List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (1990s)

Main article: List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom

Year	Victim(s)	Location of body or bodies	Notes
January 1990	William Howe	Worthing, West Sussex	The body of the 63-year-old retired vet was found tied up in his flat on 9 January 1990. Because the flat had been ransacked, and because Howe had tens of thousands of pounds hidden in a safe there (which the offender/s did not find), theft is thought to have been the motive for the killing. In the period leading up to his death, he was tortured by being hit with a hammer and having his back stamped or kneeled on, suffering broken ribs as a consequence. The cause of death was asphyxia, and it is believed he died the day before police found his body.[1]
January 1990	Bridget Brosnan	Stevenage, Hertfordshire	70-year-old Brosnan died in a hospital's psychiatric ward on 10 January 1990. The nurse who reported the death claimed at first that Brosnan had suffered a cardiac arrest, but later changed her story to say that the deceased had used tights to hang herself from the bedhead. A Home Office pathologist concluded that Brosnan had struggled with an attacker before suffocating to death as a result of being pressed face-down into bedding. Nobody has been tried for Brosnan's murder or manslaughter, but the nurse and a colleague of hers did get convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.[2]
January 1990	Doris Kellett	Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire	Kellett, 92, was hammered to death at her home on 17 January 1990. It is likely that the person who delivered the blows to her head had an accomplice, for a witness reported having seen two men (one with a clipboard) talking to her on her doorstep about 45 minutes before her home help discovered her body. Kellett's pension money was missing from the house, as was a ring and an amber paperweight. There are suspicions that her attacker tricked his way in by pretending to be an official.[3]
January 1990	William Dalziel	Attacked in Acton, London, died in hospital	61-year-old Dalziel was battered with a heavy object and robbed of his wallet outside a home for the elderly in Edgecote Close during the early hours of 15 January 1990. He died four days later. Because the investigation into the killing of the Shepherd's Bush resident found him to have been a private man who seldom left his flat after dusk, police were not able to establish why he was out in neighbouring Acton at the time he was set upon.[4]
January 1990	Surinder Gill	Hounslow, London	Gill, 33, was an insurance salesman who drove a distinctive modified dark red Mercedes with the index number 16 GLL. He was found stabbed to death in his car in Beavers Open Space, Hounslow, on 30 January 1990. Events surrounding Gill's murder were reconstructed on Crimewatch in April 1990.[5]
February 1990	Brian Fitzmaurice	Liverpool	48-year-old Fitzmaurice was stabbed to death with a stiletto knife at or near his home in Oxford Road, Huyton, on 3 February 1990. He was attacked at around 12:20 a.m. while walking home from his daughter's residence, which was also in Oxford Road and which he had visited after drinking at a pub in Huyton's Hall Lane. No motive could be found.[6][7]
February 1990	Richard Humphreys	Body not found	The 51-year-old taxi driver vanished on 3 February 1990 and his Ford Sierra was found abandoned with bloodstains inside it in a car park at Heathrow Airport (some miles from Whyteleafe, the Surrey village where he lived) on 12 February. A forensic re-examination of the car in 2012 did not give detectives the breakthrough they were hoping for.[8]
February 1990	Joseph McEwan	Slough, Berkshire	38-year-old McEwan was found with bullet wounds to his head at his home in Aldridge Road, Slough. Nine arrests were made over the Valentine's Day killing, but none of the arrested people was charged.[9]
February 1990	Kevin Childerley	Mansfield, Nottinghamshire	Intruders armed with weapons attacked 29-year-old Kevin Childerley and his wife as they lay in bed, leading to his death and to her losing the sight in her right eye. Police charged two men with the murder of Mr Childerley and the attempted murder of Mrs Childerley, but when the case came to trial in 1991, they were cleared – in part because the judge considered Mrs Childerley's testimony unreliable because a medical expert did not believe she had genuine memories of the attack.[10][11][12]
March 1990	Jack Royal	Sunniside, Tyne and Wear	Royal, 58, was killed with a shotgun in the porch of his house in Sunniside on 19 March 1990. The former science teacher had himself killed someone in January 1987, although a jury accepted his claim that he had been acting in self-defence and found him not guilty accordingly. In April 1990, a local man was charged with Royal's murder. The 21-year-old's sister had, at the time of his death in 1987, been the partner of the man killed by Royal, and this was viewed as a motive. However, he was cleared in June 1991.[13] In 1993, a second person was tried for Royal's murder. As with the previous defendant, someone close to him having a connection to the man Royal had fatally stabbed (in this case his girlfriend, who was the sister of that man) was viewed as a motive, and he spent nearly 14 years in prison for the murder before his conviction was overturned in 2007.[14]
March 1990	Stephanie Whittaker	Body not found	On 23 March 1990, 34-year-old mother-of-three Whittaker disappeared from the home she shared with her husband in Newport, southeast Wales, reportedly after going out that evening for a drink with a female friend. She never arrived. Although a missing person case, her family and friends insisted she would not have left her husband and children, and four years later her case featured on the crime-solving programme Crimewatch, on which it was said to be a case in which a crime must be suspected and that detectives feared the worst. Whittaker had taken no money, clothes or documents with her.[15][16] A response to a 2024 Freedom of Information request confirmed that she was still missing.[17]
March 1990	Alexander Hayden	Edinburgh	Hayden had head injuries from a severe beating when he was found dead under a blanket in a city centre doorway on the morning of 31 March 1990. Detectives received new information in 1996, but it did not result in anyone being charged with the 41-year-old vagrant's murder.[18][19]
April 1990	Dick Owen Sidney Johnson	Lyne, Surrey	71-year-old Johnson was found dead in his caravan on 20 April 1990, having died of a heart attack during a robbery in which he was tied up. A large stash of expensive tack was found to be missing.[20]
April 1990	Anthony Burrows	Liverpool	Burrows and a friend got into a row with other people in the early hours of Friday 20 April 1990 after a visit to a nightclub in Speke. Said to have been trivial and over a taxi, the row escalated and led to a man being knocked to the ground, and 21-year-old Burrows and his companions returned to the establishment with a hammer later that night to exact revenge at his friend's instigation. A fight involving in excess of 10 people then ensued and culminated in Burrows having his neck stabbed with a broken bottle outside the club and bleeding to death from a severed carotid. A man admitted at trial that he kicked Burrows during the fight and was accordingly sentenced for violent disorder, but the jurors were directed by the judge to acquit the man and his two co-defendants all of murder.[21]
April 1990	Michael Boothe	Attacked in Hanwell, London, died in hospital	Boothe, a 49-year-old actor, was set upon outside a toilet block in Elthorne Park on 29 April 1990. Seven people were taken in for questioning over the attack, but each of them was released without charge.[22]
June 1990	Nick Whiting	Rainham Marshes, Essex	Whiting, a 43-year-old former car-racing champion, was abducted from his car showroom in Wrotham, Kent, on 8 June 1990 and found dead in a shallow grave on Rainham Marshes a few weeks later. He had been beaten, gagged, tied up, put in the boot of a car and shot, police said.[23]
June 1990	Leonard Gomm	Hampton Gay, Oxfordshire	Gomm, 75, was a taxi driver found stabbed to death in Hampton Gay, between Bletchingdon and Kidlington in Oxfordshire, at 10:50 a.m. on 13 June 1990. His Ford Granada taxi was found five yards away. Gomm had radioed his employers at about 6:35 a.m. that day, telling them he was taking a passenger to Bicester. Police believe he picked up the fare from Gloucester Green, Oxford. Two witnesses saw the victim driving his taxi with a passenger at around that time. No money or valuables were taken from Gomm or his taxi, making the motive for his murder a mystery. On the 20th anniversary of the murder, Thames Valley Police reported the uncovering of new forensic evidence which could lead them to the killer.[24][25]
June 1990	Trevaline Evans	Body not found; disappeared from Llangollen, Denbighshire	52-year-old Evans vanished from the antiques shop she ran after leaving a note on the door that said she would be "back in 2 minutes". Her case is treated as an unsolved murder by North Wales Police and her husband was arrested in 2001 but later released without charge.[26][27]
June 1990	Patricia Parsons	Upshire, Essex	Though an arrest over Parsons's murder took place in 2007, the case has since gone cold once again. The 42-year-old was a masseuse who ran a sauna in London, and reputedly had a judge and a TV presenter among her clients. When her body was found in her car near Epping Forest on 24 June 1990, there were three head wounds caused by the bow of a crossbow, along with injuries suggesting she was beaten prior to her death. Police thought that Parsons's blue diary would contain clues as to who killed her, but it has never turned up.[28][29]
August 1990	Ann Heron	Darlington, County Durham	The 44-year-old mother-of-three had her throat cut on 3 August 1990 while sunbathing outside Aeolian House, her family home on the outskirts of Darlington. Her husband Peter found her body that day and was charged with her murder in 2005, but the case against him collapsed.[30][31] Nobody else has been charged.
August 1990	Bill Webster	Attacked in Yalding, Kent, died in hospital in East Grinstead, Sussex	On 7 August 1990, the 61-year-old retired woodcutter was covered in burning petrol and died after his house in Medway Avenue had two firebombs thrown into it. Police were questioning two men and a youth about the incident two days later.[32][33][34]
August 1990	Brian Adams	Derby	48-year-old Adams was the victim of a fatal shooting just outside his Alvaston home after returning there on his motorcycle on 14 August 1990. Why someone wanted him dead remains unclear.[35]
August 1990	Paul Stevens	Hayes, London	33-year-old Stevens was hit on the back on the head twice with a blunt instrument and then dumped in the Grand Union Canal behind the Nestlé factory in Hayes on 23 August 1990. He had been out drinking in the Chariot public house in Hounslow High Street and other pubs. Stevens was homosexual and very effeminate, and one theory was that he was killed in a homophobic attack. He still had money on him and had not been robbed. In 2002 the police asked for help in tracing a man who was about 25 and who drank in the Tankerville pub, saying he was athletic, over 6 ft tall and with blond hair. He was believed to have been Australian or a New Zealander. The case featured on Crimewatch.[36]
August 1990	Frank Harris	Leeds	25-year-old Harris was stabbed to death at a street party on 27 August 1990 following an argument about a sound system. The murder, which a Birmingham man went on trial for but was not found guilty of, happened not long after the West Indian Carnival (an event that has taken place in Leeds annually since 1967) had officially come to an end and just hours before Sedley Sullivan and Rachel Soloman were fatally shot in the same street – a street fairly close to where people had earlier been enjoying the carnival proper.[37] Two men were sentenced for manslaughter over Sullivan and Soloman's deaths.[38]
September 1990	Gail Whitehouse	Wolverhampton, West Midlands	Someone strangled 23-year-old Whitehouse, a mother-of-two, and left her body in bushes in Wolverhampton's red-light district.[39] In 1993, David Williams was acquitted of her murder but sentenced for six rapes, an attempted rape and two indecent assaults.[40]
September 1990	Andrew Pilch	Elsing, Norfolk	Pilch's wife reported finding him dead at their Church Street cottage on 13 September 1990, and it was believed the 34-year-old had died from natural causes until a pathologist found he had been strangled. Three men were cleared of his murder.[41][42]
September 1990	Andrew Bedford	Body not found	Bedford went missing on 28 September 1990. He lived in Huntingdon and was last seen in Ramsey, and it is thought by detectives that he is likely to have been shot. In 2015, Cambridgeshire Constabulary began reinvestigating the disappearance of the 27-year-old, but a police spokesman said in 2020 that the case was now in the hands of a cold case team as there were no more lines of inquiry to pursue.[43]
October 1990	Judith Gold	Hampstead, London	On 20 October 1990, a newspaper boy found the body of 51-year-old financial adviser Judith Gold, also known as Judith Silver, yards from her own home after she left dressed for a business meeting.[44] She had died after receiving several blows to the left side of her face from an unidentified weapon.[44] Following serial killer Levi Bellfield's 2008 convictions for the hammer murders of two women in southwest London, police announced they would be reviewing Gold's case, as they suspected it could be one of a number of unsolved attacks on women for which Bellfield was responsible.[44][45]
November 1990	Leslie Jackson	Blackburn, Lancashire	70-year-old Jackson, a widower and retired horse dealer living in a sheltered bungalow in Sussex Drive, Blackburn, was found beaten to death in his bathroom on 19 November 1990. He was last seen alive on the morning of 17 November. The killer(s) may have believed that large sums of money were stored at the bungalow. A watch and gold sovereign rings were missing, and police visited every jeweller, second-hand shop and pawnshop in the North West as they searched for clues and those items. Two people were charged in connection with Jackson's murder, but there was not enough evidence to prosecute. A third man who was also charged but whom the Crown Prosecution Service offered no evidence against later died, and his mother said that he never recovered from the trauma of his arrest and charge. At the time of his murder, Jackson was suffering from cancer and did not have long to live.[46][47]
November/December 1990	Patrick Hurling	Hertford	45-year-old Hurling arrived home from work at approximately 11:00 p.m. on 30 November 1990 and was found beaten and strangled to death there early the next day. Charges did not follow any of the three arrests made in the hunt for the accountant's killer(s).[48]
December 1990	Jan Mohammed	Bradford, West Yorkshire	On 20 December 1990, Mohammed was battered about the head with a blunt instrument in his house in Manningham by a culprit or culprits who then left the property with it locked. The victim, a 63-year-old widowed grandfather, was asleep on the sofa when the attack began.[49][50]
December 1990	Steven Johnson	Mow Cop, Cheshire/Staffordshire border	Insurance salesman and part-time taxi driver Johnson, 25, was last seen on 22 December 1990 at 3:30 a.m., collecting a fare in Hanley and bound for Packmoor. A dog walker discovered his body 20 yards from his taxi four hours later. His throat had been cut, and none of his takings appeared to be missing.[51]
December 1990	Edna Kilbride	Leeds	70-year-old Kilbride was found dead at her home in Parkway Vale, Seacroft, on 30 December 1990. She had died the previous day and suffered facial injuries.[52][53]
January 1991	Maria Requena	Leigh, Greater Manchester	26-year-old Requena went missing on New Year's Day 1991, and her remains were found on 6 January in five plastic bin bags in the lake at Pennington Flash. She was a sex worker and the location where she was found is less than two miles from where the body of Linda Donaldson was discovered in 1988. A link with Donaldson's murder has been suggested,[54] as has a link with the 1994 murder of Julie Finley.[55] Police have investigated prostitute killer David Smith as a suspect in both Requena and Donaldson's cases.[56]
January 1991	Wendy Gallagher	Barnsley, South Yorkshire	Gallagher, 24, was last seen on Friday 18 January 1991 in Barnsley town centre. Her body was found the following Monday at her home on Princess Street. She had been strangled with an electrical cord. On the 30th anniversary of the discovery of Gallagher's body, police announced that items from the crime scene would be re-examined for previously undetected DNA traces.[57]
February 1991	John Green	Poole, Dorset	Green, 36, suffered a frenzied stabbing in the office adjoining his shop, and his fiancée found his body there the next day. He was not known to have had any enemies, causing police to wonder if he had been murdered in a case of mistaken identity. Two men seen pushing Green into the shop on 1 February (the day of the killing) remain untraced.[58]
February 1991	Janine Downes	Shifnal, Shropshire	Downes was a 22-year-old mother-of-three. Her body was found close to Lamberts Restaurant on the road between Shifnal and Wolverhampton on 2 February 1991. She had been strangled and had extensive head injuries, and some of her clothes were missing. Downes was a sex worker and was last seen alive in Wolverhampton's red-light district.[59] Police believe she may have been a victim of Alun Kyte.[60]
February 1991	Cheryl Shackleton	Brockley, London	Shackleton, 34, was found beaten to death in Telegraph Hill Park on 3 February 1991. Her handbag was missing and police believe she may have been sexually assaulted. It was not known why Shackleton was in Brockley, as she had no ties to the area. She lived an itinerant lifestyle and carried all her belongings in a suitcase, which was never traced. Shackleton's murder was featured on Crimewatch in February 1991 and April 2006.[61][62]
February 1991	Anthony "White Tony" Johnson	Cheetham Hill, Manchester	Johnson, nephew of moors murders victim Keith Bennett and known as "White Tony" to avoid confusion with a black associate who was also called Tony, was a 22-year-old gangster shot dead in the Penny Black pub's car park on 22 February 1991. A companion was shot as well, but not killed. Desmond Noonan was tried for Johnson's murder twice (along with other defendants), and the prosecution claimed that the offence had been motivated by a robber's threat to complain to Johnson after being told by Noonan that only half of £80,000 entrusted to him – the robber's share of £362,000 from an armed raid – was left. However, each trial collapsed due to a hung jury. Johnson had embarked on a life of crime within a few years of leaving school.[63]
March 1991	Anthony Gorman	King's Lynn, Norfolk	29-year-old Gorman was found dead in Chapel Street, King's Lynn, during the early hours of Saturday 2 March 1991 after he was assaulted at the nearby Cellar Bar.[64] Three men had murder charges reduced to manslaughter before being told they now faced no charges at all in relation to the assault.[65] A broken nose was the most serious of Gorman's injuries, and it was disclosed later in 1991 that police dropped the charges because it was not certain that that injury or any other directly caused his death, with fright or a heart condition possibly being what did kill him.[66]
March 1991	Gordon Rogers	Attacked in Guildford, Surrey, died in hospital	Rogers was shot in the leg on 21 February 1991 as he attempted to stop robbers stealing money from the bank where he worked as a security guard. £25,000 in cash was taken by them, and the 63-year-old victim succumbed to his injuries two weeks later.[67][68]
March 1991	Ahmet Abdullah	Walworth, London	Jurors cleared two brothers of the murder of the Turkish drug dealer, who had been shot on 11 March 1991 – first inside a Walworth betting shop, then again in the street after leaving the building.[69]
March 1991	Duncan Clift	Struck by a car in Hexham, Northumberland, died in hospital in Newcastle	Clift, 27, a Kent Police officer who had travelled to Northumberland to visit family, was standing in front of a car in a bid to prevent theft of the vehicle when its driver purposely ran him down. He died on 24 March – two days after the incident, which happened in a car park. A jury found a man charged over Clift's death not guilty of his murder or manslaughter.[70]
March 1991	Peter Rasini	Palmers Green, London	A tall and heavily built man shot the 44-year-old antique dealer outside his home with a .45 calibre automatic pistol on 24 March 1991 before running away and leaving in a van that had been parked in nearby Oaktree Avenue.[71]
April 1991	Alan Leppard	Monkton, Kent	43-year-old Leppard was shot in the chest on 1 April 1991 (Easter Monday) after answering a knock on the door. Brenda Long, his partner, heard the bang and rushed to the door to find out the cause of it. She was also murdered at home just under nine months later. With no evidence that either of them had done anything illegal or was prone to making enemies, the reasons for the killings remain as much a mystery as the identities of the persons behind them.[72]
April 1991	Jo Ramsden	Near Lyme Regis, Dorset	Ramsden, 21, went missing from Bridport, Dorset, on 9 April 1991. She was last seen with an unknown male who was nicknamed "Mr Zig Zag" by the press due to the patterned sweater he was described as wearing. Ramsden's body was found in the same clothes she wore on the day she went missing, in woodland by the A35 near Lyme Regis, by two forestry workers on 12 March 1992.[73] A former psychiatric nurse from Charminster, Dorset, was sentenced at the Old Bailey to nine concurrent terms of life imprisonment on 10 February 1994 for the kidnap, rape and attempted rape of a number of disabled women. He was also charged with the kidnap of Ramsden; however, due to insufficient evidence, the case was dismissed at a pre-trial hearing.[74]
April 1991	Carl Stapleton	Manchester	Four men charged over the murder of Stapleton, a 17-year-old attacked with a machete in Moss Side on 29 April 1991, walked free from court after the prosecution offered no evidence.[75]
May 1991	Glenda Potter	Rochester, Kent	Someone strangled 32-year-old Potter and left her body near the United Reformed Church in Crow Lane, Rochester, in May 1991. Potter was a sex worker and her case featured on Crimewatch. Police re-examined the case in 2010, stating that they had DNA from the scene.[76]
June 1991	Alison Shaughnessy	Battersea, London	Shaughnessy was knifed over 50 times on the stairway to her Battersea flat on 3 June 1991. Two sisters were convicted of murdering the 21-year-old bank clerk and sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1992, but in June 1993, aged 22 and 19, they had their convictions quashed. The older sister and Shaughnessy's husband had formerly been having an affair (though both claimed it had ended by the time of the killing – something the police did not accept), and the accusation at trial was that that sister, fuelled by jealousy, had stabbed Shaughnessy while the younger sister stood guard. Used as evidence against the older sister was an entry from her 1990 diary stating that her "dream solution would be for Alison to disappear as if she never existed".[77][78][79]
June 1991	Penny Bell	Perivale, London	The body of the victim, a 43-year-old businesswoman and mother-of-two, was found in her car in the car park of Gurnell Leisure Centre by two women who initially thought she was asleep. She had been stabbed 50 times as she sat behind the wheel of the vehicle.[80]
June 1991	Lynne Trenholm	Chester	Trenholm, 29, was found stabbed to death in Pinky's massage parlour in Boughton, Chester, on 9 June 1991. Despite there being an unexplained fingerprint recovered from the scene, the police have no suspects and appeals are still made in an effort to solve her murder.[81]
June 1991	Sandy Drummond	Fife, Scotland	Reclusive Drummond, 33, was found dead on a farm track close to the home he shared with his brother – an isolated cottage near St Andrews, Fife – on 24 June 1991. In the days previous, Drummond withdrew a large amount of his life savings from various building societies, although the money was later found in the house. He also resigned from his job four days prior to his death. On the day itself, he was seen running from his house to fields opposite, carrying a blue sports bag which has never been found. A man with a blood-stained bandage wrapped around his hand was seen at approximately 2:30 p.m. that day on a bus near to Drummond's cottage. This man was never traced. Several times before Drummond's death (and twice on the actual day, according to some reports), a red or orange Morris Marina was seen parked outside the cottage, but it is still unknown who owned this car or who was visiting him. Drummond's death was regarded as natural until neck injuries became apparent during the post mortem examination.[82]
July 1991	Alan Brooks	Loughton, Essex	Former international boxer Brooks, 53, died on 16 July when a gang stabbed him at one of the two Loughton pubs he ran with his wife. A suspected motive was retaliation for him having barred a group of men from one of the establishments the previous week.[83]
July 1991	Sheila Egner	Nottingham	At Yeomans Army Stores (where Egner was working) on Mansfield Road, the 62-year-old was hit over the head repeatedly with a bottle or hammer and the till drawer, which contained about £250, was then carried off after being wrapped in green curtain. The drawer was found dumped and empty in a garden in Basford the following day (27 July).[84] Several witnesses saw a man walking off with the till drawer wrapped in the curtain; he was described as being between 40 and 50 years old, meaning he would be in his 70s or 80s as of the 2020s.[85]
August 1991	David Brindle and Stanley Silk	Walworth, London	Brindle, 23, and Silk, 47, died after two masked men opened fire in The Bell, a public house on East Street in Walworth, on 3 August 1991. Brindle had two brothers who had recently been charged over the March 1991 murder of Ahmet Abdullah, but whether that was the reason for the shooting at The Bell is not known.[86]
August 1991	Sharon Hoare	Fulham, London	19-year-old Hoare moved from her home in Bristol to London, where she worked as a sex worker for escort agencies. Her flatmate found her dead in her bedroom at their home on Brompton Park Crescent, Fulham. She had been throttled and bludgeoned. Hoare's boyfriend was questioned but released without charge. On 16 August, six days after Hoare's death, another sex worker was attacked at her home in nearby Kensington, and it was suggested the two attacks could be connected.[87] A link has been suggested between Hoare's murder and Anthony Hardy, the "Camden Ripper".[88]
August 1991	Brendan Penn	Bradford, West Yorkshire	Father-of-three Penn, 22, was stabbed in the heart after running into a group of people already involved in a street affray. A detective later noted that he thought there were people with important information about the murder who were unwilling to come forward because they wrongly believed Penn to have been an aggressor.[89]
August 1991	Arthur Thompson	Glasgow	Arthur Thompson was the 31-year-old son of the Scottish gangster with the same name and died outside his parents' home on 17 August 1991 when a car pulled up there and an occupant or occupants of the vehicle shot him. A man was found not guilty of the murder.[90]
August 1991	Andrew Elphick	Body not found	The disappearance of 21-year-old Elphick began to be treated as murder in 1995. Elphick was last seen in Brookwood, Surrey, on 23 August 1991, and his car was found abandoned in Slough – approximately 18 miles away – the following day. He worked in a shop in Woking and lived in Normandy. In 1995, three men were arrested in connection with Elphick's disappearance, but no charges were brought against any of them.[91]
August 1991	Vera Anderson	Warrington, Cheshire	42-year-old Anderson was found dead in her Ford Cortina on Tannery Lane, Penketh, Warrington, on 25 August 1991. Her throat had been cut.[54] Anderson had last been seen the previous day at her home on Hadfield Close, Widnes. That evening, she received a telephone call, then left her six-year-old son with a neighbour. It was not expected that she would be gone for long.[92]
August 1991	Nicholas Hanscomb	London	Hanscomb died in the early hours of 26 August at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington after a member of a group of youths stabbed the 38-year-old scientist in the groin at the Notting Hill Carnival. Part of Hanscomb's work as a scientist was to help develop the DNA genetic fingerprint test.[93]
September 1991	Brenda Cross	Attacked in Chelsea, London, died in hospital	73-year-old Cross was fatally beaten on 4 September 1991 in the basement of Anno Domini, the antique shop she worked in on Pimlico Road. The murder weapons were antique fire irons in the basement of the shop, and police said she had clearly put up a ferocious fight against her attacker. The shop's owner was tried for the murder but acquitted on the order of the judge, who said that the evidence showed it was inherently improbable that the owner was the killer. The owner had allegedly been in a bad mood as Cross was planning to leave and he had not found a replacement, and he was also stressed because he had had to pay £40,000 in back rent and arrangements for a new lease on the premises were becoming difficult. The shop owner was a retired actor and had appeared in the hospital soap opera Emergency Ward 10.[94][95]
September 1991	Andrew Smith	Glasgow	23-year-old Smith was discovered stabbed to death beside the Forth and Clyde Canal at Maryhill soon after midnight on 10 September 1991. Police suspected a man called Mark Vass to have been the assailant but never had enough evidence to charge him with the crime. Vass was later shot twice in the legs and then in the head by Eamonn Docherty, who pled guilty to the murder of Vass in 1996.[96][97]
September 1991	Sarah Bowdler	Walsall, West Midlands	Bowdler, a 68-year-old charity worker and widow, was found strangled in her bedroom at her home on Somers Road, Pleck, Walsall, on 17 September 1991. No motive for her murder was established: nothing had been stolen and the fact that there was no sign of a break-in suggested that Bowdler had let her killer into her home.[98]
September 1991	Bobby Glover and Joe Hanlon	Glasgow	31-year-old Glover and 23-year-old Hanlon were two of three men due to stand trial for the August 1991 murder of Arthur Thompson Jnr when they were shot dead on the night of 18 September 1991. Their bodies were left near a Shettleston pub after the killings – killings thought to have been carried out in revenge for the murder they were suspected of involvement in.[99][90]
October 1991	The Bolney Torso	Bolney, Sussex	A body was discovered in woodland off Broxmead Lane in Bolney, Sussex, on 11 October 1991. The head and hands had been removed and the victim was never identified. Police gave a revised description of him in March 2009: He was between 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) and 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m) tall, well built and aged 35–45. Police also issued pictures of his clothing, including a light blue shirt with a distinctive motif on its pocket.[100][101]
October 1991	Diane McInally	Glasgow	23-year-old McInally was last seen getting into a car with two men in Cadogan Street, Glasgow, on 15 October 1991. Her body was found in woodland in the city's Pollok Park and she had been strangled. Two men were charged with the sex worker's murder, but there was not enough evidence for either to stand trial. In 2017, McInally's son called for the investigation into his mother's murder to be reopened, claiming he had new evidence.[102]
October 1991	Barbara Finn	Body not found	33-year-old Finn vanished from her usual area of work in Hillfields, Coventry, on 28 October 1991. The sex worker took a prescription of methadone and it is unlikely that she would not have come home for more. Police suspect that Finn, along with fellow Hillfields sex worker Marie Garrity, who disappeared in 1995, may have been a victim of known prostitute killer Alun Kyte, the "Midlands Ripper".[103][104][105] It has been noted that Finn disappeared at about the same time as another woman, Nicola Payne, vanished from Coventry, although it has also been highlighted that their lifestyles were completely separate and it is believed their cases are not connected.[105]
October 1991	Darren Samuel	Manchester	Samuel, 19, was shot on 29 October 1991 at the Cottage Bakery in Moss Side. Two men were cleared of the offence when a potential trial witness failed to attend court.[106][107]
November 1991	Dave Rowbotham	Manchester	33-year-old Rowbotham, a former member of the bands The Durutti Column, The Mothmen and Motivation, was axed to death in his flat on Grangethorpe Drive, Burnage, early in November 1991.[108][109]
November 1991	Sharon Tyler	Tilney All Saints, Norfolk	24-year-old Tyler was knifed to death at her home in Tilney All Saints on 12 November 1991. Hairs she had in her hand when discovered dead in the kitchen not being tested as well as they could have been, together with a forensic expert's case notes being altered and his failure to treat two bloodspots on the murder weapon separately, meant that the conviction of a man found guilty of murdering her was later deemed unsafe. (It was not possible to retest the hairs to establish whether they were his as they were destroyed long before his retrial.)[110]
December 1991	Jim Morrison	Aldwych, London	Detective Constable Morrison, 26, was off duty on 13 December 1991 when he attempted to arrest a man suspected of stealing bags from pub customers. He chased the subject from Covent Garden to Aldwych, where he was stabbed three times. A reward of £30,000 was offered on the 30th anniversary of DC Morrison's death in December 2021.[111]
December 1991	Nicola Payne	Body not found	18-year-old Payne went missing from the Henley Green area of Coventry on 14 December 1991. She had a six-month-old son and was on her way to her parents' house from her home in the city's Winston Avenue at the time of her disappearance. Police began a search of Coventry parkland in June 2012 after being given new information.[112] While the search was ongoing, two local men were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to prevent a lawful burial.[113] The following day, the search was called off.[114] In January 2015, two brothers-in-law – men other than those arrested in June 2012 – were charged with Payne's murder,[115] but on 16 November, they were unanimously found not guilty.[116] A tent which had appeared to reveal scientific evidence against them had been stored in uncertain conditions for a month and cross-contamination was therefore possible.[117]
December 1991	Brenda Long	Whitstable, Kent	Because there was a suicide note next to the bath in which 42-year-old Long's body was found on 28 December 1991 and an empty pill pot was in the bath as well, foul play was not suspected to begin with, but an examination of the body by a pathologist revealed that someone had caused her to fall unconscious by holding an ether-soaked pad over her nose before drowning her. The murder followed that of Long's partner Alan Leppard in April of the same year, and his is also still unsolved.[72]
December 1991	Kathleen Waugh	Derwent Reservoir, Derbyshire	Waugh, a 41-year-old woman with an intellectual disability, was discovered to be missing from Knowl House care home, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, on the morning of 28 December 1991. Her body was found seven weeks later in a reservoir nearly 25 miles away. One of the officers of the home was arrested then released; she denied all charges against her. Waugh's murder was explored in March 1996 in Network First: The Killing of Kathleen Waugh – an episode of an ITV documentary series.[118][119]
January 1992	Perry Wenham	Ipswich, Suffolk	Two men were charged with 31-year-old Wenham's murder, but the judge at their trial ruled in their favour, describing the case against them as "deplorably weak". The case rested mainly on the fact that, on the night of the murder, the men were seen with Wenham in Ipswich town centre when he was still alive before being seen without him and walking away rather quickly from the lane whose church's graveyard his stabbed body was later found in – a lane also in the centre of town. During a police interview, one of the men admitted seeing Wenham get punched to the ground that night but denied hurting him himself in any way.[120]
January/February 1992	Tracey Meade	Grand Union Canal, London	On 20 January 1992, 14-year-old Meade said goodbye to her mother and left the home they shared, apparently for one of her frequent visits to her aunt's flat nearby. Meade never arrived, and 12 days later her body was recovered from the Grand Union Canal. She had drowned but was found to have been stabbed twice, and police think there may have been a sexual motive as she was only partially dressed and some of her clothes were discovered elsewhere. A reconstruction was featured on Crimewatch in April 1992,[121] but police are no nearer to finding the killer(s).
March 1992	Derek Ure	Greenock, Inverclyde	21-year-old Ure, a security guard, was shot on 26 March 1992 as an attempt was being made to rob a security van in Greenock town centre. The attempt ended in failure.[122] Two men were acquitted of his murder at a trial where one of them claimed that contact with the vehicle prior to the incident could be why a fingerprint belonging to him was found on a car used to get away from the crime scene.[123] In September 1995, this man – Mark Vass – was himself shot dead.[97]
March 1992	Beatrice Greig	Nottingham	79-year-old Greig was found battered to death at her home in Loughrigg Close, The Meadows, Nottingham, on 28 March 1992.[124] Her daughter was convicted of the murder, but the conviction was quashed in 1996 and a retrial ordered. Greig's daughter was convicted a second time at the retrial in 1997, but this conviction was quashed the following year.[125]
April 1992	Jacqueline Palmer-Radford	Eversley, Hampshire	The 40-year-old was found dead in her kitchen by her elder son on Wednesday 1 April 1992, having been asphyxiated while he was at school earlier that day. Nothing was stolen from the house and there was no sign of forced entry, leading investigators to consider it likely that the perpetrator was known to her.[126]
April 1992	Michael Schallamach	Body not found	After Schallamach vanished in Southampton, his wife received a letter posted in France and purportedly from a woman he had left her for, but the police, having long been of the opinion that he had been murdered by the time the letter was written, do not believe it was authentic. In 2016, two men jailed in 2005 for killing a family in 2003 were named as prime suspects in the murder of 53-year-old Schallamach.[127]
May 1992	Amanda Duffy	Hamilton, South Lanarkshire	The body of the 19-year-old Scottish student was found in bushes on wasteland near the car park on Miller Street, Hamilton, during the evening of Saturday 30 May 1992. A pathologist estimated her death to have taken place between six-and-a-half and 18-and-a-half hours prior to the discovery. There were compression marks on Duffy's neck along with branches and twigs in her orifices, and a lack of defensive injuries indicated that she was unconscious when the objects were being inserted into her.[128][129]
June 1992	James Crowther	Attacked in Birkenhead, Merseyside, died at Walton Hospital in Liverpool	Crowther, a 23-year-old newlywed, was fatally assaulted in Hamilton Street in the early hours of Sunday 28 June 1992 after visiting Liverpool for a stag night. An appeal was later made for a woman who had phoned to give information that concerned the incident to get back in touch.[130][131]
July 1992	John Bowkett	Body not found	37-year-old Bowkett, who was married and had a two-year-old daughter, disappeared without explanation on 12 July 1992 from his home on Welfare Road, Woodlands, Doncaster, South Yorkshire. His family say that "foul play" is suspected and that there was no reason for him to disappear. Bowkett also had two children from a previous marriage.[132]
c. July 1992	Yvonne Fitt	Lindley, North Yorkshire	Fitt was found dead in woodland near Otley on 12 September 1992 after being stabbed in the chest and back. Her case was featured on Crimewatch that year and in 2019 police appealed to an anonymous caller who provided information after the broadcast to call again. Fitt was a 33-year-old mother-of-one who was a sex worker in Leeds and Bradford's red-light districts,[133] and it is suspected that she was murdered by the killer of Leanne Tiernan.[134]
July 1992	Christopher Stanley	Hounslow, London	Nine-year-old Stanley was last seen on 29 July 1992, talking with a friend and a neighbour on St Aubyn's Avenue, Hounslow. His body was found the next day in a wartime pillbox on Hounslow Heath; he had been strangled. A man stood trial for Stanley's murder the following year but was acquitted.[135][136]
July 1992	Helen Gorrie	Horndean, Hampshire	15-year-old Gorrie was found half-naked and strangled in the grounds of Merchistoun Hall, Horndean, on 2 August 1992. The hall was in the same village as her home, which she had left three nights previously to see a 21-year-old man named John Corcoran. She had also seen him on the night of 29 July as he cruised around the area in his vehicle, and he later telephoned her to ask her to meet him. Corcoran was convicted of strangling Gorrie after she had rebuffed his sexual advances, but he was released on appeal in 2003 after serving around three years. The police revealed that there were no grounds to re-open the investigation, indicating that they still believed Corcoran was responsible, but the case is now technically unsolved.[137][138][139]
August 1992	Michael Towler	Bradford, West Yorkshire	57-year-old Towler was found fatally stabbed in the living room of his home on Holly Street, Horton Bank Top, Bradford, on the morning of 6 August 1992. Neighbours had heard noises coming from his home the previous evening and a man had been seen acting suspiciously nearby. Towler's video recorder was missing.[140]
September 1992	Steven Preston	Body not found	23-year-old Preston disappeared after waving to his mother as she left their home on Heath Road, Bebington, Wirral, to go to work on 18 September 1992. In 2017 police searched fields close to the M53 motorway at nearby Eastham after a tip-off suggested he could be buried somewhere around where junction 5 of the motorway meets New Chester Road. Police subsequently said they believed he may have been murdered and buried.[141][142]
September 1992	Barry Dalton	Finsbury Park, London	38-year-old Dalton, a former bareknuckle prizefighter who managed a minicab firm and reputedly ran protection rackets in London, was shot once in the head whilst at the wheel of his taxi in Newnton Close, Finsbury Park, on 25 September 1992. He was from the East Ham area of the capital and it was not clear whether he went to Finsbury Park that day to collect or drop off a fare or for some other reason.[143]
October 1992	Kevin Coniam	Mansfield, Nottinghamshire	The body of Coniam, a 36-year-old Kent-born lorry driver, was found in his Volvo estate car on 5 October 1992 in woodland close to the northern outskirts of Mansfield. He had been strangled, and police think it was by someone he had been associating with for drug-related reasons.[144]
November 1992	Natalie Pearman	Norwich, Norfolk	16-year-old Pearman was strangled and her body dumped in woodland at Ringland Hills, on the edge of Norwich. A lorry driver taking a short cut through Ringland Hills spotted the body in a lay-by at around 3:45 a.m. on 20 November.[145] New information about the case was received in November 2012.[146] A link to serial prostitute killer Steve Wright had been suggested, but in 2017 police revealed they had a full DNA profile of Pearman's murderer and that solving her murder was simply a case of matching the profile to an individual.[147][148]
November 1992	Andre Blackman	Stoke Newington, London	25-year-old Blackman was shot dead in the early hours of 30 November 1992 during a party at a community hall in Millers Terrace, Stoke Newington. A man who was alleged to have had an argument with him at the party but who denied being there was found guilty of his murder in August 1993, but he appealed the following year and had his conviction overturned after a witness admitted that her memories of the party were hazy and she could not be certain that he did in fact attend. The community hall being dimly lit, the party's disc jockey having no recollection of seeing the defendant there that night and the apparent failure of the original trial's judge to direct the jury properly as he summed up were also noted at the appeal hearing.[149]
November/December 1992	Harold Smith, Mary Smith and Harold Smith Jnr	Birmingham	Harold Smith, 72, his wife Mary, 73, and their son Harold Jnr, 47, who was paralysed and used a wheelchair,[150] were found murdered in a bedroom of their home in Overbury Close, Northfield, Birmingham, on 2 December 1992. They had been bound, beaten and stabbed with a small knife. Nothing appeared to have been stolen and the motive remains a mystery. Criminal psychologist Paul Britton suggested the culprit(s) could have been aged between 14 and 25 and had good knowledge of the area.[151]
December 1992	Johanna Young	Watton, Norfolk	14-year-old Young left her home in Merton Road, Watton, at around 7:30 p.m. on 23 December 1992 and was seen outside her local fish and chip shop half an hour later. The police were called the following morning because she had not turned up for her paper round and on Boxing Day her body was found in a water-filled marlpit near where her shoes and underwear had been discarded.[152][153]
December 1992	Steven Clark	Body not found	Clark, who was 23 and had disabilities from a childhood road accident, was for many years thought to have last been seen in Saltburn (a small town on the North Yorkshire coast) at around 3:00 p.m. on 28 December 1992, but in September 2020 a woman contacted the police to say she had walked past him near his Marske home 45 minutes or so later. (Marske is about two miles from Saltburn.) This new piece of information followed the revelation that Clark's parents had recently been arrested on suspicion of his murder before being bailed. Both strongly denied being behind his disappearance.[154][155]
January 1993	Benji Stanley	Moss Side, Manchester	14-year-old Stanley was shot dead whilst in a takeaway with a friend on Saturday 2 January. Though police found no evidence to support rumours that he had been involved in the trading of illegal drugs, they did reveal that they believed the shooter might have mistaken him for a drug dealer, and in 2011 disclosed the name of a dealer they thought likely to have been the intended target – someone of similar appearance to Stanley. Another theory is that the intended target was the friend who was with Stanley in the takeaway that day, as Stanley was on the other boy's bicycle and had that boy's jacket on when the gunman struck.[156]
January 1993	Ivan Dunn	Chorleywood, Hertfordshire	56-year-old Dunn was found dead with serious head injuries in a lay-by early on 7 January 1993. He had no fixed address and the last sighting of him was in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire the previous afternoon. Investigators initially believed that Dunn was the victim of a road traffic accident, but it was later established that he was murdered.[157][158][159]
January 1993	Arthur Brumhill	Northampton	76-year-old Brumhill's body was found in the basement of his workplace – a pet shop on Wellingborough Road – by a fellow employee. He had died from several blows to the head inflicted with a tyre iron missing from the premises. The killer is suspected to have escaped out of an upstairs window with a small amount of cash taken. A witness described seeing Brumhill with a man in his late teens with "mousey-brown" hair and about 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m) tall inside the shop on the evening of the murder. Others described seeing a suspicious-looking man in his 30s in the shop's vicinity. Despite a Crimewatch reconstruction being aired in March of that year and an arrest being made in April, the case did not get solved.[160][161] On 22 January 2013, the day after the 20th anniversary of the murder, police announced they were reviewing the case and hoped that advances in forensic analysis and DNA profiling would bring the killer to justice.[162] A former colleague of Brumhill's stood trial for his murder but was found not guilty in March 2017.[163]
January 1993	Stacey Queripel	Bracknell, Berkshire	The body of seven-year-old Queripel was found in woodland by South Hill Park on the night of 24 January 1993. She had been strangled with her necklace. It is believed she was murdered elsewhere, because her shoes were clean but the ground where she was found was muddy. Queripel's mother was arrested in connection with her murder but released without charge.[164]
February 1993	Doris Shelley	Attacked in Martlesham, Suffolk, died at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge	Concerned for her welfare because she had not answered the door to a woman attempting to deliver shopping to her, a neighbour took the decision to enter Shelley's bungalow by breaking a lounge window. Inside, he found the 82-year-old widow cowering in her kitchen. A blunt instrument had been used to strike her head with considerable force, and she died in hospital 10 days later, on 21 February.[165][166]
February 1993	Bulic Forsythe	Clapham, London	Forsythe, 42, was last seen on 24 February 1993 by his colleagues at Lambeth Social Services. There was concern when he did not arrive for work the following day, and that night, his flat at Foster Court, Clapham Park Road, was deliberately set on fire. Forsythe's body was discovered inside the flat by firefighters in the early hours of 26 February, and the cause of his death was found to have been a fractured skull. It has been suggested that he was murdered because he planned to expose widespread abuse at Lambeth Council's children's homes.[167][168]
March 1993	Richard Miles	Stonehouse, Gloucestershire	The 29-year-old panel beater's mother found his body in their back garden during the afternoon of 10 March 1993. He had suffered a single stab wound to the heart in an apparently motiveless killing sometime after arriving home for lunch from his workplace that day. Three men arrested in 2013 – two on suspicion of being Miles's killers, the third on suspicion of perverting the course of justice – all ended up being released without charge.[169]
March 1993	Jean Bradley	Acton, London	Bradley, a 47-year-old businesswoman, was stabbed to death in Carbery Avenue, Acton, on 25 March 1993. A man was charged, but the case against him was dropped.[170][171]
March 1993	Carol Clark	Sharpness, Gloucestershire	32-year-old Clark was last seen in Montpelier, Bristol, on 26 March 1993. Her body was found two days later, 30 miles away at Sharpness docks. She had been strangled and her body was partially clothed. Clark had been a sex worker and her case was featured on the BBC programme Crimewatch in the summer of 1993. Among those questioned in connection with her murder were convicted killers Alun Kyte and Philip John Smith.[172] In April 2023 a 66-year-old man was arrested and then bailed over Clark's murder after "new and significant information" had emerged.[173] In March 2024, a 64-year-old man from Newcastle was arrested for Clark's murder and then bailed pending further enquiries.[174] The man arrested in 2023 also remains under investigation.[174]
April 1993	Karen McGregor	Glasgow	26-year-old McGregor was battered and strangled on 18 April 1993 and her body was found hidden in shrubbery in the car park of the Scottish Exhibition Centre days later. In 1994, her husband stood trial for murder, but the charge was found not proven.[175][176] McGregor was a sex worker and links have been suggested between her death and the unsolved murders of other sex workers in Glasgow in the 1990s.[177]
May 1993	Raymond Saunders	Abbey Wood, London	41-year-old Saunders was shot dead on a caravan site in Abbey Wood on 9 May 1993. Although his common-law wife was due to testify at trial against a man she claimed to have seen pointing a gun at him, she changed her mind about doing so, saying in a letter to the suspect's solicitor that she was "not sure of anything anymore".[178]
June 1993	Jimmy Moody	Hackney, London	52-year-old James Alfred Moody, known as Jimmy and himself suspected of murder, was shot dead with a revolver in a pub on the fringes of Victoria Park on 1 June 1993. He had been on the run since escaping from prison in 1980.[179]
June 1993	Edna Waller	Sheffield	79-year-old Waller suffered fatal blunt-force trauma whilst being robbed in Bramwell Gardens, Netherthorpe, on 18 June 1993. Her residence was in Bramwell Gardens as well and close to the crime scene.[180]
June 1993	Tommy Roche	Near Heathrow Airport, London	42-year-old Roche was shot dead by a motorcyclist on 21 June 1993. He was the minder of fellow murder victim Donald Urquhart, a man killed in January 1993, but police played down suggestions that their deaths were connected.[181][182] A hitman was jailed for life for shooting 55-year-old Urquhart.[183]
June 1993	Michelle McKnight	Attacked in Tweedmouth, died in hospital in Ashington (both in Northumberland)	29-year-old McKnight was discovered with two abdominal stab wounds in the front garden of her home on Prior Road, Tweedmouth, on 27 June 1993. A court would later find not guilty of her murder a man with whom she was in a relationship when she suffered the attack.[184][185][186]
July 1993	George Leitch	Redhill, Surrey	37-year-old Leitch's naked body was found near a landfill site on 30 July 1993 – 28 days after he was last seen. Police acknowledged that he appeared to have had various business interests in clubs and bars in south London, but would not confirm or deny that they thought him being stabbed to death was a gang-related crime.[187] Three men had murder charges against them dropped in 1996.[188]
July 1993	Amanda Duncan	Body not found	Although the body of 26-year-old Duncan has never been found, police are treating her disappearance as a murder enquiry. Duncan was a sex worker and was last seen in the Portman Road area of Ipswich on 2 July 1993. In 2018, on the 25th anniversary of her disappearance, Suffolk Constabulary made a new appeal for information.[189] A link has been suggested to serial East Anglia prostitute killer Steve Wright.[190]
July 1993	Javad Iqbal	Brixton, London	37-year-old Iqbal was stabbed in the back outside his shop in Kent Walk, Brixton, on 9 July 1993. A 22-year-old man who was a cousin of Iqbal's minder was tried for the murder after the minder's lover claimed to have seen him leaving the murder scene while looking out of a window. Her evidence was considered unreliable by the court.[191]
July 1993	Harry and Megan Tooze	Llanharry, South Wales	64-year-old Harry Tooze and his 67-year-old wife Megan were shot from close range at their home at Ty ar y Waun Farm, Llanharry, on 26 July 1993. Jonathan Jones, the boyfriend of their daughter Cheryl, was convicted of their murders, but the verdict was quickly overturned on appeal. Since then South Wales Police have made several attempts to solve this case, but no further arrests have been made.[192] A link has been suggested between the murders and serial killer John Cooper, the man responsible for the Pembrokeshire murders.[193][194]
September 1993	Mark Jarrett	Upper Norwood, London	29-year-old Jarrett, a cocaine and cannabis dealer, was shot dead at a flat in Palace Road, Upper Norwood, on 14 September 1993. His best friend then went into hiding, but said after being charged with the murder – a charge he would be acquitted of – that he had absconded out of fear of the killer.[195]
October 1993	Gurbax Kaur Sandhu	Derby	Sandhu, a 30-year-old mother-of-two, was strangled to death at her home in Randolph Road, Derby, on 19 October 1993. Police wished to hear from anyone who noticed a red car parked in the same road that day.[196][197]
October 1993	John Culshaw	Wigan, Greater Manchester	24-year-old Culshaw was discovered knifed to death at his home on 23 October 1993, and his girlfriend's sister was later found not guilty of his murder or manslaughter. It had been alleged that she had killed him because she believed he had harmed her sister's baby son.[198][199]
October 1993	David Clarke	Maida Vale, London	23-year-old Clarke was shot and gold rings were stolen from him in Bravington Road, Maida Vale, on 29 October 1993. A man who was not known to him was cleared of both offences.[200]
November 1993	Kenneth McAllister	Colwyn Bay, Conwy County	McAllister, 42, was beaten with an iron bar and died from head injuries in his bedsit in Colwyn Bay on 9 November 1993. A man acquitted of murder in 1994 was sentenced in 2002 for attacking his aunt and uncle with a metal bar at their home. He was said to have told his aunt before the assault that he had already "put one six feet under" and it was now her turn.[201][202][203]
November 1993	Karen Hales	Ipswich, Suffolk	21-year-old Hales was stabbed and her body set on fire in an incident at her home in Lavenham Road, Ipswich, on 21 November 1993. The incident was almost certainly witnessed by her 19-month-old daughter.[204]
November 1993	Glenn Ford	Birmingham	Ford, 35, was last seen alive on 22 November 1993 in his home city of Coventry and found shot to death the next day in the yard of a deserted factory in the Saltley area of Birmingham, apparently after having been lured there. A reopening of the case in 2009 led to four men being charged over his murder in 2010, but police dropped the charges following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service that the chances of a conviction were not high enough to justify putting any of the men on trial.[205]
November 1993	Paul Hamilton	Glasgow	35-year-old Hamilton was shot as he drove his car in the Riddrie district of Glasgow on 23 November 1993, and there has been speculation that it was because he had given an alibi the previous year for the man standing trial for Arthur Thompson Jnr's 1991 murder.[206]
November 1993	Davina McMillan	Body not found	36-year-old McMillan disappeared on 25 November 1993 from the home she shared with her four-year-old daughter in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire. She was reported missing a month later by her brother. In 2020 it was reported that police were treating McMillan's case as a murder inquiry, with there being no evidence of her being still alive and her bank accounts not having been touched since the day she vanished. Her family say she would never have left her young daughter and mother and must have been murdered.[207]
December 1993	Adnan Al-Sane	Manchester	The Kuwaiti's headless body was discovered at Manchester's Piccadilly Station on 17 December 1993 and his head in a school playing field at Cheslyn Hay in Staffordshire on 27 January 1994 – parts of England to which he had no links. His home was in London's Maida Vale area, and it was after a meeting with a Kuwaiti business associate in a Mayfair hotel on 14 December 1993 that he disappeared. Police thought a financial motive was behind the murder of the 46-year-old billionaire and former banker.[208]
December 1993	Paul Logan	Blue House Farm, Northumberland	Logan's workplace, a takeaway in Consett, received a call from a nearby phone box on 23 December 1993 requesting the delivery of food to a house in the countryside. With no cause to suspect that the call was not genuine, 25-year-old Logan took the food there, only to be told that no one living there had placed the order. Logan was bludgeoned to death soon after he had started to walk away from the house, his body being found by police a few hours later on farmland within its grounds. The police had been called to the farm because the owners realised that Logan's car had not left there.[209]
December 1993	Viv Graham	Attacked in Wallsend, died in hospital in North Shields (both in Tyne and Wear)	Graham, 34, was fatally shot after leaving a pub on Wallsend High Street on 31 December 1993. He was well known locally as an organised crime figure and reportedly received a death threat shortly before he was murdered.[210]
January 1994	Derick Kiley	West Norwood, London	47-year-old Kiley was stabbed multiple times at his flat on Harpenden Road, West Norwood, on the night of 3/4 January 1994. Although an antique jewelled wristwatch and a black bag with a substantial amount of money in it were missing from the property, police did not think the main objective of the culprit(s) was to commit theft, as there was no sign of forced entry and Kiley's cautious nature meant he would not have let someone in he did not know. A man who ran a pie stall on Crystal Palace Parade claimed that he and Kiley spoke to each other at the stall shortly before the slaying and that Kiley seemed troubled. A woman who lived near Kiley claimed that she heard shouting and a woman's scream coming from the general direction of his flat at around 12:20 that night, but did not see anything suspicious when she went outside to check.[211]
January 1994	Julian Stewart	Manchester	21-year-old Stewart was shot in the head in Radley Walk, Moss Side, on 12 January 1994. A car then sped away from the scene. The killing was believed to have been a gangland one and happened the month after Stewart's body armour prevented a bullet from hitting him.[212]
January 1994	Sarah Lewin	Huddersfield, West Yorkshire	Lewin, 35, was bludgeoned at her home in Bradley Boulevard, Sheepridge, Huddersfield, on 14 January 1994. It is believed that she may have known her killer and her murder could have had a connection to her involvement in the supply of amphetamines. Lewin's brothers made a new plea for information in 2018.[213]
February 1994	Claude Moseley	Stoke Newington, London	The 32-year-old former athletics champion was stabbed with a samurai sword in early February 1994. Gilbert Wynter, who would go missing in 1998 and may himself be a murder victim, was tried for the killing but acquitted following a key witness's refusal to testify.[214]
February 1994	Danny Ferguson	Bedford	32-year-old Ferguson was shot in the head at his bedsit on the night of 20–21 February 1994. Five men were charged with and subsequently acquitted of violent disorder in relation to a fight in the building the day before Ferguson was found slain there, and the fight was believed to be connected with his murder.[215]
February 1994	Larry Burt	Wapping, London	56-year-old Burt, an artist, quality controller and Red Cross employee from Ramsgate in Kent, was strangled to death with a scarf in the yard of a warehouse in St Katharine's Way, Wapping. The scarf, which did not belong to him, was found at the scene along with his body, but his bicycle, binoculars, wallet, rucksack and camera were missing. Burt had caught a train from Ramsgate to London Victoria station on 26 February (the day before his body was found) and probably then cycled to the East End to draw and/or paint there.[216]
March 1994	Mehmet Kaygisiz	Islington, London	Kaygisiz, 33, was shot as he played backgammon at a café in Islington on 18 March 1994. Police said at the time that they suspected a link to Britain's Turkish underworld, but documents disclosed in Turkey in 2016 suggested that the killing was ordered by Turkish authorities because Kaygisiz had ties to what they regarded as a terrorist group.[217]
March 1994	Keith Copeland	Birmingham	35-year-old Copeland was shot dead in the early hours of Saturday 19 March 1994 as soon as he opened the front door of the Plaza Café, an illegal drinking den where he was a doorman. The shooter had two accomplices. An altercation inside there a little while beforehand led to a man leaving the premises, and it was thought that Copeland might have been an innocent victim of that man's aggression following his return to the building in Lozells for revenge. A man was acquitted of Copeland's murder in October 1995 – the defence claimed that the charge was a result of misidentification – but convicted in 2005 of the murder of another doorman.[218]
March 1994	Trevor Monerville	Stoke Newington, London	26-year-old Monerville was stabbed by five men on Trumans Road, Stoke Newington, on 19 March 1994.[219]
March 1994	Josephine Berrington	Wallington, London	34-year-old Berrington's ex-husband found her dead and naked in her new flat on Good Friday 1994 (1 April). She had been strangled the day before and her bedroom set on fire in an apparent attempt to hide the crime. Berrington had sat as a magistrate at Epsom Magistrates' Court until recently and her ex-husband said he believed she had moved to Wallington to escape a woman she feared would kill her. An electrical engineer was charged, but the case was later dropped.[220][221]
April 1994	Brian Dunning	Leeds	53-year-old Dunning was found beaten to death in his home in Trafford Avenue, Harehills, on Saturday 16 April 1994. He had last been seen a week previously. Valuable possessions were missing, and the murder seemed to police to have been a consequence of a burglary having gone wrong.[222]
April 1994	Ron Cousins	Chelmsford, Essex	Cousins, 78, was stabbed and strangled at his house on Anchor Street, Chelmsford, in mid-April 1994. He was a devout Christian who often let homeless people stay there, and when his body was found in the vandalised property, pages from the Bible had been stuffed into his mouth. A knife was resting on his torso as well, but it was not the one that had been used to attack him.[223]
April 1994	Karen Reed	Woking, Surrey	Reed, 33, was shot on her doorstep at 31 Willow Way, Woking, at 9:15 p.m. on 30 April 1994 when she answered the door to a man pretending to be delivering pizza. The motive for her murder is uncertain, although it has been suggested that it was a case of mistaken identity and that her sister, whose husband had been convicted of murdering two brothers, was the intended target.[224]
May 1994	Dawn Shields	Castleton, Peak District, Derbyshire	19-year-old mother-of-one Shields was last seen getting into a car in Broomhall, Sheffield on 14 May 1994. Her body was found buried under rocks at Mam Tor in the Peak District on 20 May. She had been strangled, and her clothing was missing and has never been found. Shields was described by police as leading a "troubled life", having been forced into sex work from the age of 14. The investigation into her murder was reopened in 2019.[225] Links with convicted killer Stephen Griffiths and the murder of Michaela Hague in 2001 have been suggested.[226] However, the prime suspect was prostitute killer Alun Kyte, who had killed two sex workers in December 1993 and March 1994 and was suspected by police of being responsible for many other such murders across Britain.[60]
May 1994	Andrew Trail	Sheffield	26-year-old Trail was found with stab wounds in the toilets of a blues club on Hallcarr Street, Burngreave, on 14 May 1994.[227]
16 May 1994	Diane Clark	Gainsborough, Lincolnshire	Clark died in a fire at 51 years of age when her house was set alight after being burgled. Despite three individuals having been arrested in relation to the case, no one has been charged with the burglary or with the arson attack that killed her.[228]
May 1994	Mary McKinlay	Motherwell, North Lanarkshire	McKinlay, a 50-year-old schoolteacher, was beaten, raped and stabbed to death in her flat on 21 or 22 May. A subsequent inspection there revealed no signs of forced entry. Police charged a neighbour, but the charges were found not proven at his trial. The trial came under criticism because his girlfriend had not been summoned to it – she had given him an alibi despite having gone to the cinema without him on the night of McKinlay's death – and because the prosecution's closing speech had been far shorter than that delivered by the defence.[229][230]
June 1994	Selhouk Behdjet	Holloway, London	58-year-old Behdjet, a drug trafficker, was discovered stabbed to death on 24 June 1994 at his flat on Hornsey Road. A man was charged with murder in 2012, but at a pre-trial hearing in 2014, the Crown Prosecution Service announced its decision to abandon the case. The deaths of key witnesses and the unreliability of those still alive were given as the reasons, but it later emerged that the likelihood of police inquiries being tainted by corruption – an officer was at the scene of Behdjet's murder before a 999 call was made – also played a part in the decision.[231][232]
July 1994	Sharon Harper	Grantham, Lincolnshire	21-year-old Harper was beaten and strangled in the early hours of Saturday 2 July 1994 after leaving the Market Cross, the Grantham pub where she worked behind the bar, to walk to the home of her babysitter. A Hove couple arrested over her murder in 1999 were released without charge.[233][234]
July 1994	Iftikah Ahmed	Luton, Bedfordshire	Ahmed, 23, was shot twice in the abdomen whilst working at a kebab shop on John Street, Luton, in the early hours of 7 July 1994. The gunman had forced his way into the kitchen via the back door and left the scene in a blue Vauxhall Cavalier whose lights were turned off.[235][236]
July 1994	David Foley	Kings Cross, London	Foley was shot outside a Kings Cross pub on 12 July 1994. A man was accused at trial of arranging the shooting from prison after hearing that his wife and two other women had been attacked by Foley, but the judge found the prosecution's case against him too weak to allow the jury the option of convicting him. Foley had survived being shot at 10 days before his murder.[237][238]
July 1994	Chris Little	Marple, Greater Manchester	Little was shot while driving his car along Stockport Road, Marple, on 22 July 1994. Arran Coghlan was charged with the 31-year-old racketeer's murder but cleared of it; the following decade Coghlan went on to be charged with and cleared of two other murders and cocaine smuggling.[239][240]
August 1994	Julie Finley	Near Rainford, Merseyside	23-year-old Finley was found dead in a carrot field just off the Rainford bypass on 6 August 1994, strangled and with her clothing missing. She was last seen alive the previous evening, talking to a man near the Royal Liverpool Hospital.[241] Police came to suspect that Finley may be a victim of Alun Kyte,[242] but in 2019 it was reported that they were investigating a possible link with convicted murderer Christopher Halliwell, who lived nearby and was a taxi driver. Finley was going to see a taxi driver shortly before her death.[243] It has also been suggested that Finley's murder could be linked with those of Linda Donaldson and Maria Requena.[55]
August 1994	Douglas Bryce	Wishaw, North Lanarkshire	21-year-old Bryce was fatally shot in the neck and a 29-year-old man was non-fatally shot in the leg while Bryce helped him start his car in Craigneuk on 25 August 1994. Three men were acquitted of Bryce's murder and the other man's attempted murder. Two of the accused claimed that Bryce was shot by the man he was helping before the man turned the gun on himself, and these two defendants were also acquitted of the attempted murder of a brother of that man, who had bullets fired into his home on 3 May 1994. Ballistic experts said that both crimes were committed with the same gun.[244]
August 1994	Kenneth Brown	Barrow upon Soar, Leicestershire	Originally from the Scottish town of Falkirk, the 56-year-old businessman suffered a single gunshot wound to the chest and a cleaner discovered his body in an outbuilding in the grounds of his mansion on 26 August. If the shooter was a trespasser, they had managed to gain access to the property in spite of the tall fencing and trees at its perimeter and the remote-controlled iron gates at its entrance. Brown had been fearful for his safety prior to that day, according to some of the people living close by.[245][246]
September 1994	Hassan Bilgi	High Halstow, Kent	Two dog walkers found Bilgi dead near a country lane on the morning of 18 September 1994 up to 14 hours after the Turkish-born 46-year-old was shot. Detectives did not come up with a clear motive for the offence but suspected it had something to do with heroin trafficking on his part.[247]
September 1994	Atek Hussain	East Ham, London	32-year-old Hussain drove home from his tandoori restaurant in Surrey and was stabbed outside his house in Burnels Avenue, East Ham, after getting out of his car on 18 September 1994. He rang his doorbell following the attack and told his family while dying that the assailants were Asian. Hussain's laundry bag was missing but not any of the takings he had brought with him from the restaurant.[248]
September 1994	Julie Pacey	Grantham, Lincolnshire	Pacey was found dead in her bathroom by her daughter on Monday 26 September 1994 after being strangled following a sexual assault. An unknown man wearing blue overalls was seen leaving the house the previous Friday and has been a suspect since the early days of the investigation into the murder. In 2015, a Lincolnshire Police detective revealed that they now had a DNA profile thought to belong to 38-year-old Pacey's killer.[249]
September 1994	Stan Nicholls	Yalding, Kent	37-year-old Nicholls was shot in the temple on 26 September 1994 when two men, one of them armed, burst into a pub as he was leaving the building shortly before midnight. Whether the gunman meant to shoot him or whether he did so by mistake when his real intention was to rob the pub with his accomplice (nothing was taken from there by either of them) is unknown.[250]
October 1994	Kathleen Hempsall	Lincoln	Hempsall, a 40-year-old part-time midwife, was stabbed in her home during a burglary on 11 October 1994. A 15-year-old boy was convicted of aiding and abetting the burglary (which he had already pleaded guilty to) but not of murder (which he had not been charged with), while a second youth was convicted of murder but later had his conviction overturned. A third youth charged with murder and burglary was acquitted of both.[251][228]
October 1994	Michael McCormack and John Ogden	Balham, London	Colleagues McCormack, 59, and Ogden, 34, were shot in Cavendish Road, Balham, on 21 October 1994 whilst walking back to work after a pub lunch. It seemed likely to have been a case of mistaken identity.[252]
October 1994	Michael Walkling	Penge, London	Trouble between two men and his sister and her friend outside a nightclub in Penge on the night of 28/29 October 1994 prompted 20-year-old Walkling to come to the girls' assistance and push one of the men to the ground. Both that man and his companion then punched him multiple times. The men were convicted of affray and one was additionally convicted of common assault on Walkling's sister and causing actual bodily harm to her friend, but as it could not be determined who was responsible for the fatal blow or blows Walkling suffered, neither defendant was convicted of manslaughter.[253]
November 1994	Lindsay Rimer	Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire	Rimer, a 13-year-old pupil at Calder High School in the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd, lived with her parents in Cambridge Street, Hebden Bridge. At around 10:00 p.m. on 7 November 1994, she left her home to visit the local SPAR supermarket in Crown Street to buy cornflakes, and paused briefly to speak to her mother at the Trades Club in Holme Street on the way. According to CCTV footage of her at the supermarket, Rimer paid for the cornflakes at 10:22 p.m. Just over five months later, on 12 April 1995, Rimer's body was recovered from the Rochdale Canal approximately one mile upstream from Hebden Bridge town centre.[254] A full DNA profile of her killer was isolated in 2016.[255]
November 1994	Nayantara Ali	Winchelsea Road, Forest Gate, London	11-year-old Ali reportedly vanished on her way to school on 4 November 1994, although no reliable witnesses saw her making the 15-minute walk that morning. Her naked body was discovered rolled up in a carpet under a pile of waste 50 yards from her house on 29 November. She had suffered blows to the head and been sexually molested. The yard where the body was discovered had previously been searched numerous times, suggesting that the killer had placed it there later. It is believed Ali was still alive until four days after her disappearance. Investigators said that the killer almost certainly had local knowledge due to their awareness of the waste yard where the body had been disposed of. Ali's house and the house of her uncles who lived nearby were searched, along with the men's car, but no evidence was found to indicate her body had been kept there.[256][257][258][259]
November 1994	Shona Stevens	Attacked in Irvine, North Ayrshire, died in hospital in Glasgow	31-year-old Stevens was beaten with a weapon in a daytime attack on a path near her home on 10 November 1994, and died on 13 November. Found at the crime scene, and potentially of significance to the case, was a distinctive semi-naked toy figure that police think was once attached to a keyring.[260]
November 1994	Helen Kazai	Body not found	Kazai came to be treated as a suspected murder victim by police following her disappearance in mid-November 1994. Before going missing, the 25-year-old was living in Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire with her sister's common-law husband and two people he was later convicted of killing: his daughter and his common-law wife (Kazai's sister).[261]
November 1994	Barry Bailey	Attacked in Walton, Liverpool, died at Whiston Hospital	42-year-old Bailey, a taxi driver, died on 21 November 1994 after being doused in a flammable liquid and set alight outside his house in Chapel Avenue during the early hours of 15 November. The windows of his taxi had been smashed the day before the attack.[262]
November 1994	Ethsham Ul-Haq Ghafoor	Nottingham	Ghafoor, a 26-year-old father-of-two and taxi driver known as Shami, was shot twice in his cab on 22 November 1994. In the months that followed, although the investigation into his death found him to have been a popular man, police appeals for information that would move the case forward were not very successful. Despite this, two men in their 40s were arrested on suspicion of Ghafoor's murder in 2014; they were subsequently released on bail pending further inquiries.[263][264][265]
December 1994	John Sheppard	Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire	The 66-year-old bookmaker was hit on the head with a hammer and sustained over 40 stab wounds as a robbery took place at his betting shop in Aylesbury on the evening of 3 December 1994.[266]
December 1994	Michael Meenaghan (Spike)	Oxford	A lecturer and research scientist at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University, Dr Meenaghan, 33, was shot on 10 December 1994 at his end-terrace home on the city's Blackbird Leys estate. He was shot through the kitchen window at approximately 4:30 p.m. in what police have called an apparently motiveless attack.[267]
December 1994	Leslie Watkinson	Peckham, London	Watkinson was a retired Salvation Army major who died aged 66 on 19 December 1994 when his skull was fractured during a mugging that took place as he returned to his Peckham home with a pension collected at the post office.[268]
December 1994	Mohammed Younis	Slough, Berkshire	Younis was a 42-year-old taxi driver who was stabbed about 15 times in the hallway of his home in Chalvey on 19 December 1994. Investigators suspected him to have fallen victim to an attack by a stranger who was mentally ill or a would-be burglar.[269]
December 1994	Tracey Mertens	Found fatally injured in Eaton, Cheshire. Died at the North Staffordshire Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent the following day.	Mertens was a mother-of-two aged 31 who was abducted, doused in petrol and set alight after returning to her former home in the Nechells area of Birmingham to collect belongings to take to her current address in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. A man out walking in Eaton on 23 December heard her cries and found her with her clothes still smouldering on the steps of the village church, and she died in hospital in the early hours of Christmas Eve.[270]
December 1994	Edward Bransfield	Coventry, West Midlands	Bransfield, 25, was shot in his parked car in Arthur Street, Coventry, on 29 December 1994. He was said to have been a drug dealer and to have had a kilogram of cannabis in his possession when he was murdered, but the police did not find it.[271]
December 1994	Amina Khatun	Washington, Tyne & Wear	24-year-old Khatun was beaten and stabbed to death in front of her three children on 30 December 1994 at her home in Manor View East, Concord, Washington.[272] Her brother was charged with her murder, but the charge was dropped because there was not enough evidence to be confident of a conviction. At the time, he was an illegal immigrant to the UK and awaiting possible deportation to Bangladesh. Two others were charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, but these charges were also dropped.[273]
January 1995	Michael Codner	Stoke Newington, London	25-year-old Codner sustained a fractured skull and fatal brain damage on 23 January 1995 when he was punched to the ground outside a club on Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington. One of the club's bouncers was tried for his manslaughter, but the judge, finding the evidence against the accused to be weak and inconsistent, directed the jury to clear him.[274]
January 1995	Tarsem Singh Purewal	Southall, London	Purewal, 60, was shot dead on 24 January 1995 while shutting up his office in The Crescent, Southall. Besides being a potential trial witness in the 1985 bombing of an Air India jumbo jet (two Canadian Sikhs were cleared of this act in March 2005), Purewal was the owner and editor of Des Pardes, a Punjabi-language weekly newspaper distributed in the UK that had published the names of rape victims, the names of their attackers, and his views on the personal lives and business practices of people in the community. No motive for his murder has ever been determined, however.[275][276]
January 1995	Sarbjeet Bassi	North Woolwich, London	32-year-old Bassi was found dead in Pier Road on 27 January 1995 after an assault in which he sustained head injuries. Although his two brothers were put on trial for his murder, the trial collapsed when, following consultations with three prosecution lawyers and a senior police officer, the Crown Prosecution Service declared an end to proceedings because there was not a realistic prospect of a conviction.[277]
January 1995	John Kilcoyne	Bristol	On 28 January 1995, homeless 44-year-old Kilcoyne had been drinking in a flat with two associates when the police were called to say he had been badly hurt there. An ambulance arrived soon afterwards, but Kilcoyne was dead from a stab wound to the neck. A 64-year-old man charged with the Irishman's murder had the charge against him dropped.[278]
February 1995	Joey Dean	Blackburn, Lancashire	A man alleged at trial to have stabbed 31-year-old Dean five times for reporting him for burglary, and whom Dean was said to have named as his attacker before dying, was acquitted. The judge had noted while summing up that it was universally accepted that if it was not that man who had killed Dean, the only other person who could have was the man a defence lawyer had accused of committing the crime after falling out with Dean over a drug deal.[279][280]
March 1995	Paulo Seque	Brixton, London	19-year-old Seque was an Angolan asylum seeker who, in the early hours of 5 March 1995 outside a restaurant on Brixton's Atlantic Road, was surrounded by a crowd of people who had just come out of the establishment, had CS gas sprayed into his face and was stabbed in the thigh following a dispute with staff. The dispute was to do with him not being allowed in because he had not paid the £5 entry fee.[281]
March 1995	Nasreen Akhtar	Oxford	Akhtar was a 29-year-old mother-of-four who was strangled at her home in Cobden Crescent, Grandpont, Oxford, on 30 March 1995. Her body was found by two of her children when they returned home from school. Akhtar's husband stood trial for her murder, but the trial collapsed. In 2015, police reopened the case and one of Akhtar's sons made a new appeal for information.[282]
April 1995	Michael Olymbius	Walworth, London	Olymbius was shot as he was getting into his car in Meadcroft Road, Walworth, at about 10:20 p.m. on 3 April 1995. The killing was said to have followed, and may have been connected to, a crime syndicate's loss of £1.5 million worth of the drug ecstasy in a police seizure.[283]
April 1995	Janet Brown	Hall Farm, Sprigs Holly Lane, between Radnage and Chinnor, Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire border	The body of Brown, a 51-year-old mother-of-three and research nurse for Oxford University, was found naked and handcuffed at her home on 11 April 1995. She had been bludgeoned to death with a crowbar or jemmy by an intruder, but there did not appear to have been any theft and she had not been sexually assaulted.[284][285] A link has been suggested with the murder of 50-year-old Carolanne Jackson 20 miles away in 1997 (see entry for 1997).[286]
April 1995	Natalie McLean	Wythenshawe, Manchester	18-year-old McLean was last seen with an unknown man in the Piccadilly 21 club in Manchester city centre early on Saturday 15 April 1995. Her mother found her body at her Wythenshawe flat on 20 April; she had been stabbed. A man was arrested but released without charge. In 2014 it was reported that the same man had been jailed for a sex attack on another woman and that his DNA had been recovered from McLean's flat.[287]
April 1995	Hugh Robb Ord	Morpeth, Northumberland	Ord's bludgeoned body was found on 15 April 1995 on a footpath just behind his flat on Springhill Walk. Police, who made four arrests but did not bring any charges over the death of the 61-year-old, thought he had been lured to the footpath by somebody he knew.[288]
April 1995	Sally Cannon	Port Glasgow, Inverclyde	20-year-old Cannon died after being shot at her flat on the night of 22/23 April 1995. Four months later her partner was convicted of her murder, but Scotland's appeal court overturned the conviction in April 2001.[289][290] Cannon's partner was retried towards the end of 2001, at which hearing it was stated that had the defence team for his earlier trial called in their own forensic experts, they might have been able to put forth evidence to support his claim that the droplets of her blood on his clothing, rather than being spatter from bullet wounds, had been coughed up by her as he held her in his arms while she was dying. A verdict of "not proven" was announced when the retrial concluded.[291]
April/May 1995	Robert Higgins	Kirkliston, West Lothian	35-year-old Higgins's body was discovered at the disused Craig's Quarry, Kirkliston, on 1 May 1995. He had died from a stab wound to his chest. Police believed that only someone with local knowledge would have known the secluded location. In 2007, a man stood trial for Higgins's murder, but the charge was found not proven.[292][293]
May 1995	David Ungi	Liverpool	36-year-old Ungi was shot in his car whilst driving along North Hill Street in Toxteth on 1 May 1995, and ran a short distance before collapsing and dying. A series of non-fatal shootings in Liverpool followed his murder and continued into June.[294]
May 1995	Sabrina Brett	Grand Union Canal, Stoke Hammond, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire	The body of 17-year-old Brett was found in the Grand Union Canal on Thursday 11 May 1995. She had been a sex worker. Police believed Brett had been strangled before being dumped in the canal up to six days previously.[295][296]
May 1995	Billy West	Carlton in Lindrick, Nottinghamshire	42-year-old West was stabbed with a kitchen knife in his home on 13 May 1995. A man was charged, and it was claimed at his 1996 trial that he had committed the murder because he had been in a relationship with West's neighbour and resented having been displaced by him as the object of her affection. The jury convicted the man, but he was acquitted in 1998 because the jurors had been given inaccurate timings and because an inmate to whom he had supposedly confessed could no longer be considered a reliable witness.[297]
June 1995	Leona McGovern	Glasgow	Someone throttled and stabbed 22-year-old McGovern before leaving her body behind the Arts Centre on Washington Street on 2 June 1995. A man stood trial for her murder but was cleared in January 1996.[298]
June 1995	Michael Doherty	Port Glasgow, Inverclyde	Doherty went missing on 9 June 1995 and his remains were discovered in August. He had been shot in the head and his body dismembered. Police suspected drug barons to have been responsible for the death of the 36-year-old former convict jailed for armed robbery.[299]
June 1995	Christine McGovern	Walthamstow, London	47-year-old McGovern was found dead in her flat on Hamilton Road, Walthamstow, by a friend on 22 June 1995. She lived alone with her dog and was last seen alive at 6:30 p.m. in the street outside her home the previous evening. A dog police believed may have been McGovern's was heard barking at about 11:00 p.m. that same evening. The cause of death was asphyxiation, and the flat was ransacked and a number of items taken.[300] A link has been suggested between McGovern's murder and Anthony Hardy, the "Camden Ripper".[88]
July 1995	Anthony Adams	Brixton, London	37-year-old Adams was murdered outside Brixton tube station on 17 July 1995 after two men were seen chasing him along a nearby shopping street. They went over to him when he tripped and fell as he reached the station and he was stabbed in the heart and lungs. Police charged a 17-year-old who was involved in a fight with Adams the day before the killing, but friends backed up the youth's alibi and he was cleared at his trial.[301]
August 1995, August 1996	Don Herbert, Paul Hemingway	Sharlston Common and Normanton, West Yorkshire	The same individual is thought to have murdered the two men. Herbert, a 64-year-old ex-miner, was fatally battered in his Sharlston Common flat during the August 1995 bank holiday with the oxygen cylinder which he used to ease symptoms of pneumoconiosis and emphysema, and Hemingway, a 49-year-old window cleaner, was beaten and stabbed to death in Normanton a year later, also in his own flat. The killer took money from each victim, too.[302]
September 1995	Sally Ann John	Body not found	Although John's body has never been found, her disappearance began to be treated as murder in 2014. John was a 23-year-old sex worker and was last seen on 8 September 1995 in Aylesbury Street, Swindon, Wiltshire. In 2011, during enquiries into the murders of Sian O'Callaghan and Becky Godden-Edwards, it was discovered that convicted killer Christopher Halliwell was a regular client of John's.[303] In November 2014, Wiltshire Police launched a murder investigation based on "significant new information". In 2015, three men were arrested on suspicion of John's kidnap and murder but released. In 2017, police revealed that a postcard purporting to be from John was sent shortly after her death and was discovered to be forged.[304]
September 1995	Marie Garrity	Body not found	Garrity, a 30-year-old sex worker and mother-of-three, disappeared at around 12 o'clock on the night of 8–9 September 1995 from the same area of Coventry that fellow sex worker Barbara Finn disappeared from in 1991. Both have been investigated as possible victims of a "Midlands Ripper", who may have been convicted prostitute killer Alun Kyte.[305][306][307][104][308]
September 1995	Nobantu "Mandy" Zani	Druid's Altar, Harden Moor, West Yorkshire	The body of 15-year-old Zani was found on 30 September 1995 near to Druid's Altar, on Harden Moor, not far from the towns of Keighley and Bingley. Police believed that she had been strangled with her own chiffon scarf. Zani had not been seen for two weeks but had not been reported missing as her mother thought she was staying with a friend. The police investigation uncovered a double life, but an inquest could not say with certainty how Zani had died due to decomposition of the body. However, because she had been covered with branches her death is classified as an undetected murder.[309][310][311][49]
September 1995	Gary Whitehouse	Attacked in Blackpool, died in hospital in Preston (both in Lancashire)	An occupant of a car got out and beat 27-year-old Whitehouse with a baseball bat or snooker cue early on 26 September 1995. The subsequent police investigation was hindered by the fact that the incident was not reported to them until 36 hours later and that neither of those who were with Whitehouse when it occurred could remember the location initially.[312]
October 1995	Diane Jones, Shauna Hibberd and Sarah Jane Hibberd	Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales	Jones, 21, died along with her two daughters, Shauna (aged two) and Sarah Jane (aged 13 months), after the front door of their house was torn away and petrol poured in the building and set alight while they were asleep there in the early hours of 11 October. Three women each jailed for the arson attack or an offence connected to it appealed against their convictions, resulting in two of them having theirs overturned and the other having her prison term for perverting the course of justice reduced.[313][314] One of these women was exonerated by South Wales Police in a statement read out in court on behalf of the force in 2006.[315]
October 1995	Joy Hewer	Walthamstow, London	Hewer, a 52-year-old devout Christian and retired primary school teacher, was found dead in her home on 17 October 1995 after the emergency services had been called at 11:18 p.m. to report that smoke was coming from the sixth floor flat in St David's Court, Walthamstow. She had been stabbed and sexually assaulted. The murder remains unsolved but a £20,000 reward has been offered for information leading to a conviction.[316] In an update on Crimewatch in 2015, police revealed that they had managed to trace everyone that had been captured on CCTV entering and exiting Hewer's block of flats that night except for one man, who as of the 2020s would be between about 60 and 70 years old. The flats had an intercom system and Hewer's door had a peephole which she regularly used, so it is very likely that she knew her killer and willingly let him in.[317][318]
November 1995	Andrew Forsyth	Dunfermline, Fife	Although two men were convicted of the murder of 34-year-old Forsyth, who was discovered lifeless in his flat on 9 November 1995 after he was kicked, punched and hit with pieces of wood, appeal judges overturned their convictions because of statements from witnesses saying he was alive later than 3 November 1995 (the alleged date of his death).[319] A retired police officer subsequently received a five-year prison sentence for suppressing evidence indicating that Forsyth died on a different day.[320]
November 1995	Ian Grant	Cambridge	Grant, a 24-year-old who had worked as a nightclub doorman in Cambridge and St Ives, was shot dead on waste ground near Fulbourn Hospital, Cherry Hinton, on 14 November 1995. Jurors at Norwich Crown Court cleared a man of conspiracy to murder him in 2000, and another man was cleared of the same charge in 2001.[321]
November 1995	Ali Abuzeid	Notting Hill, London	Abuzeid, a 54-year-old Libyan, was knifed repeatedly in the torso during a struggle at Quick Pick Foods, his grocery shop in Westbourne Grove, on 26 November 1995. When his daughter discovered him dead there that morning, he had a mutilated face in addition to the stab wounds on his upper body. No theft had taken place. Abuzeid had been involved in a failed coup against Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi's regime after helping to found the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, and might have been assassinated as part of Gaddafi's campaign to eliminate certain individuals in exile.[322][323]
December 1995	Ahmed Abdullah	Liverpool	21-year-old Abdullah was head-butted and fell down the stairs in a Liverpool nightclub on 3 December 1995. Two local men aged 20 and 27 were charged with his murder days later, but Liverpool Crown Court acquitted them. A barrister had suggested that Ahmed might have been injured fatally when other men were attacking him in the toilets after taking him there following the first assault.[324][325]
December 1995	John Killick	Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire	Killick was a 60-year-old security officer for Asda who was hit on the head with an iron bar and then knifed in the chest twice outside its Scunthorpe store as he escorted two female colleagues to their cars at night on 9 December 1995. The masked assailant appeared to be after the bag he was carrying and to think it had money inside, but all it contained was receipts and paperwork. Killick finished escorting the women when the attack was over and died soon afterwards in hospital.[326]
December 1995	Mustafa Zarif	Essendon, Hertfordshire	Zarif's murder was believed to have been to do with heroin trafficking involving the 32-year-old Turkish Cypriot. Thought to have been strangled to death in mid-December 1995, his remains were found on 6 April 1996 in a wood near the village of Essendon. Two men originally from Turkey were cleared of the killing but received long sentences in 1998 for smuggling drugs.[327]
December 1995	Lorna Rose	Attacked in Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, died in hospital	After 73-year-old Rose was beaten with a blunt instrument at her home in September 1995 and before she died in hospital on 17 December, she came to for a short period and named her daughter as the assailant. The daughter was subsequently charged but had the case against her dropped.[328][329]
December 1995	Trevor Hamilton	Birmingham	37-year-old Hamilton was killed in a street shooting in Handsworth Wood on 27 December 1995. Police soon started to suspect the murder to be linked with the non-fatal Christmas Eve shooting of an acquaintance of his.[330][331]
December 1995	Frederick Barnett	Hull, East Yorkshire	71-year-old Barnett was stabbed and had his throat cut at his home in Hopewell Road, east Hull, on 29 December 1995. Four men were found guilty of murder and conspiracy to rob, but their convictions were overturned in 1998.[332]
January 1996	Michael Sutherland	Hull, East Yorkshire	Sutherland died when he was stabbed through the arm and in the neck near where a New Year's Eve party was taking place. A man faced trial for the 31-year-old's murder, but the jury was instructed to find him not guilty of the crime when no further evidence was offered against him by the prosecution.[332]
January 1996	Deborah Wood	Leeds	The smouldering remains of 20-year-old Wood, who had been missing since leaving a Leeds pub 10 days earlier, were found near a railway station on 14 January 1996. Scientific evidence suggested that her body had been stored somewhere cold prior to being dumped and set on fire.[333]
January 1996	Alan Holmes	London	Police found 53-year-old Holmes fully clothed and tied face-down to his bed in his Camden Town flat on 4 January 1996. He had been there since Boxing Day, and died in hospital the day after being discovered. Several people had used Holmes's bank cards to steal £1,000.[334]
January 1996	Steven Burton	Oxford	20-year-old Burton was stabbed in the kitchen of a property on Cowley Road, Oxford, on 7 January 1996. The prosecution contended during the trial of an armed robber accused of his murder – a man who met the deceased and another man in Oxford city centre and later went with them to the residence where the stabbing was to take place – that it was a crime motivated by the armed robber's girlfriend's allegation that Burton tried to rape her a few days previously. Although the defendant was acquitted when that trial came to a close, he was sentenced for perjury in 1999 after becoming a Jehovah's Witness and confessing to killing Burton. The law of double jeopardy meant he could not be re-arraigned for the offence at that time, but police and prosecutors made an unsuccessful attempt to have the case brought before a jury once more following the repeal of this law.[335][336]
January 1996	Bobby Jones	Hastings, East Sussex	27-year-old Jones was found dead in undergrowth in Alexandra Park, Hastings, on 31 January 1996, having been beaten and stabbed in the neck. He had last been seen at around 11:20 p.m. the night before in the town's Lower Park Road. Jones was said to have sold cannabis now and then and may have been in the park to secure a deal.[337] Fourteen people were arrested at the time, but nobody was charged. A £10,000 reward was put forward in 2006 by someone who wished to remain anonymous.[338]
January/February 1996	Billy Weatherall	Near Bishopton, Renfrewshire	32-year-old Weatherall was last seen alive at around 10:00 p.m. on 31 January 1996 and found shot dead the next day in a rural lane near the M8.[339] When killed, he and seven other men were on trial for their alleged roles in a 1994 riot at Glenochil Prison in Clackmannanshire, and he had taken the decision to give evidence against his co-defendants. One of the co-defendants, George Docherty, is now also the victim of an unsolved murder, having been run over and stabbed in an incident in Glasgow in August 2006.[340]
February 1996	Surinder Kaur Varyapraj	Birmingham	Varyapraj's body was discovered in her house in Handsworth on 5 March 1996 after a local shopkeeper had expressed concern about not having seen her within the last month. A neighbour had heard a scream coming from there on 5 February, the day after the last reported sighting of her, and a pathologist determined that someone had used a ligature or similar weapon to strangle the 36-year-old. Police had the DNA profile of a suspect by the end of 2018, but it has still not been fully or partially matched to anyone in the National DNA Database.[341]
February 1996	Peter Swailes	West Yorkshire	Featherstone man Swailes, 39, died on 9 February 1996 from a blow to the head in a road-rage incident that occurred between the West Yorkshire villages of Nostell and Fitzwilliam.[342] A man in his late 30s was charged with murder in 1999 and then acquitted.[343][344]
February 1996	Kevin Nightingale	South Shields, Tyne and Wear	Nightingale, a nightclub bouncer aged 33, was shot four times on his doorstep on 17 February 1996 after being driven home from his place of work. The people he was in the car with immediately prior to the shooting were each charged twice with his murder – in 2000 and in 2001 – but none of the charges resulted in a conviction and the three of them would later be given £35,000 in compensation by Northumbria Police.[345]
February 1996	Junior Carter	Birmingham	34-year-old Carter was shot on 29 February 1996 outside Winson Green's Feed The Nation, a takeaway on Dudley Road.[331]
March 1996	Linda Millard	Body not found	48-year-old Millard vanished on 1 March 1996 and her car was found at Battery Point on the coast of Portishead, a town on the Bristol Channel. Police believe there was a connection to a recent triple gangland killing, as she had left her partner because of her suspicions of his involvement in the crime and he found her two days before she went missing.[346]
March 1996	Russell Marsom	Milton, near Cambridge	The 29-year-old hairdresser from Heacham in Norfolk travelled from his home to visit a nightclub in Cambridge on Saturday 30 March 1996 and was found drowned in a ditch the day after.[347]
April 1996	Andrew Bentley	Sheffield	A man with a gun went into the Flying Pizza restaurant on Glossop Road, chased the 26-year-old employee out and shot him dead in the car park behind the building in the early hours of 12 April.[348]
May 1996	Owen Graham	Liverpool	A man entered a betting shop in Toxteth's Granby Street and fatally shot 49-year-old Graham there on the afternoon of 1 May 1996 – a year to the day after David Ungi was shot dead in the same area of Liverpool.[349][350]
May 1996	Dorothy Wood	Huddersfield, West Yorkshire	94-year-old Wood was smothered with a pillow during a burglary at her home in Whitby Avenue, Fartown, on 6 or 7 May 1996. She had previously been burgled in 1993 and 1996. A man was convicted of Wood's murder but released after an ear print found on a window at the scene was discovered not to have been his.[351]
May 1996	John Marshall	Sydenham, London	Marshall, a 34-year-old married father-of-three, lived near Billericay in Essex, but when his body was discovered on 22 May – a week after he had gone missing – it was in south London. He had been shot twice.[352] The car dealer had once been in business with one of three men killed in Rettendon, Essex, in December 1995, and this prompted investigators to probe whether there was a connection. A later police statement made it apparent, however, that no connection had been found.[353]
May 1996	Terence Mann	Attacked in California, died in hospital in Gorleston (both in Norfolk)	Mann, a 51-year-old from Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, was stabbed on 26 May 1996 in the car park of the California Tavern, California, on the Norfolk coast between Great Yarmouth and Hemsby. A man was subsequently convicted for public order offences related to the stabbing, but there has not been a conviction for Mann's murder or manslaughter.[354][42]
June 1996	Melanie Hall	South Gloucestershire	Hall, a 25-year-old psychology graduate from Bradford Leigh, Wiltshire, disappeared on 9 June 1996 after a night out in Bath. Her skeletal remains were unearthed next to a slip road at junction 14 of the M5, approximately 15 miles north of Bristol, on 5 October 2009.[355] A man was detained as a suspect in November 2013.[356]
June 1996	Janet Murgatroyd	Preston, Lancashire	Twenty-year-old Murgatroyd was a student at the University of Central Lancashire and worked part-time for Lancashire Constabulary. She was last seen alive in the early hours of 16 June 1996, running from a man on Penwortham Bridge in Preston, before being found dead in the River Ribble, having died from drowning and head injuries. A man was convicted of manslaughter, but this was quashed on appeal in 2004.[357]
June 1996	Jacqueline Gallagher	Bowling, West Dunbartonshire	26-year-old Gallagher was last seen alive on 24 June 1996 in Glasgow city centre. Her body was found concealed near a bus stop on Dumbarton Road, Bowling. She had been bludgeoned. Gallagher was a sex worker and in 2004 a murder charge against a man, who admitted being one of her regular clients, was found not proven.[358][359]
July 1996	Katrina Taylor	Brighton, East Sussex	On 8 May 1996, eight weeks before she was stabbed to death, heroin addict Taylor kept watch while her boyfriend and a friend burgled a house. Considerable damage was done to the house in the course of the burglary, and the woman whose property it was apparently wanted whoever was responsible to pay. She, her brother and two drug dealers from London all had murder charges filed against them following the slaying of 19-year-old Taylor in a Brighton graveyard at around 11:15 p.m. on 4 July. At their trial in 1997, the drug dealers claimed that when the four defendants and Taylor were in a house together to try to reach an agreement, the woman and her brother left the house with Taylor in tow and said after returning that Taylor was dead, while the woman and her brother claimed it was the drug dealers who did that. However, the woman's brother did admit to putting the murder weapon down a drain in Peacehaven, east of Brighton. The drug dealers were found guilty of murder but their convictions were overturned on appeal in 1999. During the retrial, one of them admitted to a charge of false imprisonment but was freed because of time already spent in jail.[360]
26 July 1996	Stephen Primrose	Attacked in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, died in hospital in Chester	35-year-old Primrose lapsed into a coma and died about six months later after his head was hit multiple times with a heavy blunt object at his home on Chester Road. His common-law wife found him unconscious and seriously injured there in January 1996, and nearby was his unharmed baby son.[361]
July 1996	Ian Lowery	Gloucester	Lowery, 26, fell from a bridge in Churchdown on the night of 27/28 July 1996. A train driver and a mate saw him on the track shortly afterwards as their vehicle headed towards him, but its brakes could not be applied in time to prevent it from hitting him. Although Lowery's wallet and ring were missing, an inquest found the plunge to have been due to misadventure; but in 2002, when his death had been deemed unlawful following an independent inquiry, a man was arrested on suspicion of murder and another on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Neither was charged. Officers had been accused of handling the case poorly by ignoring scuff marks on the wall of the bridge and failing to treat the area as one with potential to be classed as a crime scene.[362]
September 1996	William "Worm" Toye	Perth Prison, Scotland	36-year-old Toye was fatally stabbed in prison while serving a sentence for killing a man to stop him from testifying against his brother.[363] Two convicts were charged with Toye's murder, but a jury found the charges not proven.[364] One of those convicts was Frank McPhee, a gangster who, in May 2000, would himself be murdered and whose murder is also unsolved.
October 1996	Geoffrey Leeming	Haxby, near York	63-year-old Leeming was stabbed to death on 9 October 1996 in the garage of his home in Linley Avenue, Haxby. His wife was in the house watching Coronation Street at the time, and the knife used in the attack was later recovered. Leeming's wife, son and daughter were charged with conspiracy to murder in 1997, but the charges were dismissed by a stipendiary magistrate in 1998. The wife died in 2005.[365][366]
October 1996	Zoe Simpson	Body not found	24-year-old mother-of-two Simpson vanished from her home in New Bank Street, Longsight, Manchester, on 26 October 1996. In March 1997 police announced that they believed she had been murdered and dug up the garden at the messy house she had lived in with her boyfriend, who was arrested on suspicion of murder in August 1997. Simpson's family had disapproved of her relationship with him; she had met him at 16 and lived with him in a tent for a while. Her doctor told police that Simpson had told her that the boyfriend had been violent towards her and that she was scared of him. He had a long criminal record and police said that they suspected that he had killed her and then hidden her body in a scrap appliance such as a fridge or washing machine before having it destroyed at a car-shredding plant 50 miles away where a witness claimed to have seen him. He died in 2012.[367][368]
October 1996	Julie Smailes	Leadgate, County Durham	The 27-year-old sales manager's Leadgate house was set on fire in the early hours of 30 October 1996 after she was strangled and repeatedly stabbed there, possibly for money. Scientific evidence later confirmed that a man already suspected was present at the time of the killing, which multiple people are thought to have been involved in. The same man was responsible for the August 1998 murder of 18-year-old Rachel Tough in nearby Moorside and committed suicide within days of her death by hanging himself from a tree. Another man was charged with Smailes's murder in 2001, but in 2002, prosecution lawyers advised at a pre-trial hearing that they did not have enough evidence to continue with proceedings against him.[369][370]
November 1996	Damien Nettles	Body not found	The 16-year-old vanished in Cowes on the Isle of Wight on 3 November 1996. The disappearance remains under investigation as murder and in 2011 several men were arrested and released on bail.[371]
November 1996	Mohammed Akram	Carrington, Greater Manchester	Akram, a 38-year-old taxi driver and father-of-five, was discovered shot dead in the village of Carrington on 11 November 1996. Theft seemed an unlikely motive because when his taxi was found in nearby Flixton, his takings from the night of 10/11 November were still in the vehicle.[372] A CCTV camera in Carrington recorded nothing useful due to fog.[373]
November 1996	Vera Holland	Reading, Berkshire	Holland, a 47-year-old married mother-of-three living in Reading, left her home on 14 November 1996 to go to a local Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway but did not return, and was subsequently reported missing by her husband. Her body was found in a burning pile of rubbish close to the A327 road south of Reading early on 16 November, and the cause of her death was strangulation. An appeal for new information was made by Holland's children and Thames Valley Police on the 20th anniversary of the murder in November 2016, but it remains a crime with which no one has been charged.[374]
November 1996	Michael Hewerdine	Body not found	32-year-old Hewerdine vanished on 21 November 1996 after leaving his home in the Lincolnshire village of Ruskington, and it was suspected that his disappearance was to do with his alleged connections to local criminals. A tip-off in 2016 led to police officers digging at nearby East Heckington to search for his remains, but nothing was found there.[375][376]
December 1996	Richard Watson	East Grinstead, Sussex	Business tycoon Watson, 54, was shot dead by an unknown shooter as he arrived home on the evening of 10 December. Charges were brought against the victim's wife and stepdaughter, but these were eventually dropped. Sussex Police later apologised to the two women and acknowledged their innocence. Another suspect has since been identified, but no charges for the murder have been brought against him.[377]
27 December 1996	Patrick Warren and David Spencer	Bodies not found	11-year-old Warren and 13-year-old Spencer, two boys known as the "Milk Carton Kids", vanished from the street in Chelmsley Wood, Solihull one night in December 1996. Although they have not been found, the police began to treat their case as a no-body double murder in 2006 after it emerged that a convicted child sex offender and murderer, Brian Lunn Field, was living nearby and had access to a van. Field abducted two boys in his car in 1986 with the intention of raping them, but they managed to escape, and he remains the only man in British criminal history to have been convicted of such a crime. Searches of land in 2006 failed to locate the missing boys. Field remains the prime suspect in the case, but the police never had sufficient evidence to charge him. In 2021, the case was featured on criminologist David Wilson's Channel 4 documentary series In the Footsteps of Killers.[378][379][380]
5 January 1997	Guydance Dacres	Clapton, London	16-year-old Dacres was shot dead in the Chimes nightclub on Lower Clapton Road. He did not have any gangland connections and appeared to have been targeted at random. Two men were acquitted of murder in 2000.[381]
6 January 1997	Marion Ross	Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire	51-year-old Ross was stabbed in the eye and throat with scissors at her bungalow in Kilmarnock. A man's murder conviction was set aside after it turned out that a fingerprint discovered on a biscuit tin found at his home – a tin he was alleged to have stolen from the bungalow because it contained money – was misidentified as the victim's by a forensic science bureau. The same bureau also misidentified a fingerprint as belonging to a police officer named Shirley McKie, which led to her being accused of falsely claiming that she did not leave it at the scene. McKie was cleared of perjury.[382][383]
24 January 1997	Marsha Wray	Body not found	Wray, a 38-year-old nurse from Harrogate in North Yorkshire, went missing after taking her son and daughter to a local primary school.[384] Her car was later seen at nearby Nidd Gorge and then in Leeds, where it was recovered, but police do not know how it came to be at either of those locations.[385]
27 January 1997	Isabelle Gray	Leeds	82-year-old Gray was found dead in the kitchen of her home in Austhorpe Road, Crossgates, on 28 January 1997. It is believed she was attacked by two men who called at the house at tea-time the previous day. Cash and Gray's handbag were stolen.[386]
8 February 1997	John Kennedy	Attacked in Shadwell, London, died in hospital	31-year-old Kennedy was knifed in the abdomen following a heated conversation with another man in a pub in the East End. A £30,000 reward is on offer.[387]
15 February 1997	Billie-Jo Jenkins	Hastings, East Sussex	13-year-old Jenkins was beaten to death with a metal tent peg on the patio of her family home in Hastings. Her foster father Sion Jenkins, who by chance had the same surname, was convicted of her murder in 1998. This conviction was quashed in 2004 and a retrial was ordered. After two retrials at which neither jury was able to reach a verdict, Jenkins was acquitted in 2006. He has been denied compensation as no evidence disproves his guilt.[388]
25 March 1997	Daniel Roff	London	Believed to have had a role in the April 1990 murder in Spain of Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson, Roff was shot on the drive of his Bromley home and died at the Royal London Hospital. The 36-year-old had used a wheelchair because he had been paralysed by a shooting at a nightclub in 1995 or 1996.[389][390]
April 1997	Paul McGrath	Denton, Greater Manchester	34-year-old McGrath was stabbed 18 times in an early hours attack at his home on 7 April 1997 and discovered dead at the bottom of the stairs by a workman who had noticed while passing that the door was ajar. Police think the killing was over a dispute involving an acquaintance of the victim. Two men went on trial in March 1998 and were cleared.[391]
April 1997	Carolanne Jackson	Wooburn Green, Buckinghamshire	Jackson, 50, ran an antique jewellery business from her home in Wooburn Green. She was found tied up and dead with severe head injuries in her kitchen on Sunday 13 April 1997, having died from asphyxiation. Police believed the culprit had been trying to get information from Jackson to access her safe. Her Rolex watch and some jewellery were missing, but the safe was still locked. Jackson had previously told police that a man was stalking her. A link has been suggested with the murder of Janet Brown 20 miles away in 1995 (see entry for 1995).[286]
April 1997	Linda Chandler	Birmingham	Widow Chandler, 46, was stabbed on her doorstep in Fairbourne Avenue, Kingstanding, Birmingham, on 18 April 1997. She managed to reach a neighbour's home but collapsed and was dead on arrival at City Hospital. No motive has ever been established. A local man was arrested but released without charge.[392]
May 1997	Emily Salvini	Caversham, Reading, Berkshire	Seven-year-old Salvini was asleep in her home on Hemdean Road, Caversham, Reading, when petrol was poured through the letterbox and then lit early on Saturday 3 May 1997. Her mother and brother, who was three years old at the time, escaped the blaze. Both were treated for severe burns at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury and recovered from their injuries, but Salvini died of smoke inhalation. It was found that phone lines to the house were cut prior to the arson attack to prevent calls to the emergency services. On 3 May 2017, the 20th anniversary of Salvini's death, her mother and brother made a new appeal for information, but the case remains unsolved.[393]
May 1997	Joe McCafferty	Huddersfield, West Yorkshire	Seven-year-old McCafferty was sleeping in his aunt's house in Huddersfield when petrol was poured through the letterbox and set alight. Four other members of his family were inside the house and escaped, but McCafferty died in hospital.[394] His death came on the same day that another child, seven-year-old Emily Salvini, was killed in an arson attack in Reading, and her murder is also unsolved.
May 1997	Sean Harvey	Luton, Bedfordshire	Harvey, 26, died outside a kebab shop on 11 May from a ruptured artery caused by a single blow to the neck during a commotion in which he and a friend were hit by two people. A teenage boy on trial for Harvey's murder admitted throwing a punch at him but said it could not have been the fatal injury because his punch was delivered not to Harvey's neck but to his eye.[395]
May 1997	Kingsley Iyasara	Attacked in Finsbury Park, London, died in hospital	On 17 May 1997, allegedly to avenge a non-fatal stabbing they thought he was responsible for, a gang of youths beat 16-year-old Iyasara with sticks and baseball bats on the landing of some flats before one of them shot him in the leg. The victim of the stabbing was said to have been part of the gang. Because detectives were not able to determine the shooter's identity or that anyone apart from him knew that he was carrying a gun and planning to use it, no one was charged with Iyasara's murder, but six youths were convicted of conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm against him.[396]
June 1997	George Pugh	Kilburn, London	56-year-old Pugh's body was found with head injuries and stab wounds at his flat on Kilburn Park Road. A friend made the discovery on 12 June 1997, and two weeks later there was an appeal from the police for witnesses to help them get a better idea of Pugh's movements from the morning of 11 June to the afternoon of 12 June.[397]
June 1997	Winnie Deighton	Attacked in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, died in hospital in Scarborough, North Yorkshire	59-year-old grandmother Deighton was found unconscious on a verge near her home in Bridlington on 10 June 1997, having been raped and beaten. She died in hospital 11 days later. A man was tried for murder in 1999, but the case against him was dismissed. Deighton's case was re-examined in 2013, with police revealing they had DNA from the scene.[398][399]
June 1997	Ann Myring	Body not found	45-year-old Myring went missing after leaving work and heading home in her Vauxhall Carlton on 25 June 1997. The car was left on the driveway of her house in Chevening Close, Stoke Gifford, near Bristol. Myring's husband, who was seeing another woman at the time of the disappearance, was charged with murder in October 1997 and cleared in December 1999.[400][401]
July 1997	Jodine Brown	Sant Road, West Heath, Birmingham	17-year-old Brown's mother found her battered and decomposing body under a duvet in her bedroom on 18 July 1997. She had been drugged, struck over the head and strangled.[402]
July 1997	Mohammed Nazir	Slough, Berkshire	61-year-old Nazir was shot in his home on 28 July 1997 after throwing himself in front of his 19-year-old son to protect him from two balaclava-clad gunmen who had forced their way in. Nazir and his son were both shot in the legs and then Nazir was shot in the abdomen as he chased the fleeing culprits.[403]
July 1997	George Dean	Kilburn, London	74-year-old Dean was killed at a laundrette near his Kilburn home on the afternoon of 31 July 1997. He and a younger man had been having what appeared to be a normal conversation when the younger man suddenly knifed him before fleeing.[404]
August 1997	Patricia Grainger	Sheffield	Grainger, 25, a vulnerable woman with learning difficulties, was found murdered close to her home in Buchanan Road, Parson Cross, on 10 August 1997. Her body had been left beneath a bed base in a brook and she had suffered multiple stab wounds. In May 2020, Grainger's family and Crimestoppers offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.[405]
August 1997	Warren Wilson	Bedford	Wilson, a 32-year-old police informant, was shot in the head four times as he sat in his car on 17 August 1997. A street cleaner found the murder weapon – a Smith & Wesson gun that had once belonged to a Scottish police force – wrapped up in a towel in a flowerbed. Bedfordshire Police charged a man with murder after being told by his brother that he had admitted to the killing. It was alleged during his trial that two brothers had paid him to commit the crime because they wanted Wilson out of the way to make it easier for them to have control over the supply of drugs in the Bedford area, but he was cleared by the jury.[406]
August 1997	John Nolan	Notting Hill, London	Nolan was left on the drive of a school on Kensington Park Road after being kicked and stamped to death during the annual Notting Hill Carnival. The discovery of the 50-year-old's body was made on the morning of 26 August.[407]
September 1997	Christopher McGrory	Milngavie, East Dunbartonshire	25-year-old McGrory was discovered strangled to death in his van at Dougalston Golf Course on 23 September 1997. Murder charges against Colin McKay and gangster Frank McPhee, who were suspected of having killed him in a dispute over drugs, were found not proven the following March. McKay and McPhee had both attended McGrory's wedding earlier in September 1997, the former as the best man.[364]
October 1997	David Seymour	Reading, Berkshire	30-year-old Seymour was hit over the head with a bottle and stabbed in the chest outside a wine bar in The Oracle, a large indoor shopping and leisure mall in central Reading, during the early hours of Sunday 26 October 1997.[408]
October/November 1997	Sharon Lynch	Liverpool	Someone strangled and beat 22-year-old Lynch and left her body in a derelict warehouse in Liverpool city centre. The body was found in the warehouse on 27 November, but may have lain undiscovered for as long as a month. The following year, John Flanagan was found guilty of Lynch's murder, but his conviction was quashed in September 2005.[409]
November 1997	Michael Pritchard	Kirk Langley, Derbyshire	54-year-old Pritchard was deliberately run over in Kirk Langley on 12 November 1997 when trying to stop his delivery van from being stolen.[410]
November 1997	Kate Bushell	Exwick, Exeter, Devon	Bushell, 14, was murdered on 15 November 1997 as she walked a neighbour's dog a short distance from her home in Exwick, on the outskirts of Exeter. Bushell had left the residence in Burrator Drive at 4:30 p.m. When she failed to return, her parents called the police. A search located Bushell's body in a field next to Exwick Lane at 7:35 p.m. that evening. Her killer had slashed her throat.[411][412][413]
November 1997	George Bromley	Liverpool	Bromley, a doorman and gangland enforcer aged 33, was shot dead in the kitchen of a friend's house in Liverpool on 18 November 1997. The friend, who claimed that he answered the door to the assailant and then ran into the garden when told to get back, was accused and found not guilty of luring the victim to the Valescourt Road property in order for a hitman to target him.[414][415]
November 1997	Shane Thompson	Nottingham	The 19-year-old gang member was chased through the streets of Radford and beaten to death outside a pub there on 30 November 1997 by people from another gang. Six men charged with his murder were all acquitted.[263]
December 1997	John Haselden	Whiston, Merseyside	Haselden, a 23-year-old car dealer, was found dying from a gunshot wound in his Ford Escort Cabriolet on 1 December 1997.[416] The vehicle was parked in the car park of Whiston Hospital's maternity unit, apparently having been driven there by someone else.[417]
December 1997	Jackie Chau Kwok Tam	Leeds	Jackie Chau Kwok Tam, 41, was shot in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant while three men were attempting to rob the premises on 9 December 1997, and died on 12 December at Leeds General Infirmary. The restaurant was in the city's district of Headingley.[418]
December 1997	Deborah Steel	Body not found	Although 37-year-old Steel disappeared in 1997, it was not until 2014 that the police changed the status of her case from that of missing person to presumed murder victim. By the end of that year, three men had been arrested on suspicion of her murder, but none of them was charged. In early 2015, the patio area of the pub Steel had run in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and the garden of her former home in the city were both dug up, but her body was not found. The police think she was murdered within a short time of catching a taxi from the pub to her house in the early hours of 28 December, and would like to have a "proper conversation" with the driver of that taxi.[419]
January 1998	Hannah Deterville	Perivale, London	The body of Deterville, a 15-year-old schoolgirl missing for three weeks, was discovered mutilated at Horsenden Woods on 24 January 1998. She had been stabbed 20 times in the face and the neck. No motive could be found.[420]
January 1998	Jimmy Harmon	Body not found	Harmon, a 30-year-old mechanic and doorman with connections to the east London criminal world, disappeared after leaving his girlfriend's home in Romford on 24 January 1998 following a call to his mobile phone. He told her before leaving that he was going to see a friend in Rainham, and his car was later found abandoned in Goodmayes.[421]
February 1998	Charlie Jones	Attacked in Northwich, Cheshire, died about 16 days later	42-year-old Jones died on 10 February from a blood clot triggered by a nighttime street attack he had suffered in his home town just over two weeks earlier.[422]
February 1998	John Bennett	Glasgow	Bennett, 26, was beaten and stabbed multiple times in an apparently "motiveless" killing on Glasgow's Royston Road on 28 February 1998. The attack occurred in broad daylight, in front of shoppers. Three men, including Glasgow gangster Ian McAteer, stood trial but were acquitted of murder.[423]
March 1998	Elsie Freeman	Impington, Cambridgeshire	76-year-old Freeman's trussed-up body was found on her bed at her home in Mill Road, Impington, near Cambridge, by a family member at around noon on 7 March 1998. She had been beaten and died from head injuries up to three days earlier, apparently in a burglary that had gone wrong.[424][425]
April 1998	Paul Cannon	Addlestone, Surrey	43-year-old Cannon died from a ruptured liver after being jumped on during a beating in the toilets of the Magpie pub in Addlestone on Friday 17 April 1998.[426] A man was acquitted of murder and manslaughter in August 1999. While in the witness box, he alleged that another man who was drinking at the pub that night was the real culprit and named him.[427]
April 1998	Donna Keogh	Body not found	The body of 17-year-old Keogh has never been found, but her disappearance from Middlesbrough is being investigated as a murder. She lived there with cousins and was last seen on 19 April 1998.[428] In 2015, Cleveland Police apologised to Keogh's family for how they had handled the investigation.[429] In 2018, a specialist police team was set up to revisit the killing, along with the murders of fellow Middlesbrough women Vicky Glass and Rachel Wilson.[430] In the summer of that year, police excavated a former allotment site near Troon Close in the town.[431]
April 1998	Janet Johnson	Manchester	Johnson was battered to death and her body left next to a tram line in Collyhurst in late April 1998. A man in his 20s was charged with the murder of the pregnant 27-year-old, but a court acquitted him.[432][433]
May 1998	Robin Wood	Northolt, London	Car dealer Wood, 47, was shot dead at his front door on Saturday 2 May 1998. He was at home with his partner and 10-year-old son on the Racecourse Estate in Northolt, West London when there was a knock on the door at around 10:40 p.m. His partner answered it to find a man calling himself Terry and asking to speak to Wood. As the victim approached the door, he was shot in the neck with a sawn-off shotgun. He bled to death at the scene. The perpetrator, described as wearing an unzipped dark-coloured anorak, having sharp facial features and being white, aged 25–35, 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m) in height and of slim build, was seen to run into Kempton Avenue. On the 15th anniversary of the murder, detectives offered a £20,000 reward for information leading to the prosecution of the person responsible.[434]
May 1998	Carmel Fenech	Body not found	16-year-old Fenech disappeared on 21 May 1998 and was never seen again. Her case is now being treated as murder. Fenech had drifted into drug use whilst living in London; at the time of her disappearance her home was in the Sussex town of Crawley but she had been paying regular visits to the Brixton and Stockwell areas of the capital. Fenech was last seen talking to a man at Camberwell Green Magistrates' Court, south London. The man was never traced.[435][436]
May 1998	Annie Davies	Erskine, Renfrewshire	When 84-year-old Davies was discovered dead at her Erskine home on 30 May 1998, police assumed she had died from a fall down the stairs. However, her purse, bag, keys and £2,000 were found to be missing.[437] In 2005, seven years after Davies's death, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel ruled that her death was "attributable to a crime of violence" and police reopened the investigation.[438]
June 1998	Daniel McFadden	Bolton, Lancashire	66-year-old McFadden was beaten at his home in Mere Gardens, Halliwell, before the flat was set on fire in the early hours of 18 June 1998. Police were unable to establish a motive for his murder.[439]
June/July 1998	Julie Jones	Manchester	32-year-old Jones was reported missing by her housemate on 27 June 1998 and found dead on 3 July under bushes on the site of the old Smithfield Market in Manchester city centre. She had suffered catastrophic injuries consistent with falling from a height or being hit by a car, and her clothing was missing. Jones had been a sex worker and detectives believed someone could have murdered her elsewhere before dumping her body.[440]
July 1998	Stephen Sweeney	Gateshead, Tyne and Wear	45-year-old Sweeney's partner and seven-year-old daughter discovered him shot dead on 8 July 1998 at his furniture upholstery factory on an industrial estate in Felling. He was later found to have belonged to a gang responsible for trafficking drugs between various countries and to have used his business to launder money made from the trafficking.[441]
July 1998	Julia Webb	Sandiway, near Northwich, Cheshire	Webb, 52, was battered with a blunt instrument while walking her dog near her home in Sandiway on 22 July 1998. A 43-year-old man was released without charge in March 2004 after being detained in relation to the offence.[442]
July 1998	Alfred Sandford	St Helens, Merseyside	72-year-old Sandford died from a cardiac arrest during a violent robbery at his home, Grove House Farm, Elton Head Road, Sutton Heath, on 24 July 1998. The armed gang left with a small amount of cash, and the two vehicles used in the robbery were later found burnt out at other locations in St Helens. Sandford's wife died six months later from what her family described as a broken heart.[443]
July 1998	Jean and Anthony Trigg	Clacton, Essex	The fire that killed 27-year-old Trigg and her five-year-old son had been started next to the front door of a house in Clacton in the early hours of 27 July. The two victims, along with Trigg's baby son Callum, had been staying there with members of another family while Trigg looked for a home of their own in the area, which she and her children had recently moved to from Bolton. Callum survived the blaze, as did the five other people at the residence. The same suspect was first arrested over the double murder in 1998 and for a second time in 2004.[444][445]
August 1998	Peter Hennessy	Finsbury, London	22-year-old Hennessy was stabbed in the abdomen during a fight outside the Duke of Wellington pub in Lever Street, Finsbury, on 30 August 1998 at approximately 11:00 p.m. He and his brother had gone back there after being asked to leave when an argument had broken out.[446]
September 1998	Charles Nelson	Liverpool	65-year-old Nelson was stabbed nine times in an alley in Kensington, Liverpool, just after midnight on 2 September 1998. Two women intervened and the attacker ran off. A friend of Nelson was placed on trial the following year. According to the prosecution, the defendant had killed Nelson because Nelson had taken the defendant's wallet in order to pay for the services of a sex worker. Nelson was thought to have been heard pleading with the defendant that night and a bloody footprint matching one of the defendant's boots was found at the scene, but the jury did not find him guilty.[447][448][449]
September 1998	Lee Harris	Epsom, Surrey	30-year-old Harris suffered a knife attack before being shot in the legs and abdomen after three men barged in through the back door of his house in Rutland Close, Epsom, late at night on 4 September 1998. His girlfriend ran out screaming and begged for an ambulance to be called. The masked killers were thought to have been hired hitmen, and may have left the scene in a white Vauxhall Astra. Harris was possibly targeted over drugs.[450][451][452]
September 1998	Rosemary Talbot	Surrey	53-year-old Talbot was strangled on 9 September 1998 and her body was discovered the following morning in a pond next to Bransland Wood. Her husband was tried but found not guilty.[453][454][68]
October 1998	Michael Baxendale	Sheffield	48-year-old Baxendale was stabbed to death and two doormen suffered non-fatal knife wounds early on Sunday, 11 October during a brawl outside Niche, a city centre nightclub managed by him and owned by his brother. A group of people thought to be from Manchester were evicted from the establishment in the hours preceding the incident, but it is unknown whether any of them were involved in it.[455]
October 1998	Lyn Bryant	Ruan High Lanes, Cornwall	40-year-old Bryant was murdered as she was walking her dog along a country lane at Ruan High Lanes, a hamlet on the Roseland Peninsula, on 20 October 1998. Her body was found that day at 2:30 p.m. She had been stabbed several times.[456] The offence is said to be connected to schoolgirl Kate Bushell's murder the previous year.[457]
November 1998	Denise Motley	Hitchin, Hertfordshire	43-year-old Motley was battered to death with a metal parking post on 9 November 1998 on the stairs leading to the basement of the furniture store she ran with her husband. The store was situated in a part of Hitchin where raids on shops by drug addicts had become common. Police charged Motley's husband after finding proof that he had been unfaithful to her, but the verdict at his trial was not guilty.[458][459]
November 1998	Saul "Solly" Nahome	Finchley, London	48-year-old Nahome was shot several times in the back at his home on Arden Road, Finchley. He collapsed and was shot again, this time in the head. The murder took place on 27 November and is believed to be linked to the disappearance earlier in 1998 of business associate Gilbert Wynter.[460]
December 1998	Grant "Granny" Byrom	Colchester, Essex	30-year-old Byrom received a fatal stab wound to the heart on Boxing Day 1998 during a brawl in Forest Road, Colchester. A suspect left the UK but returned in 2019 and was charged with murder after entering a police station to try to clear his name. He claimed at his trial in the summer of 2020 that he moved abroad because he did not want to go to jail for a crime he did not commit, and the jury acquitted him by a 10–2 majority.[461][462]
December 1998	Alan Morris	Chester	Morris, 44, had played for Chester City football club. He was fatally stabbed outside his home in Walker Street, Hoole, Chester, on 31 December 1998. Morris's partner stood trial for his death but was acquitted in December 1999. The pair had been seen arguing earlier that evening.[463]
January 1999	Mary Daulby	Liverpool	76-year-old Daulby died on 8 January 1999 as a result of complications from surgery to repair a hip that fractured when she fell over while being mugged in a subway in Liverpool on 19 October 1998. Her handbag was taken during the incident.[464][131]
January 1999	Gideon Tsagane	Kentish Town, London	Tsagane, a 30-year-old stagehand, was shot three times in the back and once in the head at a garage in Islip Street, Kentish Town, on 29 January 1999. He was due to give evidence days later against a man he claimed he saw fatally shoot Patrick Delaney in Queen's Crescent (also in Kentish Town) in July 1998.[465]
January 1999	Jay Abatan	Brighton, Sussex	Abatan, 42, an accountant from Eastbourne, died at the Royal Sussex County Hospital five days after being punched to the ground in an attack outside Brighton's Ocean Rooms nightclub that appeared to have been racially motivated.[466] Lack of evidence led to the case against two men accused of involvement in the attack being discontinued.[467] A later trial for assault, at which the jurors were not told that Abatan had died, resulted in the acquittals of the same two men, one of whom went on to kill himself in 2003.[468] Essex Police, called in to reinvestigate the case, found that many serious errors had been made during the original investigation, which led to some of the Sussex Police officers involved being disciplined.[467]
February 1999	Steven Brown	Tranent, East Lothian	The beaten and stabbed body of 35-year-old Brown was discovered in Tranent, a town a few miles from the eastern outskirts of Edinburgh, on 21 February 1999. It was thought that his injuries were inflicted the night before during a confrontation involving a large group of people in Kerr Road, close to where he was found dead.[469]
March 1999	Paul Booth	Southampton	The 31-year-old builder and diving enthusiast went to Southampton General Hospital on 5 February 1999 after being beaten by three men at a petrol station in Totton, but left without receiving treatment because of the length of time he would have had to wait for it. Though there was a crack in his skull caused by the attack and he was having frequent headaches and dizzy spells, Booth returned to work the following week but was found unconscious at his Southampton home on 16 February. He died of a brain haemorrhage in hospital on 3 March. Police thought Booth might have known his assailants or been a victim of road rage.[470][471]
March 1999	Mervyn Sills	Brixton, London	Sills was shot in Rushcroft Road, Brixton, on 6 March 1999. The shooting of the 36-year-old Jamaican took place in a busy street and was thought to have been part of a drug turf war in the capital. A warrant was issued in September 1999 for the arrest of a man who had been apprehended over Sills's death but failed to answer bail.[472][473][474]
March 1999	Kevin Palmer	Body not found	A businessman living in Spain, 37-year-old Palmer vanished on 12 March 1999 after getting out of a taxi during a visit to the UK, having argued with fellow passengers. In 2014, following a tip-off, police officers searched the grounds of an abandoned pub in Fareham, Hampshire in a bid to find his body. The case is being treated as murder.[475]
March 1999	Bruce Gapper	Body not found	40-year-old Gapper disappeared on 14 March 1999 after leaving his home on Groves Hall Road, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in an apparent hurry. In 2015, police announced that his disappearance was being treated as murder. Gapper had left a half-eaten sandwich and a nearly full drink in his house, and the next day his burnt-out car was found at the junction of Castle Hill Side and Lumb Lane in Huddersfield. His bank card was then used several times over the next three days in Heckmondwike, Scarisbrick and Morley.[476]
March 1999	Maria Wodianitzky	Attacked in Knightsbridge, London, died in hospital	A fellow passenger dragged the 49-year-old Swedish tourist off a bus whilst attempting to steal her handbag on 27 March 1999. The victim's head hit the kerb as she fell from the moving vehicle, and a member of the public chased after the culprit as he fled empty-handed.[477][474]
April 1999	Karl Morris	Attacked in Sudbury, died in hospital in Bury St Edmunds (both in Suffolk)	Morris, 23, was fatally attacked on 2 April 1999 (Good Friday) after trying to break up a fight that had started in a pub before spilling outside. A man police wanted to speak to about the killing is no longer being sought.[478]
April 1999	Elizabeth Chau	Body not found	Chau, a 19-year-old student from Vietnam, disappeared from Ealing Broadway on 16 April 1999, but some police officers believe her to have been killed by serial sex offender and suspected serial killer Andrzej Kunowski, who had murdered a 12-year-old girl nearby in 1997.[479] He was known to have been working in a dry-cleaning shop on Uxbridge Road on the day Chau was last seen walking past Ealing police station.[480] The year after she vanished another woman, 27-year-old Lola Shenkoya, disappeared from the same area, and Kunowski is also the prime suspect in her disappearance.[481]
April 1999	Jill Dando	Fulham, London	On the morning of 26 April 1999, 37-year-old Dando left the home of her fiancé Dr. Alan Farthing and returned to her house in Gowan Avenue, Fulham, west London. As she reached her front door at about 11:30 a.m., she was shot once in the head. Dando was discovered shortly afterwards by a friend, local resident Helen Doble, and taken to the nearby Charing Cross Hospital, where she was declared dead on arrival at 1:03 p.m.[482] After a huge amount of press coverage and a 13-month investigation, police arrested Barry George, a convicted sex offender, for Dando's murder. Sentenced to life imprisonment on 2 July 2001, George appealed against his conviction in November 2007 and was acquitted on 1 August 2008 following an eight-week hearing.[483]
May 1999	Katherine O'Brien	Runcorn, Cheshire	26-year-old O'Brien was murdered at her home at The Croft, Halton, Runcorn, on 3 May 1999. She died from head injuries. O'Brien's husband stood trial for her murder but was acquitted in May 2000.[484][485]
May 1999	Richard Smith	South Tottenham, London	Smith was a 35-year-old Tottenham man who was stabbed to death on 5 May 1999 in a flat on Albert Road, South Tottenham.[472][474]
May 1999	Mary Lazenby	Bethnal Green, London	Aged 80 and 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m) tall, Lazenby was kicked and stamped to death on 22 May 1999 at her flat in Rochester Court, Wilmott Street, Bethnal Green. Her killer was possibly a man claiming to be from the water company. Lazenby was disabled after she had lost a foot in a motorcycle accident. Once a successful restaurateur known as the "Curry Queen of South Shields", she eventually lost her business and settled in Bethnal Green with her son and grandchildren.[472][486]
June 1999	Jack Hughes	Liverpool	18-year-old Hughes was stabbed in the leg in the early hours of 5 June 1999 in Adrian's Way, Kirkby. He died at Liverpool's Fazakerley Hospital shortly afterwards.[487][131]
June 1999	Barrington Page	Edmonton, London	The 44-year-old minicab driver disappeared on 8 June 1999 and was found dead in the River Lea at Edmonton nine days later with his head and hands cut off. He worked as a DJ around Clapton and Stoke Newington and was friends with Ian Dowe, a world champion bodybuilder, who used to DJ with him and later said: "If I hadn't got out of it, I'd be dead or in jail too."[488][489][472]
June 1999	Michael Marples	Sheffield	Marples, 57, suffered injuries to his brain and skull during an assault in the car park of the Sheffield Trades & Labour Club on the night of 18/19 June 1999. A man was convicted of manslaughter in 2002 despite claiming to have discovered and tried to help the dying victim, but the conviction was overturned in 2006. The reason it was overturned, however, has been kept secret on the grounds that disclosing it would cause "serious damage to the public interest".[490]
June 1999	Maureen Hale	Body not found	Hale lived in Thames Ditton in Surrey and went missing aged 42. Her husband was tried for her murder in 2009. The prosecution argued that he strangled her to death in their house on 22 June 1999 because she wanted a divorce and he did not want to lose the house or his children, but his legal team said there was no scientific evidence against him, he had no defensive wounds and there were other people who potentially could be suspects. The jury found him not guilty.[491]
July 1999	Nathan Cawley	Windsor, Berkshire	21-year-old Cawley was shot in a nightclub in Windsor town centre on 4 July 1999. He was from Croydon in south London and the incident was thought to have been drug-related.[492]
July 1999	Patrick and Margaret Spencer	Leeds	Patrick Spencer, 85, and his wife Margaret, 77, both died after their home in Sandiford Terrace, Manston, was deliberately set alight on 21 July 1999. Though they were rescued, Margaret died a short while later from smoke inhalation and Patrick died from the effects of the fire two months later.[493]
July 1999	Hok Wan Leung	Colchester, Essex	On 25 July 1999, the 34-year-old chef from Watford in Hertfordshire was attacked at Middleborough roundabout in Colchester by a gang armed with machetes, allegedly to punish him for breaking away from a Triad group and starting up his own business. All seven of the people tried over his murder were acquitted.[494]
July 1999	Patrick Logan	Manchester	40-year-old Logan heard intruders downstairs while he and his fiancée were in bed in their house in Withington, Manchester, on 28 July 1999. He was on the phone to the emergency services to report the break-in when one of the two intruders – a man in a mask – entered the bedroom and fired five shots, two of which hit him. Logan had been acquitted of a non-fatal shooting in 1997, and it was a line of enquiry that his murder was a revenge attack.[495]
July 1999	Martin Bennett	Manchester	Gang member Bennett was taken to hospital and died on 31 July 1999 after being shot in Moss Side. The shooting followed a quarrel the 25-year-old had got into outside a newsagent's shop.[496]
August 1999	Dorrie McKie	Manchester	20-year-old McKie was chased by three bandanna-wearing youths on bicycles and shot dead in Hulme, an inner city area of Manchester, on 3 August 1999. Nobody has been convicted of the killing, but two men did go to prison for possessing the murder weapon.[497]
August 1999	Antony Cook	Manchester	24-year-old Cook was a passenger in a car which crashed on 15 August 1999 after being chased by another vehicle. A gunman from the pursuing car then shot him dead and wounded his driver. Reports suggested it was a gangland killing.[498]
August 1999	Austin O'Reilly	Cardiff	Two people were tried for the murder of 55-year-old O'Reilly but acquitted. He had died in hospital on 21 August 1999 after a street assault on Clare Road in Grangetown three days earlier.[499][500]
August 1999	David Scott	London	Scott, 30, was stabbed in a Tottenham underpass and died at North Middlesex Hospital in neighbouring Edmonton on 24 August 1999. A man was arrested for the murder in December 2011 and later charged, but the case was dropped before it went to trial on the basis of scientific evidence which supported his innocence.[501][502]
September 1999	Martin Joyce	Body not found	29-year-old Joyce went missing after giving his sister a lift and having a night out in Manchester's Ancoats district on 5 September 1999. Police reclassified him as a murder victim in 2016 and conducted an unsuccessful search for his body at a former pub in that district.[503]
September 1999	Michael Smith	Canterbury, Kent	41-year-old Smith, a taxi controller convicted of dealing cocaine, was shot dead at Lynx Taxis, Gordon Road, Canterbury, on 15 September 1999.[504][34]
September 1999	Vicky Hall	Creeting St Peter, Suffolk	17-year-old Hall went missing at about 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, 19 September 1999 as she walked towards her home in Faulkeners Way, Trimley St Mary, Suffolk.[505] Her body was found on Friday, 24 September in a ditch about 25 miles away. She had been strangled.[506] A man was cleared of murder in November 2001.[507] Hall's case has since been linked to Suffolk serial killer Steve Wright, who lived in the area at the time.[508] The case was reopened on the 20th anniversary of her death and police said that witnesses had given them new information.[509] In December 2019, police released CCTV footage of people visiting the field where Hall's body was found and appealed for those people to come forward.[510] In May 2024, police announced that Wright had been charged with her murder.[511] His trial is due to start in February 2026.[512]
September 1999	David Barnshaw	Stockport, Greater Manchester	The 32-year-old drug dealer died in a burning car on 20 September 1999 after being abducted and forced to drink petrol. Arran Coghlan – previously cleared of the murder of Chris Little – was prosecuted but cleared after it emerged that the police had withheld information concerning a possible alternative suspect. Coghlan went on to be charged with and cleared of a third count of murder and conspiracy to supply cocaine.[240]
September 1999	Steven Devaney	London	34-year-old Devaney was fatally stabbed sometime between 24 and 26 September 1999 in a park near his Camden home.[472][474]
September 1999	Junior Collins	Kennington, London	Collins, a 40-year-old on a visit from Jamaica, was killed on 29 September 1999 when a bullet that had gone through the front door of a Rastafarian temple hit him in the back and entered his heart. A 23-year-old man from Sydenham who had been evicted from the temple for dealing drugs prior to Collins's death was found not guilty of his murder but guilty of unlawful possession of a gun with intent to endanger life, as was one of his brothers. Two bursts of gunshots had been heard – one said to have been fired at the temple from the group of four the brothers belonged to, the other said to have been return fire from its front garden.[513][514]
October 1999	John Nisbet and William Lindsay	Near Elphinstone, East Lothian	The bodies of drug dealer Nisbet, 25, of Craigneuk, and his friend Lindsay, 26, of Motherwell, were found on a hilltop near Elphinstone on 13 October 1999. They had been tortured and shot dead in Lanarkshire, with their bodies then dumped and set on fire 40 miles away. It was said to have been the result of a drug war. At least five people were taken in for questioning.[515][516]
October 1999	Kevin Hector	London	27-year-old Hector, of Willesden, died in hospital on 22 October 1999 after being shot four times in a parked car in the Golders Green area. A second person in the car was wounded. Hector had told people shortly before the shooting that he and the other person were being followed.[517][474]
October 1999	Vincent Shaw	London	29-year-old Shaw was stabbed in his Downham flat on 23 October 1999 by one of a group of people wearing balaclavas, and died in hospital in Lewisham less than an hour later. They had forced their way into the flat at around 8:00 p.m.[518]
October 1999	Judah Dewar	Manchester	The 35-year-old courier was about to get into his car in Longsight when he was shot dead on 28 October. He was not involved with any gangs and a line of enquiry was that it might have been his dark blue BMW that drew the attention of a criminal or criminals.[519]
November 1999	Alan Rosser	Attacked in Blackpool, died in hospital in Preston (both in Lancashire)	Rosser suffered an attempted kidnap in March 1999, but no link was found between that and the fatal shooting of the 34-year-old at his car repair workshop on 12 November. Police explored the theory that he was involved in drug trafficking.[520]
December 1999	Tommy Hole and Joey Evans	Canning Town, London	57-year-old Hole and 55-year-old Evans were shot by two masked men while watching a football match in the Beckton Arms pub in Canning Town on 5 December 1999. Hole, who had recently been released from prison for armed robbery, had been charged years previously with the June 1982 murder of Nicky Gerard, but it is not known whether that incident had anything to do with the one at the Beckton Arms. Legal action against Hole over Gerard's death had ceased because a key prosecution witness had acknowledged his inability to positively identify Hole as having been at the crime scene.[521][522]
December 1999	Simon Brown	Manchester	A Christmas party at a community centre in Cheetham Hill had just ended when 27-year-old Brown was shot as he left the building at about 5:45 a.m. on Boxing Day. Detectives examined the possibility of a grudge killing.[496]
December 1999	Babatunde Oba	London	Oba, 23, died at Ealing Hospital in Southall on 30 December 1999 after being stabbed when he intervened in an argument between two people in an Ealing nightclub the night before. In December 2000, four men, one of them a professional footballer, were jailed for life for his murder, but their convictions were quashed in 2004.[523][524]

See also

• List of people who disappeared mysteriously
• Chris Clark, British author who writes and produces documentaries about unsolved crimes
• David Smith, convicted killer suspected of being responsible for unsolved murders