Mystery: Elsie Frost was just 14-years-old when she was murdered

Even half a century on, Elsie Frost’s family is haunted by memories of the day she was murdered. Again and again their minds are drawn back to thoughts of the pretty 14-year-old as she was on October 9, 1965.

One minute she was walking happily alongside a canal towpath in her bright red jacket, floral skirt and new shoes. The next, school prefect Elsie was crawling in the mud, bleeding from stab wounds to her back and head.

The horrific events that Saturday afternoon in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, left scars on the close-knit community: Elsie’s parents, railway worker Arthur and his wife Edith, died without seeing anyone brought to justice for their youngest daughter’s murder, an innocent man had his reputation destroyed while neighbours and friends were left doubting each other for decades.

Now, curiously, a decision has been taken by someone, somewhere deep in the British justice system, to seal until 2060 the case files relating to Elsie’s murder which are at the National Archives in Kew.

Today, Elsie’s siblings, 67-year-old Anne, who was 18 at the time of the murder, and 56-year-old Colin, who was six, are faced with nearly 100 years of official silence and secrecy, a time span which reaches far beyond their lifetimes. Anne and Colin wonder why the Ministry of Justice is so keen to keep the truth hidden.

Colin, who still lives in Wakefield, says: ‘We are totally in the dark. We are missing key information.’ Anne, who lives on the Isle of Mull, adds: ‘We’re just trying to find out why it happened.’

This week the Mail returned to Wakefield to speak to those who still recall this baffling crime, including the family of the only man ever charged with her murder, and to look at what possible reason there could be for keeping the Elsie Frost murder case under wraps.

In the 1960s the area of Lupset on the south side of Wakefield where Elsie lived was a peaceful suburban haven filled with post-war housing estates. While the newly-built M1 cut across the nearby countryside, children roamed the banks of the River Calder and ventured out to swim in the water-filled gravel pits.

At one pit, known as Millfield Lagoon, youngsters were also able to learn to sail. On the day of her death, October 9, 1965, Elsie Frost had gone to watch her friends do just that.

According to one version of events, she chose a different route home to her friends along the towpath to avoid getting her new shoes muddy. Had she not been alone her killer might never have had the opportunity to strike from behind as she entered a 30ft tunnel beneath a railway embankment.

A post mortem examination found she had been stabbed five times — twice in the back, twice in the head, once through the hand as she tried to shield herself — with the fatal blow piercing her heart.

Elsie's body was found at the foot of these railway service steps, known locally as the ABC Steps, after being stabbed in the tunnel

The teenager was walking home along the towpath of the Calder and Hebble canal

Despite her terrible injuries, Elsie managed to stumble through the tunnel to the bottom of what locals called the ‘ABC Steps’; a steep flight of 26 steps up to the main road.

Today the crumbling steps are overgrown with brambles and nettles but Dorothy Brown vividly remembers the day that her late husband Thomas found Elsie dying at the bottom of them.

Mr Brown, who had taken his three-year-old daughter Beverley, five-year-old son Martin and their dog Pip for a walk, saw Elsie face down and assumed she had fallen down the stairs.

‘He left the children at the top and ran down,’ says 81-year-old Mrs Brown. ‘She was on her front so he picked her up and moved her to the grassy bank. He thought she was still alive.’

Within minutes, others appeared on the scene and waited with Elsie’s body while Mr Brown ran to call for an ambulance and the police.

Her crumpled body was found on a canal towpath

They included lock-keeper Ralph Brewster and John Blackburn, one of the sailing instructors from the lagoon. There was also a 19-year-old who had been taking photographs of the river (his camera was later examined but police found nothing useful on it).

Back at Elsie’s home — in Manor Haigh Road — her parents Edith and Arthur, were about to receive a visit from the police which would turn their lives upside down and, according to their family, irreparably break their hearts.

By all accounts, Elsie Frost was a happy, fun-loving teenager, the middle of three children, growing up in a close, loving family.

Her father worked on the railways as a ‘plate layer’, maintaining the tracks. At weekends he took his children out in his motorbike and sidecar for picnics in the countryside. The family spent holidays in a caravan on the east coast each year. Dark-haired Elsie was a prefect at Snapethorpe High School in Wakefield and was tipped as a future head girl. She had dreams of becoming a teacher. She was bright and pretty, a young girl on the brink of womanhood and she had no known boyfriends. Why would anyone want to kill such a lovely young girl?

A clear motive was never established by police. The pathologist who examined Elsie’s body said she had not been sexually assaulted and was still a virgin. Her cause of death was given as ‘shock and haemorrhage due to multiple stab wounds’.

And yet, the terrible force of the knife blows she received suggested an attack that was more than just random, committed by someone filled with anger and hatred. It was deemed not to have been a random attack but, perhaps, one that was deeply personal.

The hunt for the killer made national news for weeks. West Yorkshire police combed the area for clues and divers searched the river and lagoons for the murder weapon. Scotland Yard detectives joined the investigation.

Elsie Frost had been stabbed five times by her killer

The murder gripped the nation and in Wakefield it cast a veil of fear and suspicion across the close-knit community as police officers went from door to door interviewing every man living in the area. About 12,000 men were questioned by police, among them David Hinchliffe, Wakefield’s Labour MP between 1987 and 2005, who was 16 at the time.

‘The police came to my house,’ he says, ‘they came to my friends’ houses. We were asked where we were on the day in question. I was watching Wakefield Trinity Rugby League team play at their Belle Vue Ground. There were six or seven thousand people there and I was with friends so I had an alibi.

‘I had to produce a sheath knife. It sounds strange now but most boys at that time would carry a sheath knife. You carved wood with it. You used it for making spears and as part of play.

‘They did a lot of questioning of people in our area. A lot of work was put into talking to people about where they were when this murder occurred.’

Not surprisingly, members of Elsie’s close family were also brought in for questioning, including her father, who had worked a night shift and been asleep at home at the time she was murdered. Also questioned was her then 22-year-old brother-in-law Michael Measures, Anne’s husband. They have since divorced and both remarried.

‘We were put under a lot of pressure,’ 71-year-old Michael recalled this week. ‘Where were we at what times, when we had last seen Elsie.

‘It wasn’t just that they asked you once. They would come back a week later and ask you all over again but with a slightly different phraseology to try to catch you out. They interviewed everyone. Before the questioning, everyone was pointing fingers at each other. ‘My wife trusted me. I think she accepted the fact that I was going to be questioned because everyone was. The police had a job to do.’

While the police investigation rumbled on, an inquest was opened and adjourned by the Leeds and Wakefield coroner Philip Gill but amid the vast amounts of evidence given over those few weeks in January 1966, Mr Gill decided that the testimony of one man did not fit in.

That man, who we have chosen not to name, was a 33-year-old railway worker who lived near Elsie. He was requestioned about his whereabouts.

The murder was said to have taken place between 4.20pm and 4.30pm. The suspect told police that he was at home by 3.30pm but several witnesses insisted they had seen him outside, near his home, at around the time of the murder.

Employing rarely used coroner’s powers which have since been abolished, Mr Gill then took the astonishing step of giving a verdict naming the man as Elsie’s killer.

He immediately followed that by issuing a coroner’s warrant for his arrest and committed the married father-of-one to Leeds Prison to await trial.

It was a vicious attack filled with anger and hate

After spending six months in prison, however, he was discharged by Wakefield magistrates who decided that there was no evidence against him.

Faced with such a damning conclusion from the inquest while being completely exonerated by magistrates, the man, who is now 82 and suffering from dementia, never shook off the shadow of suspicion that hung over him.

His family told the Mail this week that his arrest caused untold heartache to the family. His son said: ‘This has followed him all his life and we want him to be left alone. I understand that Elsie’s family want closure but we do not want his name dragged up every time.’

Another relative added: ‘He is not a murderer. He was never convicted of anything. He is one of the softest, kindest people I know but he has had to live with this most of his life.

‘It is not fair. He is an old man and deserves to have his last years in peace. Our family deserves to put it behind us as he never did anything and was cleared.’

So how on earth did the police inquiry into Elsie’s murder go so badly wrong and why is there such a veil of secrecy about it?

A spokesman for The National Archives said this week that after a Freedom of Information request earlier this year, the Metropolitan Police, in consultation with Freedom of Information experts at The National Archives, decided to close the file until 2060 ‘because it contains information deemed sensitive under various FoI exemptions’.

Internet speculation suggests that the murder of Elsie, left, was an early crime of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe was just 19-years-old and lived 25 miles away.

Exactly what this means is anyone’s guess, and in the absence of a clear explanation, theories abound. There has even been speculation on internet forums that Elsie’s murder was an early crime of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who killed 13 women and attempted to kill seven others in the 1970s, and who lived 25 miles away in Bingley.

Sutcliffe was only 19 in 1965 but he had a criminal conviction that year for breaking into cars. It is also worth noting that one of his victims who survived was only 14 when she was attacked in a country lane.

So why did the police never find Elsie’s killer? Given how many people were in the area at the time she died, it seems astonishing that the trail went cold so quickly.

There was a trail of blood leading from the place where Elsie was stabbed to the bottom of the ABC Steps. There were other clues: a tan-coloured 12in leather knife-sheath with a stag’s head motif which had been tossed over a wall near the murder scene, reports of a bearded hitchhiker seen by several people in a road nearby and the well-dressed driver of an Austin Cambridge parked near the scene who was never traced.

And then came the bizarre decision by the coroner Philip Gill to name the man he believed to be Elsie’s killer; a move which forced the police to arrest him before they had had sufficient time to complete their investigations.

A teenage Peter Sutcliffe lived in the area

It is perhaps worth noting that Mr Gill, who died in 2006, had only just taken over as Leeds and Wakefield Coroner from his father, who died in April 1966. Was he, while presiding over a case that was making headlines each day, trying to make a name for himself? Certainly, the law was subsequently changed by the Criminal Law Act 1977 and coroners are no longer able to name suspects or commit witnesses to trial.

Whether or not the answers to these questions lie in the police files in The National Archives is a mystery. This week, West Yorkshire police said that a full review of the case was conducted in 2013. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fountain said: ‘No new evidence was detected on which to base a reinvestigation.

‘A man was remanded in custody for the offence in 1966 but was not convicted at court. As with any unsolved murder, the case remains open and any new evidence which comes to light will be investigated.’

None of this will offer any comfort to Anne and Colin, the only family members left to fight for justice for Elsie. Their parents, they say, died weighed down by guilt that Elsie’s killer was never found.

Colin said: ‘We don’t want to have that same kind of scenario for us. When we die we want to know that we have done as much as we can.’