Gripped by our true-crime series? We began on Saturday with the 80 best TV shows and podcasts in Weekend magazine, and this week we’ve continued with super sleuths, crimes of passion and serial killers in these compelling four-page specials. Tomorrow, we’ll look at possible miscarriages of justice, but today Christopher Stevens explores unsolved murders — where the killer got away with it.

On the surface, there was nothing to connect the two murders. One victim lived a wild, glamorous life and was found dead in her East London bedroom, her throat slit by an unknown lover.

The other was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, raped and bludgeoned as she walked home from a night out with friends in the west of the capital six months later.

But almost 30 years later DNA evidence proved the same attacker killed both Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon in 1975 — prompting detectives to ask how many more young women might have been murdered by this mystery assailant.

It’s hard to imagine how the victims could have been more different. Eve was a nude model and Bunny Girl at the Playboy Club in Mayfair, who lived with her pop singer boyfriend but had a string of lovers, male and female.

Despite her lurid love life she was ‘the sweetest girl and had an almost innocent quality about her,’ said her friend Barbara Haigh, a fellow ‘bunny’ at the club. ‘She was desperate to be a model but she wasn’t very worldly.’

Glamour: Eve (right) with Eric Morecambe at a Variety Club charity ball in 1975. Eve was said to be very proud of her picture with the comedian

The bunnies waited on tables at the Playboy, dressed in velvet bodices with bow ties and floppy rabbit-ear headgear. And they posed with clients, many of them celebrities. Eve was proud of the photographs of her on the arms of comedians Eric Morecambe and Sid James, and in an adoring crowd of girls around boxing champion John Conteh, all taken at the club. She sent the pictures home to her parents in Warrington, Cheshire, the town she left as a teenager in the early 1970s to seek her fortune in London as a glamour model.

But she angered the management of the club when, frustrated that she had not been picked to pose naked in Playboy magazine, she appeared in the rival Mayfair magazine instead.

Her boss, Victor Aubrey Lownes III, who had a reputation for dating the bunnies and once regarded Eve as a favourite, was furious. Suspended from work, Eve spent her days at the maisonette in a suburban house on Lyndhurst Drive, Leyton, that she shared with boyfriend Tony Priest and two other members of his rock band, The Onyx — a former support act for Queen and Thin Lizzy, though by now they were on the slide.

Priest was working as a forklift driver in the day. He came home on March 18, 1975, to discover Eve’s mutilated body on a mattress beside their bed. She was wearing a dressing-gown, bra and pants and her wrists were tied behind her back with a scarf. One nylon stocking hung from her right ankle. There was one obvious clue. Next to the body, spattered with blood and still wrapped in cellophane, lay a cheap bunch of flowers, mostly dried grass and leaves.

With no sign of a struggle, and the fact that the killer had brought a bouquet, detectives suggested that Eve knew her attacker and was probably having an affair with him — a theory strengthened by the likelihood she had stripped to her underwear to wait for him.

Victim: Teenager Lynne Weedon, whose murder was linked to that of Eve Stratford. She was bludgeoned as she walked home after an early evening disco at a pub

Enquiries showed that the flowers had not been purchased locally. Suspicion fell on Eve’s clients at the Playboy Club, and the Daily Mail reported that detectives had quizzed two ‘well-known showbiz personalities’. Their names were never released. Interviews were also done with other club regulars, including Arab businessmen: in the mid-1970s oil money flowed ostentatiously in London. One suspect was a Libyan pimp and underworld ‘fixer’, an associate of Lownes named Abdul Khawaji.

Some of the other girls said he was close to Eve and called her his ‘girlfriend’. For years police regarded him as a possible killer. But after he died in 2009, his family provided a DNA sample that cleared him: it didn’t match evidence from the crime scene.Public sympathy for Eve was in short supply in the 1970s. Many thought she had ‘got what she deserved’ for having a colourful sex life. A few expressed their contempt, and her grave in Warrington was repeatedly vandalised. Cranks bombarded her parents’ house with obscene phone calls. Three years after the murder, her mother suffered a breakdown.

The murder of 15-year-old Lynne Weedon in September 1975 could hardly have seemed more different. She was bludgeoned as she walked home after an early evening disco at a pub: the Daily Mail’s front page headline read ‘The Girl Next-Door Is Dead’.

Beaten unconscious and with a fractured skull, her body was dumped over the fence of an electricity substation, just a few minutes walk from her home in Hounslow.

The killer raped her and left her dying. When a school caretaker discovered her the next morning, she was rushed to West Middlesex Hospital but she tragically died a week later. The murder weapon has never been found.

Despite exhaustive enquiries, police never found a substantial lead. Even the discovery 29 years later that Lynne’s murder was linked to that of Eve Stratford could not lead to a breakthrough

Lynne’s father described her as a model daughter, the kind of girl who never stayed out late. She had finished school weeks earlier, with six O-levels and two grade one CSEs, and was about to start a polytechnic course, studying to be a secretary speaking French and German.

At her funeral in Hounslow’s Holy Trinity church, vicar John Barter turned the eulogy into an attack on modern culture. ‘It is right that we should be shocked and horrified,’ he said, ‘because it is only then that we stop and think and see that in our society we have allowed sex and violence to dominate our television, our papers, our cinema and our stage. We have allowed our society to steadily descend into moral depravity.’

After suspecting at first that Lynne was murdered by another teenager, perhaps a boy who had seen her that night and followed her, police altered their theory: the victim was attacked while taking a short-cut home down an unlit path, and it seemed probable her killer had been lying in wait, perhaps for hours.

Despite exhaustive enquiries, police never found a substantial lead. Even the discovery 29 years later that Lynne’s murder was linked to that of Eve Stratford could not lead to a breakthrough.

In 2015, the investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Noel McHugh appealed to anyone who thought an older family member might be hiding a terrible secret.

‘The man who carried out these murders is now of a different, older generation,’ he pleaded. ‘I would imagine he must have reflected on his actions every day over the past 40 years. It is a heavy burden to carry and he must have let details slip over the years — maybe to a partner, a friend, even a cellmate.’

DCI McHugh asked anyone with information to come forward. Lynne’s mother Margaret made a poignant plea of her own. She said: ‘It has been 40 years since our beautiful young daughter Lynne was violently taken from us. 1975 seems so long ago and it is. Forty years without her. We have missed out on so much. She missed out on life, no relationship or marriage, no career or children, or even just travelling the world — all taken from her.

‘We are left 40 years on always wondering what it would have been like — a true life sentence.’

Did he die or move abroad? The murder four years after that of Eve Stratford, of pregnant mother-of-two Lynda Farrow, had such strong similarities that some detectives are convinced to this day they must be connected. The 29-year-old croupier had recently left her husband and taken her children to live with a boyfriend when an intruder broke in and stabbed her repeatedly. The horrific scene was discovered by her daughters, 11 and eight, when they came home from school and, unable to get in, peered through the letterbox. Horror: Croupier Lynda Farrow had left her husband and taken her kids to live with her boyfriend Police were convinced Lynda knew her killer, as there was no sign of forced entry at the house in Woodford Green, East London. Both her husband and her boyfriend were quickly eliminated from enquiries, and the hunt centred on witness descriptions of a well-built man in his 30s with an Afro hairstyle, wearing a donkey jacket, who was seen running from the scene. DCI Colin Sutton, the detective who led the investigation that sent serial killer Levi Bellfield to prison, led a review of the evidence in 2002. ‘It has tantalised and burned in me ever since,’ he said in 2015. ‘With Eve Stratford all the evidence was available, which enabled us to send items away for modern scientific analysis. In Lynda’s case it was the reverse. This was particularly disappointing, as the physical evidence in Lynda’s murder has never been checked for DNA, cutting off an important detection route. ‘The fact that the Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon DNA profile remains unmatched tells us their killer has not been arrested in the past 20 years. I have no doubt the same man committed all three murders. Did he die, or move abroad? My gut feeling tells me he is still out there somewhere and still nervous about a knock on his door.’ Advertisement

He killed several women but was never caught. Then, a survivor was shown a picture to freeze her blood...

Chilling photofit of the one that got away

The cigarette machine at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow was broken. A woman in a black, woollen dress stood and cursed it. ‘This thing’s taken my money,’ she told a young man who strolled over to help.

He offered her his pack. They chatted and smoked together, and started dancing. She told him her name was Helen Puttock, and she was here with her sister, Jean Langford.

Perhaps she didn’t add that she was 29 and married with two children. It was just after midnight on the morning of Friday, October 31, 1969.

The young man told her his name was John, and that he didn’t drink. He had been brought up by strict Presbyterian parents and had always been teetotal. He could quote passages from The Bible, he said with pride. He was stylishly dressed, good-looking and a confident dancer.

Jean had met a man, too. The four of them shared a taxi home, and the women teased John, asking him to recite some scripture. He did, quoting from the Book of Moses. His mood darkened, and he condemned the Barrowland as ‘an adulterous den of iniquity’.

Eerie: The composite image of Bible John who killed Helen Puttock and dumped her body in the back courtyard of a tenement in Earl Street, Scotstoun

The taxi dropped off Jean and her admirer. She never saw her sister alive again. Next morning, Helen’s body was discovered in the back courtyard of a tenement in Earl Street, Scotstoun, by a woman taking out the rubbish.

Helen’s partly naked corpse lay face down. Her knee-length ocelot fur coat was still wrapped over her shoulders, but her underwear had been pulled off. A pathologist’s examination confirmed that she had been beaten and raped, then strangled with her own tights. There was a deep bite mark on her thigh, made by a jaw with overlapping teeth. The killer took her handbag but left one clue, a cufflink.

After police circulated a description of the suspect, the conductor of a night bus contacted the station. He had picked up a passenger with a dirty jacket and a sore bruise on his face and dropped him near the ferry that crosses the river Clyde. The man kept tucking one loose shirt cuff into his jacket sleeve.

Jean was able to give detectives a detailed description of the man and helped police artists create a lifelike portrait, a combination of photofit segments and hand-drawing — the first time such a portrait had been used in a Scottish murder inquiry. A headline writer with a flair for the dramatic dubbed the killer Bible John.

Police were convinced this was the latest in a series of killings. Almost two years earlier, in February 1968, a woman’s naked body was discovered, dumped beside a lock-up garage in south Glasgow. She had been strangled with a ligature. She was identified as Patricia Docker, a 25-year-old with a husband in the Army and a four-year-old son. The night she died, she had been at the Barrowland.

Helen Puttock (pictured) was one of the victims of serial killer Bible Johnwho terrorised Glasgow but was never caught

Eighteen months later, in August 1969, a group of children came running from a derelict tenement in MacKeith Street, Bridgeton, shouting that they had found a body. A woman named Margaret O’Brien heard them and her blood ran cold: she had been searching all morning for her sister Mima, 32, who hadn’t been seen since leaving the Barrowland the previous night.

Margaret found her sister’s body on the ground floor, battered and strangled. The corpse was fully clothed and, at first, police did not connect the two killings. All that changed with the murder of Helen Puttock three months later. Despite extensive newspaper coverage, police were unable to identify a suspect. They carried out 300 identity parades, and Jean doggedly attended every one, without ever seeing the face she was looking for.

In charge of the investigation, Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie told the Press: ‘I am positive this man comes from Glasgow or nearby. He is aged between 25 and 30, between 5 ft 10 in and 6 ft tall, has light-red hair, good features, blue-grey eyes and a smart, modern appearance. I do not think he is a religious man but just has a normal, intelligent working knowledge of The Bible that he likes to air.’

One man, John White, seemed a likely suspect after he was arrested at the Barrowland, where he had been arguing with a woman. He was taken to hospital and quizzed, but detectives dismissed him at first: his teeth did not overlap. When they returned to question him again, he had discharged himself and vanished. ‘John White’ soon turned out to be a false name.

Helen’s tights were analysed again in the mid-1990s, and a partial DNA match linked the crime to a former squaddie, John Irvine McInnes, who had been raised in a strict religious family.

Scottish-born rapist Peter Tobin (pictured) was convicted in 2007 for the murder of two teenage girls whose skeletons were found in the garden of his old home in Kent. His picture was shown to an escapee of Bible John who alleged Tobin and John were the same person

But McInnes killed himself, aged 41, in 1980. Police applied to exhume the body and test the remains but the DNA was too damaged to establish a link. The investigation took a dramatic twist in 2007 with the conviction of Scottish-born rapist Peter Tobin for the murder of two teenage girls, whose skeletons were found in the garden of his former home in Margate, Kent.

Tobin killed a third woman, a Polish church volunteer, and hid her body under the floor of a Roman Catholic church in Glasgow. He was given a ‘whole life order’ by the court, and remains in prison. During his police interrogation, he taunted officers to ‘waste your money’ looking for the remains of other victims. The case intrigued private eye Mark Williams-Thomas, who suspected Tobin of killing two women in Brighton a decade earlier. This link led him to consider Tobin as a possible match for Bible John.

Detectives were following the same line of inquiry. Tobin’s pattern of violence fitted the crimes. His three ex-wives all reported he had beaten, throttled and raped them. Crucially, his face bore a strong likeness to the composite photofit of Bible John from 1969, when Tobin would have been 23.

The picture was shown in 2010 to Mancunian Julia Taylor, who was 20 years old at the end of the 1960s. She vividly remembered a terrifying encounter with a ‘weird man’ who pestered her to dance at the Barrowland. ‘When I saw that picture I was so shaken up,’ she said. ‘It was the man who came up to me so many years ago. I am 100 per cent certain that Tobin is Bible John.’

Man from Pru who beat the NOOSE

Insurance salesman’s conviction was overturned. But if he didn’t kill his wife with a poker, who did?

By the light of a flickering match, William Wallace stared at the body of his wife, Julia, as it lay face down on the carpet in the front room of their terrace house in Liverpool. The wounds to her head were horrific. Wallace did not stoop to test for a pulse — he knew it was impossible for anyone to survive such injuries.

Wallace dropped his match and struck another, this time to light a cigarette. Then he walked to the back door and called to a neighbour for help. ‘Come and see!’ he cried out. ‘She has been killed. They’ve finished her.’

The murder on January 20, 1931, caused a national furore. Wallace was arrested and subsequently found guilty of murdering his wife — and then sensationally acquitted by the Court of Appeal.

In the intervening 80-plus years, no one, not the Liverpool police, nor the many journalists and investigators who have looked at the evidence, has been able to prove whodunnit.

The Wallaces, a childless couple, were poor but respectable. He was 52, an educated man fallen on hard times, and a familiar face in the city as a life insurance agent who went door-to-door collecting premiums for Prudential Assurance — the proverbial ‘Man from the Pru’.

William Wallace (pictured) was arrested in 1931 and subsequently found guilty of murdering his wife — and then sensationally acquitted by the Court of Appeal when he was faced with the death penalty

His wife was 17 years his senior, an anxious creature in frail health. Like many others who had known real poverty, her idea of an insurance policy was the £1 note which she kept sewn into her underclothes.

Her husband’s trial — with a courtroom packed with gawking members of the public — saw jurors take just 60 minutes to find him guilty of murder.

But with Wallace facing the death sentence, the case went to the Court of Appeal, which overturned his conviction because it could not be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that he killed her. It was the first time the courts had ever seen such a reversal.

The case turned on Wallace’s alibi. He claimed that at the time his wife was killed, he was elsewhere, tramping the streets of Liverpool in the middle-class Woolton district, five miles from his Anfield home.

A telephone message, received a day earlier at the club where he played chess, had sent him on a wild goose chase to 25 Menlove Gardens East, Woolton — an address he discovered didn’t exist — to collect an insurance premium. When he returned home, he found his front door bolted. Having let himself in through the back door, he found his wife lying in a pool of blood. Rigor mortis had already set in.

Julia Wallace was found lying in a pool of her blood by her husband who had come home to find their front door was bolted

In court, Wallace pleaded not guilty and named a local petty crook and former Prudential employee, 22-year-old Richard Parry, as a likely suspect. Parry bore Wallace an intense grudge because he had reported him for dipping into the till and Parry had lost his job. Wallace always claimed Parry had lured him away from the house to burgle it. His wife knew the younger man, and would have invited him in. Wallace claimed he killed her, took £4 from a tin in the kitchen and fled. Parry was interviewed by police but there was never enough evidence to convict him.

Why Wallace would want to kill his wife, no one could ever say with certainty. If they had rows, their neighbours were not aware of it — and despite his profession, her life was not heavily insured. Nonetheless, police claimed that when Wallace returned from work that day, he stripped to his underwear to save his clothes from any bloodstains and donned his Mackintosh, before picking up a poker. His wife was in the front room, setting up for one of their musical evenings where she would play piano while her husband accompanied her on the violin. He crept up and struck a vicious blow that killed her instantly. He then delivered ten heavy strokes before removing his coat, folding it and placing it under her head.

In court, Wallace’s defence counsel mocked the idea that his client had committed the killing dressed only in a raincoat while his wife prepared for a recital: ‘Was it your habit to play the violin naked in a Mackintosh?’ he enquired.

The trial saw a telling exchange between the pathologist, Professor J.E. Whitley MacFall, and Wallace’s defence barrister who argued: ‘If this is the work of a maniac, and Wallace is a sane man, he did not do it.’

‘He may be sane now,’ MacFall responded quietly. ‘We know very little about the private lives of people, or their thoughts.’

Crime novelist P.D. James was convinced Wallace was guilty, and called the case ‘more fascinating’ than any fiction. ‘When he struck the first tremendous blow that killed her,’ she said, ‘and the ten afterwards delivered with such force, it was years of striving and constant disappointment that he was obliterating.’