Twenty-four-year-old barmaid Linda Cook lived in the seaside town of Portsmouth with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s mother. At around eleven-thirty p.m. on the night of December 8th, 1986, Linda walked to a friend’s house on Sultan Road, a little more than a mile away from her own home on Victoria Road North. She spent less than an hour at her friend’s place before heading back, but at some point on her journey home, she was savagely attacked by an unknown assailant.
On the morning of December 9th, the nude body of Linda Cook was discovered on an area of waste ground known as Merry Row. She had been raped and strangled, and as if that wasn’t horrifying enough, her killer had also stomped her with his foot so hard that her larynx was crushed, her jaw and backbone were broken, and an imprint of his sneaker was left on her stomach.
The attack on Linda Cook was only the latest in a series of rapes that had been taking place around Portsmouth and had been attributed to an individual dubbed the Beast of Buckland. Police were under enormous pressure to solve the case, and days after Linda’s murder, they were pretty sure they had got their man: eighteen-year-old Able Seaman Michael Shirley.
It so happened that on the night that Linda Cook was slain, Michael Shirley had been on shore leave, and was out and about trying to pick up girls at a nearby nightclub called Joanna’s. At the bar, he met a girl who told him her name was Sue, though in reality she was called Deena Fogg. She agreed to share a taxi with him, and Michael likely thought he had his night sorted out. But Deena apparently changed her mind at some stage during the cab ride; she told Michael that she needed to be dropped off at her tower block so she could pick up her child, after which she would return to the cab. He agreed, but after Deena got out of the car, she gave Michael the slip and simply went home.
Michael Shirley waited in the taxi for her for about fifteen minutes, then got out of the vehicle and wandered the streets looking for her for a brief time before finally giving up and heading back to his ship, where he was recorded as returning at one-forty-five a.m.
Two days after this incident, Michael ran into Deena again, and apparently, the two of them spoke about how close they had been to the site of Linda Cook’s murder. Deena reportedly thought Michael’s discussion of the homicide seemed suspicious, and later reported him to police, who hypothesized that Michael had perhaps been sexually frustrated after being ditched by Deena and had then gone on to attack Linda Cook. He was arrested for the crime in early 1987.
Key to the authorities’ case against Michael Shirley was the fact that he owned a pair of sneakers of a similar size and bearing the same tread pattern as the shoe that had made the impression on Linda’s abdomen. He also had the same blood type as the attacker, which was O positive, and had several minor scratches on his face, arms, and hands. Further, police believed that there was an ample window of thirty minutes between the time when Deena Fogg claimed she had last seen Michael and when he had arrived back on his ship, during which he could have perpetrated the attack on Linda.
Michael Shirley was convicted of rape and murder in early 1988, and sentenced to life in prison. But even from the beginning, there were those who believed the young seaman was innocent. Indeed, Michael himself campaigned mightily on his own behalf, staging hunger strikes and protests in order to attract attention to his cause.
As supporters looked further into the case, in fact, numerous discrepancies came to light. The thirty-minute time frame in which Michael was thought to have committed the crime, for example, was shown not to exist; Deena Fogg actually misremembered the time that the taxi had picked her and Michael up, placing it half an hour earlier than it actually was.
In addition, the scratches found on Michael’s person were essentially a red herring, as Linda’s long fingernails showed no signs that she had scratched her attacker at all. And the fact that Michael’s blood type matched that of Linda’s killer was similarly meaningless, as O positive blood was found in nearly a quarter of British men.
Even the shoe tread, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence presented at the trial, was on second glance not nearly as damning as it seemed, as approximately nine-thousand pairs of the exact same shoes had been sold in the United Kingdom in 1986 alone. Police did recover Michael Shirley’s pair from his parents’ house, but found no trace of blood or other tissue on them.
At last, in 2002, new DNA tests were performed on pieces of Linda’s clothing, and semen that had been recovered at the scene, and these tests eliminated Michael Shirley as the killer of Linda Cook. He was released from prison in 2003, at the age of thirty-four.
Authorities subsequently reopened the homicide investigation and made new appeals to the public to solve the crime once and for all. They made no progress, however, and in later years, retired Norfolk police constable Chris Clark began looking into the case with a view to writing a book. He has stated that he believes Linda Cook’s killer is serial rapist and murderer Paul Barry Taylor, who in 2012 was convicted of the 1979 slaying of twenty-two-year-old Sally Ann McGrath, as well as three other rapes and an attempted rape.
Clark points out that wherever Taylor moved to around the country, a spate of sexual assaults would occur there in short order. In fact, Taylor had arrived in the town of Fareham in 1985, which was only six miles away from Portsmouth. Furthermore, a witness claimed to have seen a man resembling Taylor running in front of his car near Merry Row on the night that Linda Cook was killed.
Clark has requested that the police compare the DNA from the crime scene to Taylor’s profile, but so far his appeals have gone unanswered. Paul Barry Taylor remains in prison as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 