Still At Large Podcast

Jean Bradley – 25th March 1993 This episode is the last in an accidental trilogy. I didn’t set out with the idea of doing another mini-series on the senseless deaths of women of a similar status at the hands of another angry and violent man who is evading justice to this day, but they have all, at one time or another been tenuously linked by the popular press with each other. Janice Weston was murdered changing a tyre by a roadside, near her car. Penny Bell was viciously murdered in her car....

Ruth Penelope “Penny” Bell – 6th June 1991 Penny Bell, as most people will know her, was born in 1948. Her family life seems to have been a happy and healthy one. In 1981 she married her boyfriend, Alistair Bell. They had met in 1975. The marriage would be Penny’s second, the first ending in divorce some years earlier. Together Penny and Alistair would both become successful people employed at the director level. Alistair was a director of an estate agency, that’s a realtor for the American...

Janice Carole Weston - 11th September 1983 In 1982 Janice and Tony were to end up as a couple. Two wealthy people with Janice being a leading solicitor, first with Herbert Oppenheimer, Nathan & Vandyke, immediately after college, and then Charles Russell and Co as a partner. Janis’ drive was monumental and as well as writing a book on the emerging computer data legal framework, she also helped to set-up a network for professional women in business and law. The neat and tidy child had become...

Series 3, episode 6: Lucy McHugh – 26th July 2018 This week’s show deals with violence against children and is significantly different from most of the cases as this is still an active investigation and someone has been detained, but the Police, Hampshire Constabulary, are still appealing for information about the movements of the victim on the day she died and need to speak with any potential witnesses. This is the tragic and active investigation in to the murder of thirteen-year-old Lucy...

1992 seems such a long time ago these days. Charles and Eddie were topping the charts with their falsetto filled soul/disco classic, “Would I lie to you”, the Church of England voted to allow women to become priests, and the Hoxne Hoard of late Roman Gold and Silver was discovered by a metal detectorist in Suffolk, but the most controversial news for the week beginning 16th November 1992, was the High Court decision to allow for the disconnection of feeding tubes to twenty-one-year-old Tony...

News of Pc Keith Blakelock’s murder spread rapidly across the Broadwater Farm Estate, and according to multiple sources, as word spread the intensity of the anger seemed to ebb away, the rioters thinned out and the police regained control of the streets at around 4:30 am. Smoke still hung in the air as the injured officers of Shield Serial 502 were variously taken to hospital or were left to sit in their Sherpa Van in a state of dazed, terrified, shock. The van wasn’t an official van, it was...

The social order of things in the UK had a number of growing problems – unemployment, disenfranchisement from the political system, rising crime and rising tensions between the Police and communities of Black and other ethnic minorities, due mainly to the wide spread use of the ‘sus laws’. This was legislation allowed Police to conduct stop and searches without needing the suspicion of a crime in progress, and despite the ‘sus laws’ officially being repealed in August 1981, the stop and...

At fifty-one, Janet Brown was the model of educated rural success. Her three children, Zara, Benedict and Roxanne, were either living away from home, away at university, or as in the case of the youngest, Roxanne, studying for A-levels and a place at university. Her husband, Grahaem Brown, was a doctor who worked for pharmaceutical companies. His work took him away from home a great deal, and at the time in question, Dr Brown was in Switzerland, while Janet herself worked as a research nurse...

At 7:45pm on 9th of December, Tony Miller returned to the home he shared with his brother Peter, in Camden Place, Great Yarmouth in Norfolk on the east Coast of England. On arrival he found the front door ajar. Upon entering the house, he found his brother on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. He had been stabbed once through the heart. There is a smell that has been described as being “CS gas” or tear gas in the room. Thirty-four-years later, his killer is still at large.

Linda Donaldson had been found dreadfully mutilated and left in a remote field between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1988. Her death was the starting point of a wide-ranging inquiry into the unsolved murders of women across the UK. Many men were considered suspects, but none proved to be responsible. Cases went cold, killers went unapprehended, women continued to go missing and turn up murdered in shallow graves and by roadsides all over the country. In 2011 a new suspect appeared on the...

Following the murders of Linda Donaldson and Maria Requina in 1988 and 1991 respectively, Greater Manchester Police uncovered the signs of as many as twenty-one potential serial killers who were collectively responsible for more than one-hundred murders, and for a while they considered that there many have been a link between the two women's deaths. Their most promising suspects all drew blanks and detectives were left with a series of killings as more women from the cities of Liverpool and...

In 1996 the Greater Manchester Police initiated a special operation called Enigma. Operation Enigma set out to look for a pattern in the deaths of several women who were found murdered between Liverpool and Manchester. Their results were horrifying. Of the two-hundred and seven unsolved murders between 1986 and 1991, seventy were found to be split into twenty-one clusters of activity. Rather than one serial murderer who had killed Linda Donaldson in 1988 and Maria Requena in 1991, they were...

Coffee tables across the country were being graced by a book that would spark a populist wave of renewed interest in the sciences. Famously including only one equation, Einstein's E=MC2 the author, the late great Dr Stephen Hawking explores the physics behind the cosmos and the then current ideas about the universe's beginning. Using easily accessible charts, illustrations and language, the redoubtable Doctor unlocks the story of how the universe came to be and how even with the vast leaps...

At 4pm on the afternoon of Friday 21st September, Adam Minter was crossing the iconic Tower Bridge in London, when he spotted an object floating in the Thames. At first Mr Minter believed it to be either a stained barrel or manikin, but as the object came closer to the bridge, he was able to see that the object was the body of a young child. Mr Minter could also tell that the body had been mutilated. When the Police retrieved the body from the water, it became apparent that the child was a...

1994 also witnessed the passing of the legendary formula one racing driver, Ayrton Senna on lap 6 of the San Marino Grand Prix, when he lost control of his car as he entered the Tamburello corner at 190mph and hit a wall. Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party, the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire, trading was allowed on a Sunday for the first time and in a rather unremarkable working-class housing estate on the outskirts of Oxford, thirty-three years old biochemist with a...

Life on the mainland was, however, pretty normal for most people. For twenty-six-year-old Deborah Linsley it was the day she would return to her home in Edinburgh following a few days visiting her family in friends in Bromley, South East London, following a training course in London. Deborah was going to be her brother's bridesmaid in two weeks-time and the trip was a welcomed break that allowed her to catch-up with the wedding plans. At the time the train was most sensible and economic way...

Maida Vale, in 1972, wasn't the gentrified location preferred by affluent families, celebrities and successful professionals that it is today. Back then it had a reputation for being a bit sleezy and run down. There were many derelict buildings and the sizable student population was attracted to the area because of the low rents and proliferation of bedsits that were available there. Incidental Music is by Russel J White https://soundcloud.com/russ-white

If this the first episode you're listening to, I would advise that you go back and begin at the start of the Hammersmith Nudes mini-series. That is episode two of series two. This episode is the concluding part so it would be very confusing to start from here. Over the last two episodes I have looked at the deaths of eight young women, and have examined the three primary suspects, none of whom were convicted. This episode will look at the various other suspects and some of the theories put...

By mid-February 1965 the Police in London had six young women who had been murdered in a short space of time. Two other women had been murder in the years prior to this, an as February 1965 came to a close, they hadn't been connected, yet. At the head of the investigation was Chief Superintendent John Du Rose. A seasoned detective approaching the end of his career. A career that had seen him involved with such infamous characters of John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer. Over the course...

London was a city undergoing a massive change. World War two had reduced much of the capital to rubble and the rebuilding of it was the primary focus of the 1950s. Towards the end of the 50s, a serial murderer was beginning a reign of violence against the working girls of London. His methods would lead to him being dubbed Jack the Stripper by the press, although the series of killings is more correctly known as The Hammersmith Nude Murders.