At approximately eight a.m. on the morning of August 28th, 1981, a phone call came in to the offices of the Ripon police in North Yorkshire.
“Near Scawton Moor House, you will find a decomposed body among the willow herbs,” said the voice on the line. The officer who had taken the call, PC John Jeffries, attempted to get the caller to state his name and address, but the individual declined “for reasons of national security” and hung up the phone. The call had lasted less than one minute, and was not able to be traced.
When a constable local to the area arrived at the site the caller had specified, he found nothing amiss at first, but after an extensive search, eventually came across what appeared to be part of a human skull. At that point, he phoned for CID, and after detectives cut down some of the surrounding nettles and dug around a bit more, they were able to recover most of the rest of the remains.
Because of the state of decomposition, surrounding plant growth, and the fact that the lid off a cup of yogurt was found beneath the body that bore a sell-by date approximately two years earlier, authorities surmised that this must have been how long the victim had been there. Due to its concealed location, it was extremely unlikely that anyone would have found the remains by accident, despite the area being popular with picnickers. It was this fact that led police to initially assume that the caller who had reported the corpse was also possibly the killer.
The victim, dubbed “The Nude in the Nettles,” was a woman of about thirty-five years old, standing five-foot-two and with dark brown hair cut into a pageboy style. She wore no clothing and had no jewelry. At some point, she had given birth to two or three children, and didn’t appear to have taken very good care of herself: most of her teeth were missing and had been replaced with a dental plate, and the few teeth that did remain were stained with tar, indicating the woman had been a heavy smoker. She also would have suffered from a bad back during her life, as one of the vertebrae in her neck was malformed. She had also fractured her right ankle at some stage in the past.
Though detectives never released a cause of death to the public, the case was treated as a homicide due to the situation in which the body had been found.
Investigators fanned out from the location of the victim’s last resting place in an effort to identify her and clarify her last moments on earth. About a mile away from the dump site, a pair of underwear and a black evening gown were discovered hanging from a tree, though these articles were never able to be definitively linked to the Nude in the Nettles. Likewise, a lead concerning an escaped inmate from nearby Askham Grange women’s prison also went nowhere, as the inmate was later found to be alive and well.
Though an intensive probe was also undertaken to identify the man who had initially called the body in to police, eventually it was determined that the caller was probably not the killer, simply because it seemed farfetched to presume that the murderer would have waited two years to report the crime. In addition, it was entirely possible that someone—perhaps someone in the military—could have come across the body and reported it anonymously because they did not wish to get involved.
One of the most persistent theories about what happened to the Nude in the Nettles is that she may have been a victim of infamous Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who in 1981 was convicted of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. Sutcliffe, a truck driver during the time of his killing spree, would have driven through the area where the body was found at around the time she was probably killed. Further, the Nude in the Nettles may very well have been a prostitute, like Sutcliffe’s other victims were.
On the other hand, certain aspects of the crime scene in the Nettles case don’t really adhere to Sutcliffe’s modus operandi, and because the authorities have not released details of the woman’s cause of death, it remains unclear if the method of murder matched those of the Yorkshire Ripper’s other victims, though her skull did not appear to display the hammer blows that were a hallmark of many of Sutcliffe’s other homicides. He was also disinclined to leave the bodies naked, and had a tendency to pose them, which was not consistent with the manner in which the Nude in the Nettles’ remains were discovered.
The DNA profile of the victim was added to the UK’s national database in 2013, but as of this writing, she remains unidentified.
Crime Immemorial 