles away, beside the A40 at Barnard Gate near Oxford. The cause of Karjalainen's death was strangulation. |
| September 1983 | Janice Weston | Cambridgeshire | At 9:00 a.m. on Sunday 11 September 1983, the fully clothed body of Weston, a 36-year-old solicitor from London, was found in a ditch adjacent to a lay-by on the northbound carriageway of the A1 road, approximately 11⁄2 miles south of the Brampton Hut roundabout in Cambridgeshire. The body had several head wounds caused by a blunt object. Weston had stopped in the lay-by to change a tyre, and while the spare tyre was found attached to the car, the replaced tyre was never found. Her killer, who may have been in the car with her for the journey, had driven off in the vehicle after her murder and abandoned it in Camden Town, with money and the keys to her two properties left untouched inside. Twenty-three miles from the murder site at a garage in Royston, a man ordered a new number plate with the exact number of Weston's car. Weston's 39-year-old husband Anthony Weston, whom she had been married to for 15 months and who inherited £200,000 untaxed as a result of his wife's death, was held for 55 hours and the police applied to the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge him, but after an extended deliberation the DPP decided not to pursue a trial of him. |
| September 1983 | George Murdoch | Aberdeen | Taxi driver Murdoch was found fatally injured on Pitfodels Station Road, Aberdeen, on the evening of 29 September 1983. The 58-year-old had picked up a fare at 8:35 p.m. but never made it to his destination, Culter. A cheese wire was used to attack him and left at the scene. In 2023, police revealed that DNA believed to be the attacker's had been isolated, and said that it was the most significant development in the case to date. |
| October 1983 | Winifred Locke | North Petherton, Somerset | 80-year-old Locke was strangled and sexually assaulted at her sheltered accommodation after her daughter-in-law had left there on 21 October following a visit to give her her pension and some shopping she had done for her. |
| October 1983 | Stanley Cassidy | Salford, Greater Manchester | Cassidy, 76, was found battered to death on 28 October 1983 at his home in Wingrave House, Amersham Street. A man who denied murder but admitted to burglary was cleared of the former in December 1984. |
| November 1983 | Lloyd Simpson | Hoxton, London | 26-year-old Simpson was shot in the head and stomach as he watched TV at his flat in Shaftesbury Court, Shaftesbury Street, Hoxton, on 5 November 1983. Despite the flat's thin walls, the sound of gunshots did not attract neighbours' attention, reportedly due to a fireworks display outside the building at that time. Simpson's body was discovered by his father two days later after he failed to turn up for work at the family's wastepaper business. According to detectives, the murder bore all the hallmarks of a professional killing. A theoretical motive behind it had to do with the victim's sideline dealings with second-hand cars, but his father strongly disputed this hypothesis. Another hypothesis was that the perpetrators were looking for something important to them (the flat was searched thoroughly). |
| November 1983 | Stephen Sylvester | Heathrow Airport, London | The 39-year-old West Indian minicab driver was stabbed multiple times with a commando knife while on duty in the early hours of 17 November 1983. He was attacked in the car's back seat, where he had got in circumstances that remain unclear, and one of the stab wounds penetrated his heart. Sylvester's body was hidden in the boot and then found four days later when the boot was opened in a car park at Heathrow Airport. Most likely his killer was also responsible for the murder of another taxi driver in the same area: Pardeep Sangha. |
| November 1983 | Hinifan Bibi | Blackburn, West Lothian | 47-year-old Bibi and her 23-year-old son and 21-year-old daughter jumped 30 feet from their flat in Blackburn to escape a nighttime blaze on 27 November 1983. The son and daughter survived the drop, but Bibi herself did not. Teenagers who had been hanging around the area in recent months were thought to have been to blame for the fire as well as ones at other properties there, with the cause of each fire being burning paper pushed through the letterbox. |
| December 1983 | Gary Collins | Brightling, East Sussex | The 25-year-old drug dealer was discovered stabbed and beaten to death in woods at Brightling, near Battle. Detectives believe it may have been a contract killing related to drug smuggling. Collins had disappeared from his home in St Thomas Road, Hastings on 12 December 1983 – almost three months before his body was found. His unlocked grey BMW car was found abandoned at Battle rail station. Also the body of his cross-bred collie Trudy, who had been stabbed through the heart, was found in the same woods. |
| January 1984 | Phyllis Millward | Attacked in Sheerness, died in hospital in Gillingham (both in Kent) | 56-year-old Millward was attacked with a blunt instrument on the night of 12/13 January at her ground floor flat in Hope Street. No thievery was committed there, and the front door had been forced open. Fresh information led to six men being apprehended in 1992. |
| February 1984 | Colin Maxwell | Streatham, London | 13-year-old Maxwell left his home in Streatham on 19 February 1984 and was never seen again. His skeletal remains were found on 14 June 1986 in the back garden of a house in the district. The cause of death is unknown, although it is believed the teenager was strangled. Prime suspect Albert Newman was cleared of his murder at the Old Bailey in 2004. |
| March 1984 | Pardeep Sangha | By the A30 road close to the southern perimeter fence of Heathrow Airport | Indian minicab driver Sangha, 31, was stabbed to death while on duty in the early hours of 31 March 1984. His body was found slumped behind the car's passenger seat that day at around 2:00 a.m. Probably the killer intended to hide the body in the boot and then abandon the car at Heathrow Airport, but their plans were thwarted by the vehicle running out of petrol before reaching the airport and their inability to open the boot. It is likely that Sangha's killer was also responsible for the murder of another taxi driver in the same area: Stephen Sylvester. |
| April 1984 | James Doyle Snr, James Doyle Jnr, Andrew Doyle, Tony Doyle, Christina Halleron and Mark Halleron | Glasgow | James Doyle Snr, 53, and his sons James Doyle Jnr, 23, Andrew Doyle, 18, and Tony Doyle, 14, together with Christina Halleron (their 25-year-old sister) and Mark Halleron (her 18-month-old son), died after the flat they were in – a property in Bankend Street, Ruchazie, Glasgow – was set alight using petrol at approximately 2:00 a.m. on 16 April 1984. James Doyle Snr's 51-year-old wife and two other sons were there too but escaped. The murders were regarded as part of the Glasgow ice cream wars because Andrew legitimately sold ice creams from a van and there were people who sought to take over businesses such as his to use them as fronts for criminal activities. Two men were incarcerated for the murders later in 1984, but their convictions were overturned in 2004. |
| May 1984 | Anthony Littler | East Finchley, London | The 45-year-old senior Customs and Excise man's body was found in a pool of blood in a dark alley near East Finchley tube station. He had been returning home from the city centre, and was attacked soon after he had left the tube station, at around 0:15 a.m. on 1 May 1984. The man who alerted the emergency services from a nearby telephone box was never traced. Two men in their 50s were charged with Littler's murder in March 2025. |
| May 1984 | Yvonne Coley | Kings Heath, Birmingham | The body of Coley, a 28-year-old sex worker, was discovered hidden under a hedge on the edge of Cocks Moors Woods Golf Course at Warstock Lane, Kings Heath. She had been strangled with her own bra in the early hours of 25 May 1984. Alun Kyte, the killer of two other sex workers, was suspected of Coley's murder; however, no charges were filed against him in this case. |
| June 1984 | Shelley Morgan | Backwell, Somerset | The US-born 33-year-old mother-of-two disappeared on 11 June 1984 after heading to the Avon Gorge in Bristol to draw and take pictures. Her remains were found on 14 October 1984 in a copse off Long Lane, in Backwell. Morgan was stabbed 14 times in the back in an attack that police believed was sexually motivated. Her Olympus OM20 camera, as well as her bag, clothes and glasses, were stolen and have never been found. |
| July 1984 | Marion Hodge | Body not found | Hodge was a 33-year-old mother-of-two from the Scottish town of Lockerbie and vanished on Friday, 6 July after being dropped off in nearby Dumfries. The Court of Session in Edinburgh declared her legally dead in 1992. Hodge's 78-year-old husband was charged with her murder in December 2023, but deemed unfit for trial at a hearing in February 2025. An examination of facts is nevertheless set to begin at the High Court in Glasgow in September 2025. |
| August 1984 | Edna Harvey | Ipswich, Suffolk | Harvey's body was found in her ground-floor flat after concerned neighbours had seen smoke coming out of its front door – smoke from a fire that had been set following the asphyxiation of the 87-year-old. Police thought it was likely that she had been murdered because a burglary had gone wrong. |
| September 1984 | Mark Billington | Meriden, West Midlands | 15-year-old Billington lived in South Yardley, Birmingham, and was last seen alive on 1 September 1984 with his blue racing bike. His body was found hanging from a tree in remote woodland near Meriden – about seven miles from his home – on 11 November 1984. The inquest into Billington's death returned an open verdict, but the case was revisited and reopened as a murder enquiry after a man living in the area in 1984 – Brian Lunn Field – was convicted in November 2001 of murdering 14-year-old Roy Tutill in 1968. Field is suspected of being responsible for Billington's death. Three men were arrested in 2002 and subsequently released without charge. |
| September 1984 | Lorna Porter | Bellshill, North Lanarkshire | Porter's body was discovered with a cut to the throat near a railway track on 10 September 1984. In 1988, an ex-policeman was convicted of the 18-year-old secretary's murder, but he walked free in 1999 when a "not proven" verdict was delivered following a retrial. (At the time of Porter's death, he was married to a woman who was both a friend of hers and the sister of her fiancé.) It was contended during the 1999 trial that a man lied at the 1988 one by falsely claiming to have witnessed an incident in the garden of the accused the day before Porter was found dead. |
| September 1984 | Mark Yendell | Bristol | On the evening of 10 September 1984, the 33-year-old British Rail steward received fatal blows to the head in the car park of Bristol Temple Meads railway station before being placed on the back seat of his own red Lancia and taken to Welsh Back (an area of dockland between Bristol Bridge and Redcliffe Bridge), where he was dumped into the water. A motive behind the killing has never been clearly established. |
| September 1984 | Elizabeth Sutherland | Culbokie, Ross-shire, Scotland | In the afternoon of 24 September 1984, 36-year-old Sutherland, a mother of two, was stabbed to death in her house in Culbokie, apparently after she disturbed burglars. A few hours later her body, lying in a pool of blood, was discovered by her 10-year-old daughter. In December 1985 George McPhee was convicted of the murder. However, the case was re-opened many years later and brought to the Appeal Court in 2003, when the jury overturned the conviction and McPhee was released. The murder is therefore now officially unsolved, although the police have decided not to hunt the killer anymore. |
| October 1984 | Barbara Pinder | Battersea, London | Pinder, a 76-year-old widow, was beaten, strangled and then stabbed 35 times in her flat at 24A Prince of Wales Mansions in Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, at some point between 26 and 28 October 1984. A motive behind the killing has never been clearly determined. |
| October 1984 | Beverley Trendall | Farman Grove, Northolt, London | 37-year-old Trendall was stabbed through the heart in her flat on Halloween in 1984, but her body was not discovered until a month later, when police forced their way into the flat because her mother was concerned about her lack of contact. A workmate said that Trendall was heading out to meet a new boyfriend that night, and she was seen with a mystery man. Trendall was not the type of person who would go back to her flat with a man she did not know. Her diaries and personal belongings were missing from the scene, and her white Volkswagen Beetle was seen being driven around the area the day after she was killed. The case featured on Crimewatch. |
| December 1984 | Lisa Hession | Leigh, Greater Manchester | 14-year-old Hession was attacked and strangled to death on Saturday 8 December 1984 after being snatched as she walked home alone from a party. Her mother reported her missing when she failed to return home, and within a short space of time, the police called at her house in Bonnywell Road to ask her to make her way to Leigh Infirmary to identify a body discovered just before midnight in an alleyway near the house. Hession's clothing had been disturbed (suggesting a sexual motive), and she also had marks around her neck and a black eye. The case went cold, but advances in DNA profiling meant that the swabbing of men in the Leigh and Wigan area was allowed to take place in 2011. However, nobody has been charged with the murder. Hession's mother died in 2016. |
| 9 December 1984 | Peter Miller | Great Yarmouth, Norfolk | 24-year-old Miller died from a single stab wound to the chest and was found in his kitchen by his brother. Although the victim had connections to convicted criminals Andrew Hall and James Ventham, his murder was not linked to either of them. A CS canister was also found at the scene, believed to have been used by either Miller or his killer during a struggle. |
| January 1985 | Aristos Constantinou | East Finchley, London | Constantinou, co-founder of the fashion label Ariella, was shot dead at the age of 40 in his home on The Bishops Avenue – 'Billionaires Row' – in the early hours of New Year's Day 1985. He was shot with six silver-coloured bullets. Police initially suspected the motive was theft, but a number of family disputes have emerged in the years since Constantinou's death. |
| February 1985 | Louise Goble and Robert Goble Jr. | Hastings, East Sussex | A fire was deliberately started on the night of 2–3 February 1985 at the house of the Goble family, at 38 St Helen's Road in Hastings. Robert Goble Sr. and his wife Lee managed to escape the fire with the help of neighbours, but the couple's two children, 11-year-old Louise and four-year-old Robert, did not survive the attack. A motive has not been established, but there is a theory that the arsonist(s) meant to target a different house but set fire to the Gobles' instead by mistake. |
| February 1985 | Constance "Connie" Aris | Cheltenham, Gloucestershire | Aris, a 73-year-old widow, died from several axe blows to the head in her house at 32 Roman Road, Cheltenham. The murderer, who was probably known to her (since there was no sign of forced entry), struck unexpectedly as she sat in a chair and watched TV. Aris was last seen alive when she was returning home from a community centre on the evening of 27 February 1985. Her body was discovered the next morning by her son and daughter-in-law. Despite a massive hunt for the perpetrator, nobody was ever charged with the killing. A possible motive for it was theft (watches, jewellery and Aris's pension book were missing). |
| March 1985 | Pat McCluskey | Birmingham | The body of the 52-year-old Irish builder was found under a mattress on waste ground in Small Heath on 17 March 1985. He had been beaten around the head with a brick, barbed wire was tied around his throat and his stomach had been slashed. McCluskey had last been seen with a ginger-haired man in the Shakespeare pub and had links with the criminal underworld. |
| April 1985 | Jackie Waines | Frampton Cotterell, near Bristol | 35-year-old Jackie Waines, a sex worker and mother-of-three also known as Linda Guest, was stabbed to death on the night of 21/22 April 1985, probably by one of her clients. She was last seen alive at 11:20 p.m. on Ashley Road in Bristol. One hour later her body was found on Perrinpit Road near Frampton Cotterell. The people who discovered the body also spotted a dark Ford Cortina parked nearby; the car drove off as soon as they emerged. |
| April 1985 | Mary, Mark and Leslie Budworth | Liverpool | Pregnant Mary Budworth and her twin toddler sons Mark and Leslie died at their home in Hindley Walk, Speke, on 22 April 1985. Mary was throttled before the house was set on fire and it was found that her death was from a combination of strangulation, shock and smoke inhalation. Mark and Leslie died from smoke inhalation; three other children who were in the house managed to escape. |
| June 1985 | Sandra Phillips | Swansea | The 38-year-old mother of four's body was found beaten and strangled inside the sex shop she managed, which was locked up. Two brothers were wrongly convicted and spent seven years behind bars before their 1992 release, after which police apologised for investigational failings. An appeal on the programme Crimewatch in the 2000s led to new information but no killer, and in 2009 it was announced that inquiries would cease until and unless there was a fresh lead. When the case was being reinvestigated in the 2000s, a man seen locking the door of the shop at around 11:15 a.m. on the day of the murder (14 June 1985) was identified as the chief suspect. He was described as then being approximately in his late 50s, meaning he would be in his 90s as of the 2020s if still alive. |
| July 1985 | Shamira, Zahir, Rahim and Alim Kassam | Ilford, London | Pregnant Shamira Kassam, 24, and her sons Zahir, six, Rahim, five, and Alim, 14 months, were killed when their home in Oakwood Gardens, Seven Kings, was set fire to on 13 July 1985. Suspected to have been a racially motivated offence, it was the third arson attack on the property within a three-year timespan. |
| July 1985 | Henrietta Osborne | Pimlico, London | The beaten, strangled and stabbed body of the 86-year-old widow was found on her burning bed on 21 July 1985, and a later inspection of the flat suggested it was missing a vase. A man was convicted in 1990 of the manslaughter of both this victim and Barbara Pinder (died in October 1984) after telling the police that he killed them, but the Appeal Court quashed the convictions in 1992 on the grounds that he was a serial false confessor and there was nothing apart from his admissions to link him to either death. |
| August 1985 | Jeffrey McNish | Liverpool | McNish, a 22-year-old from London, was stabbed in the liver while men were beating him with cricket bats at the Toxteth Caribbean Carnival on 10 August 1985. Police claimed that there were people who were shielding his attackers. |
| August 1985 | Dennis Radcliffe | Tottenham, London | Seven men were cleared of the murder of Radcliffe, a 23-year-old fatally stabbed in Tottenham's Campbell Road on 25 August 1985 after he had been to a party. |
| September/October 1985 | Alexander McClelland | Brighouse, West Yorkshire | The body of 66-year-old Alexander McClelland, also known as Sandy, was discovered on 7 October 1985 in the boot of a car in the car park between Bethel Street and the Calder and Hebble Navigation. He had been stabbed. McClelland had last been seen on the evening of 12 September 1985 near his house in Leeds, and seemed to be in a good mood at the time. The case was re-appealed in 2017. |
| September 1985 | Brian "Little Legs" Clifford | Kennington, London | Career criminal and nightclub owner Clifford, 45, was shot dead in his bedroom in the early hours of 28 September 1985. He had been acquitted in 1979 of the attempted murder of a man shot twice in the head. |
| September/October 1985 | Violet Milsom | Bristol | 62-year-old Milsom was tied up, sexually assaulted and strangled in her flat on Ashley Road, St Pauls, on the night of 30 September/1 October 1985. Her body was severely mutilated and the flat ransacked as well. There was no sign of forced entry, which led to the conclusion that Milsom might have known her assailant and let him in, despite the fact that she used to go to bed very early and not let anyone in after 6:00 p.m. |
| 6 October 1985 | PC Keith Blakelock | London | 40-year-old Blakelock was defending firefighters as they tended to a burning supermarket during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham; he stumbled and was set upon by a mob with bladed weapons. Three men were convicted in 1987, but the convictions were overturned after forensic evidence suggested interview transcripts had been falsified. The officer in charge of the original investigation was cleared of inventing a statement by one of the accused. |
| 9 October 1985 | Philip Wong | Glasgow | The 48-year-old restaurateur was hacked to death in central Glasgow by three men with machetes. It is thought that somebody ordered the killing because Wong would not do a deal with a Triad group eager for a share of a Chinese video rental business owned by him. |
| 16 October 1985 | Cyril Martin | Attacked in Maidenhead, died in hospital in Slough (both in Berkshire) | Martin was a 63-year-old homeless father-of-six found bludgeoned near the back of a former art college on Marlow Road, Maidenhead, on 21 August 1985. He died eight weeks later. Martin had been beaten with a blunt instrument in a "vicious attack" before being discovered lying in a pool of blood in an outbuilding where he had been sleeping rough. Three people were arrested over the murder but not charged. |
| 26 October 1985 | Alison Slade | Tetsworth, Oxfordshire | 17-year-old Slade was initially seriously injured but later died after people branded "yobs" threw a lump of concrete through the windscreen of the car in which she was travelling in the front passenger seat. This happened as the car passed through Tetsworth. Four youths were soon interviewed by police. |
| 5 November 1985 | Margaret Greenwood | Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear | 58-year-old Greenwood was battered to death at her home in Houghton-le-Spring. A boy aged 11 and a man aged 22 – two people believed to have been let in by her because they had fooled her into thinking they were there to collect money for Bonfire Night – were locked up for her murder in 1986, but the boy's conviction was ruled unsafe in 1987 and the man's in 1999 after the Appeal Court had heard evidence of his suggestibility. |
| 6 November 1985 | Phil Nickson | Stoke Newington, London | Nickson was a 32-year-old civil servant killed by a blow to the head in Newington Green Road, Stoke Newington, at about 5:20 p.m. on 6 November 1985. An extensive police investigation along with a reconstruction on the BBC programme Crimewatch failed to get the case solved. |
| 16/17 November 1985 | Clara Kirton | Southwark, London | Kirton was a few days shy of her 86th birthday when she was fatally attacked with a broken beer bottle in her Southwark flat. Police are of the opinion that her killer entered her flat to burgle the property and turned on her when she became aware that she had an intruder. |
| 29 November 1985 | Gérard Hoarau | Edgware, London | 34-year-old Hoarau, an exile who had once led an opposition party in the Seychelles, was killed with a submachine gun outside his home on Greencourt Avenue, Edgware. Two men – one aged 77, the other in his 80s – were arrested in 2018 on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. Three people had previously been sentenced in 1986 for perverting the course of justice. |
| 23/24 December 1985 | Susan Drury | Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire | 24-year-old Drury was discovered dead in her front garden on Christmas Eve morning, lying face down and with no obvious signs of assault. It was subsequently found, however, that she had died from forcible asphyxia. |
| 1986 | Helen Gormeley | Body not found | 64-year-old Gormeley was reported missing in Northamptonshire in 1986, but Humberside Police took over the case and made it into a murder inquiry in 2015. |
| January 1986 | Parvez Akhtar | Bradford, West Yorkshire | On 12 January 1986, the 24-year-old restaurant owner was strangled to death and then had his throat cut before being left in his car, where he was discovered by a cousin. Police have suspected the killing to have been ritualistic in nature and to be linked to a feud with another family – a feud said to have begun when Akhtar's parents lived in Pakistan in the 1950s. |
| January 1986 | Danuta Kaczmarska | Birmingham | Polish GP Kaczmarska was 52 years old when she was found dead in the kitchen of her home on Coniston Close, Hall Green, Birmingham, on 22 January 1986. She had suffered head injuries (possibly from a small axe), been gagged with a tea towel and had her body set on fire. Two used champagne glasses were found close by. The wire cork cage and foil from the bottle were also found, but the champagne bottle itself was missing. Cash and valuables in the house had been left alone. |
| February 1986 | Rosalia Jones | Luton, Bedfordshire | 24-year-old Jones was murdered at her home on Layham Drive on 14 February 1986. She was found in bed having suffered head injuries and asphyxiation. |
| March 1986 | Kevin Hicks | Body not found | 16-year-old Hicks disappeared on 2 March 1986 after telling his mother he was leaving their home in Addiscombe, Croydon, London, to buy some eggs at a nearby corner shop. He left at about 8:30 p.m., and the last known sighting of him was at about 10:00 p.m. on Shirley Road, walking in the general direction of his home. In 2016 police announced that they were treating Hicks's case as murder. Someone had called the Croydon Advertiser in 1996 to say they knew where his body was, and police have urged this person to come forward. |
| April 1986 | Peter Thurgood and Lindy Benstead | Rake, near Rogate, West Sussex | 47-year-old Thurgood and 49-year-old Benstead, both from Whitehill in Hampshire, were attacked on 22 April 1986 while in a silver Mazda hire car which was parked in a lay-by near the village of Rake in West Sussex. Thurgood was shot in the head and chest and Benstead was shot in the head. The pair had been conducting an affair, and Benstead's husband was questioned about the murders but had an alibi. |
| May 1986 | Sandra Court | Near Bournemouth, Dorset | A group of teenagers found the 26-year-old's strangled corpse in a ditch beside the Avon Causeway after she had been out the night before to celebrate a new job she was due to start soon. The suspected killer of Suzy Lamplugh, convicted murderer John Cannan, is also suspected to have killed Court. A pay-and-display parking ticket proves he was in Bournemouth on the night of her murder. |
| May 1986 | Arif Khan | Tipton, West Midlands | Khan, a 28-year-old foundry worker, was found dead in a garage on Coneygree Road on 9 May 1986. The neck and chest of his body had burn marks suggesting that he had been tortured. |
| May 1986 | Fiona Saunders | Church Crookham, Hampshire | On 12 May 1986, the body of the 23-year-old mother was found battered with a hammer and a rolling pin in her home on Army married quarters at Church Crookham, Hampshire. Her husband was away on military exercises at the time. A week earlier, another woman had been attacked on the estate by a man with a knife before he escaped. |
| May 1986 | Julie Perigo | Sunderland | 51-year-old Perigo was stabbed to death in her one-bedroom flat on Kidderminster Road, Sunderland. Police discovered her body there after forcing entry to the property on 23 May 1986 – a week after she was last seen alive. Perigo was a sex worker and kept diaries containing names of clients of hers; police used these in their investigation, which resulted in three men being arrested and then released. A couple of men who had contact with Perigo around the time of her death were never traced. The case was featured on Crimewatch in July 1986. |
| May 1986 | Richard Griffith | Reading, Berkshire | Griffith, a 20-year-old from Stockwell in London, was stabbed in the heart early on 18 May 1986 at a party on Oxford Road, Reading. Thirteen months later a 23-year-old painter and decorator was acquitted of his murder at Aylesbury Crown Court. |
| May 1986 | Georgina Davies | Salford, Greater Manchester | Davies, a 72-year-old widow and semi-retired nurse who lived alone and was known as Jean to her friends and neighbours, was last seen going into her home on Mildred Street, Higher Broughton, Salford, by a neighbour at around 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday 20 May 1986. A friend called for her at around 9:00 p.m. that evening to ask if she wanted to go out for a drink, but there was no answer. When she did not arrive for work the next day, her concerned employer visited the house, noticed a broken window and called the police. Davies was found in her bedroom and had died from pressure to the neck. A set of house keys was missing, along with her handbag, a jacket and some wellington boots. The case was featured on Crimewatch in July 1986. |
| July 1986 | Suzy Lamplugh | Body not found | Lamplugh was a British estate agent who went missing on 28 July 1986 (aged 25) in Fulham, southwest London. She was officially declared dead, presumed murdered, in 1994. Although the Crown Prosecution Service ultimately decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge him, police announced in November 2002, in a very rare move, that they believed John Cannan had killed Lamplugh. Cannan had been released from a prison near Fulham three days before she vanished. |
| August 1986 | Lorna Hayles | Tasman Road, Clapham, London | Unemployed 28-year-old Hayles from Jamaica was found dead in her flat on 29 August 1986 after a neighbour reported seeing a swarm of flies by her window. She was found in her underclothes in her bedroom, and is thought to have died four weeks earlier. At the front of Hayles's neck were two puncture wounds inflicted with the murder weapon (a carving fork), and wounds on her hands indicated that she tried to defend herself from her attacker. A man was charged with murder after fingerprints from the flat turned out to match his, but the case against him was dropped on the grounds of insufficient evidence. |
| August 1986 | Che Keng Fung | Holloway, London | 68-year-old Fung was tied up and beaten to death at his home in Sussex Way, Holloway, on 11 August 1986, and jewellery and luncheon vouchers were stolen. The perpetrator(s) likely also killed Thomas Walker at his home in nearby Caledonian Road a month later. |
| August 1986 | John Malthouse | Cambridge | 55-year-old Malthouse was of no fixed abode. On 22 August 1986, three days after he had arrived in the city, his body was found in the toilets at Victoria Avenue, Midsummer Common, Cambridge. He had been the subject of an extremely violent assault. |
| August 1986 | Michael Collins | Stratford, London | The 37-year-old gang boss was set upon in the Moonlight pub on Broadway, Stratford, on 25 August 1986, and bled to death after having an artery severed while being stabbed in the legs and buttocks. Police thought, however, that his death was unintentional and that the aim of the offenders, who apparently consisted of four men, was to frighten rather than kill him. Two men were acquitted. A connection was suspected between Collins's murder and that in neighbouring West Ham five days later of 47-year-old Peter Morris. |
| August 1986 | Frank Moody | Attacked in Bermondsey, London, died in hospital | The 27-year-old pub doorman was shot in what was apparently a gangland incident while on duty at a pub called The Willows on 23 August 1986. Death from his injuries occurred five days later. |
| August 1986 | Peter Morris | West Ham, London | On 30 August 1986, Morris, a 47-year-old club boss, was killed with an axe and at least two other men were severely wounded when they were chased out of a West Ham pub known as The Telegraph and had shots fired at them. The pub was in Church Street. Three men extradited from Spain to face charges over Morris's murder were released after the prosecution offered no evidence. |
| August 1986 | Mabel Crandell | Herne Bay, Kent | Crandell, 89, was killed at her bungalow on 30 or 31 August 1986. Neck and facial injuries she had when discovered in the burning building early on 1 September would appear to the pathologist to have been caused by kicking and stamping. A man and his wife went to the police in November 1989 and told them that her ex-husband turned up at their residence on 31 August 1986 and confessed to the crime before returning to the victim's property to set it alight, but his 1991 conviction was overturned in 2003 after three experts testified during his appeal hearing that it was unlikely that Crandell was murdered at the time the couple said he said she was. |
| September 1986 | Thomas Walker | Holloway, London | 61-year-old Walker was tied to a chair, beaten to death and robbed of his wallet at his maisonette in Caledonian Road, Holloway. Whoever committed the acts may also have killed Che Keng Fung at his home in the same district a month earlier. |
| October 1986 | William "Bill" Smith | Mirfield, West Yorkshire | Smith, 56, was murdered on the evening of 25 October 1986. He had been walking along a path between Mirfield Memorial Park and the canal known as the Calder and Hebble Navigation. Smith's body was found at the bottom of an embankment next to the canal; he had been asphyxiated. Police made a new appeal for information on the 30th anniversary of his death. |
| November 1986 | John Gaspa | Camden Town, London | 42-year-old Gaspa was shot in his flat in Julian Court, Camden Road, and found dead in the property on 10 November 1986. Speculation followed that the murder was over money he owed due to a gambling habit. |
| November 1986 | Narmalan Selvanaygan, Gnanharan Arthimoorty and Karunharan Arthimoorty | East Ham, London | 23-year-old Narmalan Selvanaygan, 20-year-old Gnanharan Arthimoorty and 21-year-old Karunharan Arthimoorty were Tamils killed in a petrol bomb attack at a property on Burges Road, East Ham, on 14 November 1986. Two fellow Tamils' convictions for murder and arson were quashed in 1994 when concerns had been expressed about police methods used to obtain confessions from the men. |
| November 1986 | Ann Ballantine | Edinburgh | Ballantine was a 20-year-old woman whose body was found wrapped in cloth in a canal. She had been throttled to death and then stored for up to two months before being dumped there. |
| December 1986 | John Dobson | Body not found | 34-year-old Dobson disappeared from the campus of Lancaster University on 1 December 1986, and his case was featured on Crimewatch in January 1994. On the day of his disappearance, Dobson was given a lift to the university by another student. They had an arrangement in which Dobson would be driven in by the other man and contribute towards the cost of the petrol. The other man said that he and Dobson talked on that journey but that Dobson was quieter than usual. Two hours after arriving at the university, Dobson went to see a lecturer about some work, but the lecturer said they should speak in greater detail later that afternoon. Dobson could not commit to any time and said he hoped that he would be able to come back, but he never did. He did not have a money or drug problem and there was no sexual scandal to do with him. |
| December 1986 | Linda Cook | Portsmouth, Hampshire | The 24-year-old former barmaid was raped, stamped on and throttled on waste ground off Lake Road, Portsmouth, on Tuesday 9 December 1986. Police believed that the killing could be linked to a spate of increasingly violent sex attacks in the Landport and Buckland areas over the previous two years, apparently committed by an unidentified "baby-faced" ginger man dubbed the "Beast of Buckland" in the press. Footprint evidence showed that Cook's killer wore a shoe with the word "Flash" imprinted on the sole, and the case was dubbed the "Cinderella Murder". Investigations found that less than 7,000 pairs of shoes with the Flash logo had been sold in Britain, with only 133 sold in Portsmouth, many to naval personnel of the nearby naval base. An off-duty sailor was sentenced to life in 1988 but released in 2003 when DNA evidence proved he was not the killer. Police enquiries had originally focused on a key sighting of an agitated man in his early 20s who had hailed a taxi 400 yards from the murder site shortly after the killing. The taxi driver reported the man as asking to go to North End Junction and having a signet ring on his right forefinger. Police announced in 2007 that they were reviewing the case with a view to taking advantage of further advancements in DNA testing. |
| December 1986 | Nigel Bostock | Banks, near Southport, Lancashire | Bostock was found dead five days before Christmas in the semi-detached bungalow he lived in by himself. He was half in and half out of the bathtub, and around his neck was a ligature. It was thought that up to three other people were at the bungalow on the night of Bostock's death, but none of them has ever been traced or come forward. In 2003, police received an anonymous letter with information about the murder, but it did not lead to a breakthrough. Bostock was 31 when he was killed. |
| January 1987 | Edmund Owusu | Hammersmith, London | Car park attendant Owusu, 46, was shot twice at a kiosk in a car park in Sussex Place, Hammersmith, whilst at work there on the evening of Saturday 17 January. Much but not all of the money in the kiosk was taken as well – money thought to have amounted to less than £100. Two suspects were seen running towards King Street after the shots were fired. |
| January 1987 | Marina Monti | Shepherd's Bush, London | The 27-year-old sex worker was strangled and her body left on waste ground in Shepherd's Bush towards the end of January. |
| January 1987 | Rachel Applethwaite | Chelsea, London | 24-year-old Applethwaite was found dead in Sumner Place the day after Marina Monti was in Shepherd's Bush, but investigators eventually ruled out a link between the deaths of the two sex workers. Applethwaite had been beaten and stamped on. A Mexican who worked at his country's embassy in London handed himself in to the police after finding out from Crimewatch that they were interested in speaking to a man whose description matched his, but they did not charge him with either woman's murder. |
| January 1987 | William Barnard | London | Barnard was a 65-year-old Cricklewood man who died of a heart attack on 29 January after being assaulted in Neasden. The offenders (two youths) wanted money off him, but he was not carrying any. |
| February 1987 | Alvin Burke | Shepherd's Bush, London | On the afternoon of 22 February 1987, 27-year-old Burke was stabbed 54 times and kicked in an attack that started in the foyer of a tower block and continued in the car park. His girlfriend had a flat in the tower block and he was on his way to see her when he encountered his assailant. Theories that the murder was a case of mistaken identity or a contract killing over a drug deal were suggested, as was a motive to do with the multiple women Burke was seeing at the time. |
| March 1987 | Daniel Morgan | Sydenham, London | Morgan was found dead with an axe wound to the head in the car park of the Golden Lion pub on 10 March 1987. There are suggestions that police corruption is linked to the death of the 37-year-old private investigator. |
| March 1987 | Helen Fleet | Weston-super-Mare, Somerset | 66-year-old Fleet was beaten, stabbed and strangled in an apparently motiveless attack while out walking her dogs in Weston Woods, on the outskirts of Weston-super-Mare, on 28 March 1987. |
| April 1987 | May Richards | Walkden, Greater Manchester | Richards, 89, was found lifeless behind her front door on 21 April 1987. She had been tied to a chair and died from a heart attack, but it could not be established whether any items were missing, and the property showed no signs of forced entry. A female pedlar who never came forward and whom detectives were unsuccessful in tracing had been seen peering through windows there earlier on 21 April. |
| May 1987 | Desmond Blain | Bedford | 53-year-old Blain died after being pushed down a stairway on 30 May 1987. The stairway was part of a block of flats located in Beaumont Gardens, off Chantry Road in Kempston. |
| July 1987 | Rosemary Allen | Liverpool | 37-year-old Rosemary Allen, also spelled Rose Marie Allen, was found stabbed to death outside her husband's flat in Parkway, Toxteth, on 27 July 1987. The husband was tried, but the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence for him to be convicted. Semen was found on Allen's blood-covered body, but it was not known when she last had sex. The murder weapon was a casserole dish that belonged to the husband, and it was found at the scene. The husband was alleged to have told a fellow prisoner while on remand: "It is the perfect murder; no witness, no forensics, no way they can get me." |
| August 1987 | Michael Galvin | London | 23-year-old Galvin was stabbed at his stall at the Notting Hill Carnival on 30 August 1987 and died in hospital. The conviction of a man jailed for his murder was quashed following a claim by a police informer that he had lied under oath about what he had seen at the carnival due to intense pressure from officers for him to do so. |
| September 1987 | Fitzroy Johnson | Brixton, London | Jamaican by birth and aged 27, Johnson died on 2 September 1987 after a bullet or bullets fired by an unknown person struck his head in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. |
| September 1987 | Simon Dale | Heath, Herefordshire | Dale, a 68-year-old near-blind former architect, was found dead on 13 September 1987 at Heath House, an isolated 17th century mansion close to Herefordshire's border with Shropshire. He had been bludgeoned to death up to two days previously. Dale's ex-wife, Baroness de Stempel (née Susan Wilberforce), stood trial for murder in July 1989 (earlier charges of murder against two of the Baroness's children, Marcus and Sophia Wilberforce, had been dropped); she was found not guilty. No one else has ever been charged with the slaying. The investigation coincidentally revealed a fraud committed by the Baroness against her late aunt, Lady Illingworth. Police investigating the fraud conducted a search of the grounds of Heath House for 30 gold bars said to be there and to have a total value of around £12 million, but none were found. |
| October 1987 | Philip Saunders | Cardiff | 52-year-old Saunders was beaten with a spade in the garden of his home in Anstee Court, Canton, on the evening of 12 October 1987. He died in hospital five days later. Saunders ran a newsagent's kiosk at Cardiff Central bus station and was robbed of his day's takings during the attack. Three men, known as the Cardiff Newsagent Three, were jailed for his murder, but their convictions were quashed in 1999. |
| October 1987 | Elsa Hannaway | Manchester | 37-year-old Hannaway was beaten, raped and left for dead in Whitworth Park in Rusholme after visiting the West Indian Sports and Social Club and the Big Western pub in Moss Side one night. A woman who got out of a taxi in the early hours of 30 October 1987 told an inquest that she saw a woman arguing and struggling with a Rastafarian man on a footpath in that park. Police think they were Hannaway and her killer. Next to her body was a Sekonda watch believed to have been his. |
| November 1987 | Cyril Fensome, Florence Pennell and Stacey Darlington | Northampton | 62-year-old Fensome and 60-year-old Pennell died when petrol poured through the letterbox was ignited. The third victim of the blaze, seven-year-old Darlington (Pennell's granddaughter), died later in hospital. |
| December 1987 | Michael Brown | Rotherhithe, London | Brown, 34, left Lower Road's Dreadnought pub on 5 December 1987 and had two barrels' worth of bullets fired at him from a car as he waited at a nearby bus stop. |
| December 1987 | Roland Carmagnole | Liverpool | Carmagnole, a 28-year-old student, was beaten to death with a plank of wood on Scotland Road, Liverpool, on 12 December 1987. The case was featured on Crimewatch in 2001, which resulted in new information surfacing. A man was found not guilty of Carmagnole's murder in March 2006. |
| December 1987 | Geoffrey Gilbert | Manchester | The murder of 43-year-old Gilbert, found stabbed to death at his flat in Gorton on 19 December 1987, was thought by police to have been perpetrated due to homophobia on the part of the attacker. |
| December 1987 | Alice and Edna Rowley | Birmingham | Alice and Edna Rowley ran a corner shop together for over 50 years in Greswolde Road, Sparkhill, Birmingham. On 23 December 1987 the sisters were found dead in their home above the shop. Alice, 87, was in the living room – she had been strangled, and Edna, 77, was found suffocated in her bedroom. There was no sign of a break-in. Among the items missing were a cassette radio, boxes of chocolates, a bottle of Tia Maria and an old brown leather suitcase. A neighbour told police that he had seen a scruffy-looking middle-aged man knocking on the internal glass door of the shop on the evening of 22 December, but no further leads emerged. |
| January 1988 | Anthony Gardner | Manchester | Gardner, 26, was shot and killed outside a Moss Side drug den on 11 January. Gangster Anthony Johnson was suspected of being the perpetrator, and he was himself unlawfully shot dead just over three years after Gardner was. Johnson's murder is unsolved too. |
| January 1988 | Yana Jones | Walworth, London | 28-year-old Jones was found dead in her flat in Rutley Close on 16 January 1988. She had been stabbed three times in the neck and face but had no defensive injuries, and there were no signs of a break-in, suggesting she had known her murderer(s) and let them in. £300 was missing from the flat. Police said witnesses appeared unwilling to help them. |
| February 1988 | John Lennon | Forest Gate, London | 41-year-old Lennon was found dead with his pockets turned out in St Antony's Road on 20 February 1988. He had died from massive bleeding into the brain following an assault. |
| February 1988 | Kate Simpson | Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham | A woman visiting the widowed 94-year-old's semi-detached house to deliver groceries on 27 February 1988 found her dead in her living room with a knife sticking out of her chest. Three men were sentenced for murder, but attempts to get the convictions against them quashed met with success. The person who stabbed Simpson was probably one of two or three distraction burglars and might not have been planning to go as far as killing someone. |
| March 1988 | Donna Healey | Leeds | Sex worker Healey disappeared after being seen by family the day before her 18th birthday, which was in March 1988. Her body was discovered in a Chapel Allerton park in January 1991, but it was not identified until 2003. In a state of mummification when it was found, it would later be revealed that the body was stored somewhere cool and dry for a considerable amount of time, and the police think that whoever was storing it finally got rid of it because having it at home was no longer viable. |
| 23 March 1988 | Debbie Linsley | Victoria Station, London | Linsley was found murdered in a carriage of a Network SouthEast train at Victoria Station. She had died from multiple stab wounds to the heart. The case was reopened in 2002, but so far no one has been arrested in connection with it. Linsley, a 26-year-old living and working in Edinburgh, had been visiting her parents and brother in Bromley. She got into an old-fashioned compartment of the 14:16 train from Petts Wood to London Victoria stations. Screams were heard between Brixton and London Victoria. The killer left traces of his blood at the scene, but the murder weapon, thought to have been a knife with a blade length of between 13 and 19 centimetres, was not found. There is a £20,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Linsley's murder led to Network SouthEast reconfiguring the interiors of its trains and removing the compartments from most workings. |
| 26 March 1988 | Carol Baldwin | Northampton | A jury took over seven hours to find a 13-year-old girl not guilty of killing 13-year-old Baldwin in a Northampton park. The girl was alleged to have stabbed Baldwin for calling her a name, but in court she insisted that she was not in the park when the stabbing took place and that her confession to being the killer to the police was false and due to coercion. |
| March 1988 | Florence Mills | South Ferriby, Lincolnshire | A man out walking his dog on 19 April 1989 saw a washed-up severed human head on the bank of the River Humber at South Ferriby, and it was subsequently recovered from there and found to have been battered with a blunt instrument. The victim was a 61-year-old woman living in the nearby town of Scunthorpe when last known to have been alive, and was reported missing after failing to turn up to a prearranged meeting with her daughter on 31 March 1988. |
| April 1988 | Inga Maria Hauser | Ballypatrick Forest, near Ballycastle, County Antrim, Northern Ireland | Hauser, 18, a German tourist, was found dead with a broken neck in a remote part of Ballypatrick Forest on 20 April 1988 – two weeks after arriving in Northern Ireland on a ferry from Scotland. Police believe the area around where she was found has residents with information that could assist in solving her case, which has already been progressed by developments in DNA technology. |
| April 1988 | Abdur Rashid | Epping Forest, Essex | 46-year-old Rashid was fatally battered about the head on 26/27 April 1988, after which his body had petrol poured over it and was set alight in Epping Forest. Though no motive is known, the idea that he might have been targeted because of his religion (he had formerly been a mullah at the East London Mosque) cannot be discounted. |
| April 1988 | John Lewis | Attacked in Bermondsey, London, died in hospital | 66-year-old Lewis was kicked repeatedly after going to sleep on a park bench on 7 August 1987. He was known as Scouse and was 5 feet 4 inches (1.63 m) tall. A witness said the assailant was wearing working boots with steel-capped toes, and his bloody footprints were left on a path. Lewis died on 28 April 1988 after slipping into a coma. A man was tried but acquitted when it was found that he owned no boots that matched those used in the attack. |
| May 1988 | Joan Macan | Ashridge, near Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire | Macan was bludgeoned to death after disturbing burglars at her cottage on 6 May 1988 (her 81st birthday). A 47-year-old man appeared before magistrates in 1994 to stand accused of her murder, but no conviction for it followed that hearing. |
| June 1988 | Joseph Hargreaves | Leeds | 71-year-old Hargreaves was beaten to death without the use of a weapon. Although somebody was charged with his murder, no conviction resulted from it. |
| June 1988 | Jack Christian | South Witham, Lincolnshire | 74-year-old Christian was battered to death at his home on 8–9 June 1988. His son was charged with the murder despite being the one to have raised the alarm over it, but was acquitted after it was revealed that traces of blood found on his trousers – blood matching his father's blood group – could have got on them by his dog sniffing a pool of blood and then sneezing near them. |
| June 1988 | Sheila Farrow | Stockport, Greater Manchester | Someone beat 49-year-old Farrow to death in Stockport town centre on 17 June 1988. A witness saw her talking to a man in the early hours of the day she was murdered. He was described as being white, about 25, of slim build and with spiky brown hair. He was wearing a silvery, shiny suit and an open-neck white shirt. Police released an e-fit of him in July 1988. Farrow was a mother-of-eight and her murderer has never been found. |
| 18 June 1988 | Marie Wilks | Close to the section of the M50 motorway near Bushley, Worcestershire | Wilks, aged 22 and seven months pregnant, broke down on the M50 motorway. Leaving her 13-month-old son and 11-year-old sister in the car, Wilks walked approximately 700 yards along the hard shoulder to use an emergency telephone to call for help. At some point during the call, she was abducted. Wilks was found dead two days later, three miles from the location of the telephone (which had been found hanging down by its cord). She had been stabbed in the neck. Witnesses had seen a man park up near to Wilks in a silver Renault 25 car and approach her, and all the witnesses reported the man as being blond. An artist's impression of the suspect resulted in the arrest and subsequent trial of soldier Eddie Browning, who also had been driving in that direction in a silver Renault 25 that day. Police were able to eliminate all the 479 other drivers of silver/grey Renault cars in the country with the same first two letters on their number plates as a witness had reported the car as having, indicating that only he could have been responsible. Browning was convicted but ultimately released in May 1994 after the Court of Appeal ruled the conviction unsafe due to a video of an officer under hypnosis not having been disclosed. In May 2018, he died aged 63. Reviews of the Wilks case have failed to uncover any other evidence or suspects. |
| 19 June 1988 | Noel Smith | Limehouse, London | The 40-year-old taxi driver was stabbed in the neck and chest in a frenzied attack while driving a passenger, causing him to crash into a wall. Witnesses saw a man running from the scene. He was white, about 20 years old, about 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 m) tall, and had brown hair. Smith's murder was linked to a number of other taxi murders across the country, such as those of John Landa in August 1982, Derek Brann on 6 November 1988, and Sarfraz Ahmed on 15 November 1988. Smith was also the third taxi driver to be murdered in London in the space of three months. The weapon was never found. |
| 24 June 1988 | Louise Kay | Body not found | Although her body has never been found and few clues exist as regards to her fate, the disappearance of 18-year-old Kay has been investigated by police as a suspected murder. Kay was last seen dropping off a friend in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in the early hours before driving off alone, saying that she was going to sleep in her car on Beachy Head that night. Neither she nor her car has been seen since. The case was featured on Crimewatch. In the late 2000s, serial killer Peter Tobin became the prime suspect in Kay's murder after it was discovered that he was working in a hotel in Eastbourne at the time and was known to have been selling a small hand-painted car after her disappearance. Kay was also said to have met an unknown Scottish man a few days before she vanished, who reportedly gave her money for petrol. In 2010, police searched two of Tobin's former homes in Brighton but failed to find her body. Kay's disappearance was featured on the 2018 series of The Investigator: A British Crime Story, in which the lead DSI of Operation Anagram, the police unit set up to investigate Tobin's crimes, stated that he believed Tobin killed her. Her case is believed to be linked to the murder of Jessie Earl, who disappeared from Eastbourne in 1980 and was found dead on Beachy Head in 1989. |
| 27 June 1988 | Kenneth Challenger (a.k.a. Kenny Roberts) and Richard Duddie | Kingston upon Thames, London | 44-year-old Challenger and 48-year-old Duddie died in a fire at the house they and other vagrants were using as a squat. An expert who examined the house afterwards concluded that three separate fires had been started there deliberately, merging into one as they spread. A woman in her 50s was jailed for murdering the two men, but the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction 10 years later, in 1999. The men had been sharing the squat with her at the time of the blaze. |
| July 1988 | Brian Hayward | Paddington, London | A surveyor reprimanded by Hayward for substandard work and abusing a female colleague was unanimously cleared of murder in July 1989. The surveyor's defence was that his incorrect claim that he was opening up a gym at the time of the killing was a mistake rather than a lie, and that two friends who testified against him gave perjured evidence because £25,000 in reward money was on offer. 51-year-old Hayward was shot dead on 4 July 1988 in an underground car park accessed from Burwood Place in Paddington, and was the head of the estate agency department in which the surveyor worked. |
| July 1988 | Diana Maw | Ealing, London | 36-year-old Maw died almost instantly after a crossbow bolt severed her spinal cord whilst she was on the landing outside her flat on Woodfield Road, Ealing, on 20 July 1988. Her handbag was stolen too and found abandoned on a footpath behind the flat a month later. A man described as being 19 to 21 years old and 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m) tall was apparently seen carrying a crossbow in the street. A woman whose ex-boyfriend was said to have started seeing Maw in February 1988 was tried for murder, but the charge was dropped due to insufficient evidence. The ex-boyfriend's house was then set on fire, but the charge against her for this was also dropped. The woman admitted following her ex-boyfriend and Maw around and was alleged at her trial to have made anonymous phone calls to Maw. Maw, who was planning to move in with the woman's ex-boyfriend, had her briefcase stolen from outside her home a few weeks before the murder as well. |
| August 1988 | Percy Francis | Rushden, Northamptonshire | Because no signs of forced entry were discovered at 70-year-old Francis's bungalow, whoever battered and stabbed him there on 1 August 1988 is likely to have been welcomed into it by him. Nothing was found to have been stolen either. |
| August 1988 | Samuel Williamson | Bournemouth, Dorset | 58-year-old Williamson was strangled on 10 August 1988 and his body was left in Cotlands Road. The extraction of a DNA profile from matter from under Williamson's fingernails and the presence of a hair and fingerprints on items from the crime scene led to a 54-year-old man being charged in 2005, but he was acquitted of murder and manslaughter at his trial. |
| August 1988 | Elena Dimitri | Stanway Street, Hoxton, London | 20-year-old Dimitri was stabbed twice in the neck and once just above the left breast in her flat on 14 August 1988. Her boyfriend said he entered the flat and saw there a tall black knifeman who then fled. He described the man as aged about 25 and wearing sunglasses. He later identified the man to police and the man was tried but acquitted after he claimed he had an alibi. Nothing was stolen from the flat, Dimitri was not sexually assaulted and there was no sign of forced entry, and Dimitri was found lightly dressed in a chair, indicating that she let her killer in willingly. Dimitri was a heroin addict and her previous boyfriend was in prison at the time of the murder. The man who was tried lived with this previous boyfriend's sister and when he was searched he was found to have on him a knife that could have been from Dimitri's flat and could have been the murder weapon. The man admitted knowing her. |
| August 1988 | Michael Williams | Highgate, London | Other than whoever killed him, the last person known to have seen Williams alive was a colleague he was with on the London Underground late at night on Friday 26 August 1988. A dog walker found the civil servant's body on a path next to Highgate Wood early the following morning, and possessions he had on him the night before (including his watch and ring) were now missing, it was soon discovered. The cause of death was a blow to the throat probably inflicted with a karate chop. Williams was a 42-year-old married bisexual, and police could not rule out that the attack was motivated by homophobia. |
| September 1988 | Lee Boxell | Body not found | Boxell was last seen on 10 September 1988 on the High Street in Sutton, south London. In 2014, three men were arrested on suspicion of murder, indecency with children and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and a woman on suspicion of indecency with children and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. None were charged. The police believe that 15-year-old Boxell was killed after witnessing a sexual assault on another person at an informal youth club. |
| September 1988 | David Short | Broadstairs, Kent | 36-year-old Short had his face sprayed with CS gas and then his head struck twice with an unknown object at the doorstep of his Broadstairs home on 22 September 1988. The victim was said to have struggled with debt, but hard evidence that he was killed for failing to pay up was not found. |
| September 1988 | Albert Smith | Enfield, London | 60-year-old Smith was found throttled to death in his home on Carterhatch Road on 23 September 1988. A man who had been one of a group of builders working on Smith's house a few days before his murder was tried but acquitted when the judge determined that there was insufficient evidence against him. The only significant evidence against him was a claim that he had confessed to the murder in a pub. |
| September 1988 | Ray Anstey | Plymouth, Devon | 52-year-old Anstey was stabbed several times in the chest at the Pennycross Sports and Social Club. He was probably locking up the building he was the steward of when he was attacked. The fruit machines at the club were emptied and the phone wires ripped out, and Anstey's expensive ring, wallet, keys and lighter were later found to be missing. A witness saw two men getting into a dark brown estate car, possibly a Mark 3 Ford Cortina, at about 12:10 a.m. on 30 September 1988. Anstey's case featured on Crimewatch. |
| October 1988 | Laurence Winstanley | Baitings Reservoir, West Yorkshire | The 23-year-old car mechanic was last seen on 2 October 1988 at his local pub in Oldham, Greater Manchester. His body was found in Baitings Reservoir almost a year later, on 26 September 1989. He had been shot, set on fire, wrapped in a curtain and weighed down with a pickaxe head. A man who has never been traced sold Winstanley's car to a scrap dealer in the Oldham area a couple of days after his disappearance. |
| October 1988 | Linda Donaldson | Lowton, Greater Manchester | 31-year-old Donaldson was a sex worker from Liverpool. Her body was found in a ditch on Winwick Lane, Lowton, near Leigh, on 18 October 1988. She had been stabbed elsewhere before being mutilated and washed after death, and her clothing was missing. Police stated in 2018 that they would be conducting fresh interviews about her death. It has been suggested that Donaldson's murder could be connected to the murders of Julie Finley and Maria Requena. Police have investigated prostitute killer David Smith as a suspect in both Donaldson and Requena's murders. |
| October 1988 | James Durrant | Surbiton, London | Durrant, 74, was murdered on 26 October 1988 in his suburban house on Cranes Park Avenue, Surbiton. He was a retired solicitor who had spent the earlier part of that evening attending a Masonic function and having dinner at a pub in central London, and it was believed that his attacker might have been accompanying him as he entered his home after travelling back to Surbiton by train. The fatal injury was a head wound sustained when Durrant was hit a single time with an object resembling a baseball bat. |
| November 1988 | Harry Howell | Blackpool, Lancashire | Howell, a 74-year-old former mechanic, was last seen outside his home at Ibbison Court, off Central Drive, Blackpool, on 5 November 1988. His body was found by a window cleaner 17 days later, slumped in a chair in his living room. He had been bludgeoned with a heavy weapon, and police thought he had died on the night he was last seen. Burglary is believed to have been the motive behind Howell's murder: Thousands of pounds in cash and a gold watch were missing, and Howell had let slip at his local pub that he kept his life savings at home. His murder was featured on the BBC's Crimewatch the following year. |
| November 1988 | Derek Brann | By the M20 in Kent | Although the inside of Brann's taxi was soaked with blood when it was found in Sandgate (the area of Folkestone where he lived) on the morning of 6 November 1988, Brann himself was nowhere to be seen, and it was to be a fortnight before his body (which had many stab wounds) was discovered some miles from there. Police have not determined a motive for the 49-year-old's murder. |
| December 1988 | John Heron | Attacked at Waterloo Station, London, died in hospital | 35-year-old Heron was stabbed in the back while queueing for information at London Waterloo station on the evening of 9 December 1988. The killer had wrongly accused him of jumping the queue, and was described as being white, between 30 and 40 years old, between 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) and 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 m) tall, of medium build, and with a long thin face and dark straggly greasy brown collar-length hair. He was believed to have been wearing a light grey jacket and looked scruffy. Police concluded he was probably Scottish and probably being shielded by people in Scotland. |
| December 1988 | Lionel Webb | Stoke Newington, London | Webb was a 38-year-old London-based estate agent who had been involved in a foiled plot with four other men to rob a Harborne (West Midlands) bank's security van in 1986. He was shot dead in his Stoke Newington office on 11 December 1988, and drugs were discovered on the premises when they were being searched following the killing. |
| December 1988 | Peter Hurburgh | Fickleshole, Surrey | 57-year-old Hurburgh had a fatal heart attack when, along with another man, he was dragged out of his parked car and given a beating in the early hours of 16 December 1988. The other man was robbed of money as well as beaten but did not die. Those responsible then went on to target people in other parts of Surrey, stabbing a man in Oxted and robbing a couple in Fetcham but without actually killing anybody else. Three men ("the M25 Three") convicted in 1990 of Hurburgh's murder and the other offences were freed when the Appeal Court ruled in 2000 that failure to disclose that a man who testified against them in 1990 was a police informer and convicted criminal meant their 1990 trial was not a completely fair one. However, an appeal judge said when reluctantly releasing the three: "In our view the case against all three appellants was formidable. The evidence against Rowe was overwhelming... For the better understanding of those who have listened to this judgment and of those who may report it hereafter this is not a finding of innocence, far from it." |
| January 1989 | Michael Fahey | Bristol | The 33-year-old vagrant was found to be dead on the corner of Ashley Road and Picton Street on 13 January 1989 after being hit on the head with a blunt instrument the night before. Whether he died there or at a different location was indeterminable. |
| January 1989 | Frederick and Miriam Dunkley | Wembley, London | 63-year-old Frederick and 59-year-old Miriam were battered to death with a hammer inside their home on Clifford Road on 23 January 1989. The home was then set on fire, and they were found dead in their garage after the fire had been discovered at 6:00 p.m. They had only returned to the house at 5:20 p.m., meaning they must have been murdered in those 40 minutes. The table was found to have been laid out for a meal, nothing had been stolen, and there was no sign of forced entry or any interference with the house. Their unemployed son was put on trial for their murders, with it being said that he had killed them after they had refused to lend him money and excluded him from their will in favour of his own son. The pair's estate was worth £250,000. However, the case against him was circumstantial and the timings would have made it difficult for him to carry out the murders, and he was acquitted. After this, the police said that the case was closed and they were not looking for anyone else. |
| January 1989 | Mary McManus | Peterborough, Cambridgeshire | 66-year-old McManus was found deceased in her home on Queens Road, Fletton, on 28 January 1989. She had been battered, bitten, stabbed in the chest and sexually assaulted. McManus's ex-lodger was tried twice for her murder and convicted at the second trial, but the Appeal Court later overturned his conviction. |
| February 1989 | Jeanette Kempton | Wangford, Suffolk | 32-year-old Kempton was last seen at the Loughborough Hotel in Brixton, south London, at 7:15 p.m. on 2 February 1989. She lived in Brixton with her family and is not thought to have had any connections to Suffolk, where her body was found on 18 February on the Earl of Stradbroke's estate at Wangford, just off the A12. Kempton had been strangled, and her coat, one shoe, some jewellery, her purse, and a wreath she had bought for a funeral were missing. Police had five suspects in her murder at one stage, including her ex-husband, but still no one has been convicted of it. The case was featured on Crimewatch in May 1989. |
| February 1989 | James "Jimmy" Hassard | Caol, near Fort William, Scotland | The badly beaten body of Hassard, 47, was found in a car park in the Highland village of Caol in the early hours of Saturday, 18 February 1989. He had been drinking at the nearby Lochaber Bar between about 8:00 p.m. on Friday, 17 February and 1:00 a.m. on Saturday. Despite a lengthy police inquiry, no one has ever been caught. In 2010, the Northern Constabulary said they were conducting a review of the case in the hope that some new evidence would come to light and ultimately resolve it. |
| March 1989 | Patrick Byrne | Robson Road, South Norwood, London | On 11 March 1989, a white man aged between 20 and 28 was seen hitting 44-year-old Byrne with a wooden plank in broad daylight. There was no known motive for the attack. Witnesses reported seeing Byrne in a scuffle with a young man in a toilet block sometime earlier, and Byrne may have torn the man's jacket. This man was said to have then found a piece of wood and chased Byrne before beating him to death. A witness tried to follow the young man but lost sight of him when he turned into Chancellor Grove. In 1996, a man walked into a police station and confessed to the murder, but he was acquitted at trial after it was heard that there were discrepancies between his account and what actually happened and that he was suffering from depression at the time. |
| March 1989 | Cyril Davies | Swansea | A 27-year-old man was acquitted in March 1990 of the murder of 51-year-old Davies, who was found battered to death in his Swansea home on 22 March 1989 after visiting a gay haunt in the city three days earlier. |
| April 1989 | Saifuddin Figa Hussein | Sheffield | 36-year-old Hussein was a vagrant murdered in a stairwell of a car park in Blonk Street, Sheffield, on 10 April 1989. Injuries suggested he was kicked to death, and his easygoing nature suggested the attack was an act of violence for the sake of violence. |
| April 1989 | Peter Smith | Glasgow | 45-year-old Smith was stabbed in the heart on 11 April 1989 near toilets in central Glasgow that were used as a gay meeting place. Two men were charged with his murder, but one of them had the charge dropped when he agreed to testify against the other suspect, who was convicted in August 1989 but had his conviction quashed in July 2006 after it was accepted that police statements showing that an important witness was unreliable should not have been kept from the 1989 trial's defence team. |
| June 1989 | Tina Bell | Billingham, County Durham | 18-year-old Bell went missing soon after leaving a flat above a Billingham fruit shop in early June. Not until over 10 months later, when her skull, collarbone and shoulder blade were found on wasteland near ICI's Cassel Works in the town, was it confirmed that she had been murdered. Tests done on the skull indicated that the killer had tried to dissolve Bell's body in a chemical of some sort. |
| July 1989 | Martin Broom | Boreham, near Chelmsford, Essex | Broom, 29, was beaten to death with a hammer at his home in Sussex Close, Boreham, on 22 July 1989. The murder weapon and a bloodied wrench were found at the scene and nothing appeared to have been stolen. Essex Police made a new appeal for information in August 2019. |
| July 1989 | George Thorley | Bristol | The 46-year-old homeless former serviceman was fatally assaulted in Bristol but remained alive for up to three days afterwards. Following the incident, Thorley told people at the resettlement centre where he was staying that he was attacked in Gloucester, but police piecing together his last movements found a witness who said he looked fine as he left a Bristol pub within hours of arriving in the city from Gloucester on 27 July 1989, and another witness who said he had a swollen black eye and other facial injuries on 28 July. Thorley died in hospital on 30 July. |
| August 1989 | Andrew Maddocks | Bickerstaffe, Lancashire | Maddocks, a 22-year-old chef, was found dead inside a septic tank at a restaurant on 12 August 1989. He had drowned there after being garrotted and beaten around the head. |
| September 1989 | Trevor Metcalfe | Redcar, North Yorkshire | Metcalfe's body was found at Dormanstown recreation ground on 16 September 1989; he had been beaten and suffered a brain haemorrhage. An anonymous letter from someone claiming to have more information about the killing of the 25-year-old was sent to police in September 1998. |
| September 1989 | Louis/Lewis Raggett | Attacked in Ash, Surrey; died at Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, Hampshire | 55-year-old Raggett was the landlord of many bedsits in the Aldershot area, and it was thought that a tenant falling foul of him for rent arrears may have had something to do with him being fatally attacked on 23 September 1989 as he returned to his house at nighttime. The only person who has been indicted over Raggett's murder, however, is his wife, who was with him when two men stabbed and beat him that night before leaving on a motorcycle. She was accused of hiring hitmen to kill him and ensuring that neither of her two large dogs would be in a place where it could interfere with their mission, but the jury at her trial found her not guilty. |
| October 1989 | Ricky Haywood | Southampton | Police believe that when 36-year-old Haywood was shot five times in the flat above his Southampton jewellery shop on 16 October 1989, it was probably by a hired killer acting on behalf of someone Haywood had got on the wrong side of. A £100,000 reward for information leading to a conviction for his murder was still on offer as of October 2009. |
| November 1989 | William Youens | Chatham, Kent | Youens, a 51-year-old drug dealer, was found hacked to death yards from his parked red Transit van on the evening of 7 November 1989. The van's lights were still on and the radio was playing. |
| November 1989 | Carmel Gamble | Stroud, Gloucestershire | Firefighters called to a blaze at a holiday cottage in Rodborough on 12 November 1989 (Remembrance Sunday) found the remains of the 43-year-old woman inside. It was later determined that she had died not because of the fire, but as a result of her head being battered. Police would still like to speak to a man seen arguing with Gamble in Stroud High Street a week before the murder. |
| December 1989 | Clifford Howes | Blacknest, Hampshire | Petrol was poured through the wooden doors of a country pub's cellar and a homemade wick was lit to start a fire there during the night of 4–5 December 1989. Though the flame on the wick went out before it had burnt down enough of it to reach the petrol, a huge explosion was nonetheless triggered by fumes from the petrol causing an automatic dehumidifier in the cellar to come on and spark in the process. The explosion destroyed the building, killing 34-year-old pub chef Howes and seriously injuring the bar manager, and a likely motive is something that investigators have never been able to come up with. |
| December 1989 | Ian Murray Erskine | Upware, Cambridgeshire | The body of Erskine, 44, was found in the River Cam at Upware on 25 March 1990. Erskine had last been seen on 15 December 1989 at his workplace, the Bank of England, in the City of London. It is not known if he returned to his home at 5 Norland Square, Notting Hill, that evening. Following his disappearance, Erskine's credit card was used to make a number of cash withdrawals from his account, hire a car, and purchase a watch and a five-day return ticket to the Netherlands. His body was found wrapped in plastic bags and the cause of his death could not be determined. Police suspected Erskine's murder was related to his homosexuality. |
| December 1989 | Keith Burgess | Bristol | 38-year-old Burgess was found brutally murdered at his flat on Duchess Road, Clifton, on 17 December 1989. He had been attacked with a hammer and stabbed. Burgess had last been seen at the Alma Tavern pub at lunchtime that day. It was believed he may have invited the attacker into his home, and people told of having seen a man of scruffy appearance hanging around there. |
| December 1989 | Terry Gooderham and Maxine Arnold | Epping Forest, Essex | The couple were shot dead in Gooderham's Mercedes three days before Christmas after leaving their flat in Walthamstow when they had sat down for an evening meal. Gooderham was 39 and Arnold was 32. It has been suggested that Gooderham was murdered for fear that he would blow the whistle over a scam he had found out about in his job as a stocktaker, and that Arnold was murdered too because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. |