This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A coroner has paid tribute to the brother of a teenage girl who was fatally stabbed in the 1960s as he opened a fresh inquest into her death.

The circumstances surrounding the killing of 14-year-old Elsie Frost in October 1965 remain something of a mystery as no one has been successfully prosecuted.

Police believe Peter Pickering, a convicted killer known as the Beast of Wombwell, was responsible but they were not able to charge him before he died in March 2018.

The high court ordered the new inquest in April after an application from Elsie’s family, including her brother Colin Frost, as evidence had arisen since the original hearing in 1966.

At the inquest’s opening in Wakefield on Thursday, the senior coroner Kevin McLoughlin briefly outlined details of Elsie’s death. He said she was walking home after an event at the Snapethorpe school’s sailing club on Horbury Lagoon in Wakefield when she was killed.

Addressing Colin Frost, who was six when Elsie died, the coroner said: “I pay tribute to your tenacity over many years to get to where you have got to now.”

During the 1966 inquest, a local man, Ian Bernard Spencer, was implicated, but a criminal case against him was thrown out owing to a lack of evidence. His son, Ian Lee Spencer, sat in court during Thursday’s opening and will give evidence during the full inquest, which is scheduled to run for two days from 18 November.

Frost said he hoped the full circumstances of his sibling’s death would come to light during the inquest. “That would go a long way to allaying the fears of the Spencer and the Frost families,” he said.

West Yorkshire police revealed shortly after Pickering’s death last year that he was close to being charged with Elsie’s murder and that they had passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service.

McLoughlin said efforts had been made to find someone to represent Pickering in the full inquest, but he had no close family capable of acting on his behalf.

Pickering was held under a hospital order for more than 45 years after admitting killing 14-year-old Shirley Boldy in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in 1972. He died, aged 80, days after he was convicted of abducting and violently raping an 18-year-old woman, also in Barnsley, three weeks before he killed Shirley.

During Thursday’s hearing the court heard that the full inquest would sit without a jury and that the number of statements relating to the case exceeded 900.