Crime Immemorial

August 3rd, 1990 was a Friday, and just as he usually did, Peter Heron headed out for his job at GE Stiller Transport, a haulage firm in the town of Darlington in northeast England. His wife, forty-four-year-old Ann Heron, was off work that day, and had been shopping with a friend that morning, though she had arrived back at the house by the time Peter came home for lunch at one p.m.

After her husband went back to work at two that afternoon, Ann decided to do some sunbathing on the lawn of the couple’s luxurious home, known as Aeolian House. The home was isolated, but was clearly visible from a nearby busy highway; Ann had reportedly long been uneasy about the remoteness of the place. Despite her concerns, though, on this particular day, she felt safe enough to stretch out on her lounge chair, her cigarettes and a drink by her side, a book about ghosts in her hand. Her beloved collie sat contentedly in the grass next to her.

At approximately two-thirty p.m., Ann spoke to a friend on the phone, and sounded contented and cheerful. An hour later, a friend of Ann’s who was riding past the house on the second level of a double-decker bus spotted the bikini-clad woman enjoying the sunshine in her garden in front of the house.

At five o’clock p.m., witnesses reported seeing a jogger pass by the house, but in light of later events, this wasn’t the most sinister sighting. Other witnesses told police that they had seen a tanned, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties parked in front of Aeolian House in a blue car, possibly a Vauxhall Astra or Cavalier, though it could have been a Toyota or a Mazda. Other witnesses later claimed they saw what authorities believed to be the same car speeding out of the driveway at a few minutes past five p.m.

When Peter Heron arrived home from work at six p.m., he found the front door open, the dog outside, and Ann’s lounge chair abandoned on the front lawn. Her cigarettes and a half-empty glass were next to the chair, while her book and a pair of her shoes were lying under a tree several yards away; additionally, the radio she’d been listening to was still playing.

When Peter went inside the house, he was confronted with the shocking scene of his wife lying dead in a widening pool of blood on the living room floor. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear, possibly with a razor or a Stanley knife. She was still wearing her bikini top, though the bottoms had been removed.

Despite this, there was no indication that Ann had been raped. Further, there were absolutely no signs of a struggle or of forced entry, and nothing whatsoever had been stolen from the home, leaving investigators baffled as to what the motive for the crime had been.

Authorities attempted to locate the individuals seen by witnesses at around five p.m., the time Ann was thought to have been killed. The jogger, the man in the blue vehicle, and the three people seen sitting in a blue Leyland Sherpa van outside of the home at around five p.m. were all sought, but none came forward, and to this day are all unidentified.

From the very beginning of the inquiry, Peter Heron was a person of interest in the murder of his wife, a common enough situation in spousal murder cases. He had a fairly plausible alibi for the time of her death: several witnesses placed him at a work meeting in the village of Cleveland Bridge that afternoon, though notably, the meeting took place only 440 yards from the home he shared with his wife.

However, police officers uncovered the fact that not only had Peter had been having an affair with a much younger woman who worked as a barmaid at his golf club, perhaps giving him incentive for murder, but he also apparently fudged the time of the meeting he’d attended. After another employee told police that he was certain he’d seen Peter Heron driving his white car at high speed towards Aeolian House at three-fifteen p.m., Peter stated that the meeting began at three-fifteen p.m. and ended at four-thirty, and that he was there for the entire duration. Other employees, though, asserted that the meeting actually began at around three-forty-five and lasted until about four-fifteen. Additionally, Peter was also spotted driving around about two miles from Aeolian House between three-fifty and three-fifty-five. It’s believed that Ann Heron was murdered at around five p.m., so Peter’s whereabouts were still unaccounted for during the time in question.

Another point of contention was the fact that Peter had taken an oddly circuitous route home on the day of his wife’s death; when asked about this, he claimed he had stopped by to visit his mistress along the way. This series of events, however, could not be confirmed.

In 1992, Peter Heron remarried, and the press had a field day, speculating as to why he had wed again only two years after the murder. Police, still considering him a suspect, sent two officers to attend the wedding.

A few more bizarre details about the homicide would emerge in ensuing years. In late 1992 or early 1993, for example, a woman known only as Sylvia came forward and informed police that a man had come into the card shop in Newton Aycliffe where she worked and bragged about murdering Ann Heron. Sylvia asserted that this individual looked very much like the person described as leaving the scene of the crime in the blue Vauxhall, and further stated that the man had told her that he would never be punished for the crime because he was moving to Australia.

And in 1994, an anonymous letter arrived at police headquarters as well as at the offices of the Northern Echo; it read, “Hello editor, it’s me. Ann Heron’s killer.” The writer of this missive has never been traced.

Convicted rapist Philip Hann was questioned about the murder in 1997; he had been in prison on an unrelated charge since 1994. This line of inquiry likewise went nowhere.

But in 2005, there was a massive twist in the case when Peter Heron, then seventy years old, was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. His semen was found on the back of his wife’s neck, and authorities were still suspicious of his stated movements on the day of the killing. But the charges against Peter were dropped in early 2006, due to lack of evidence; most researchers, however, still consider him a suspect, though concede that it is certainly feasible that Ann might have simply been the unlucky victim of a completely random attack.

To that end, in 2020, a private investigator named Jen Jarvie put forward a man named Michael Benson as a possible person of interest. Benson, who had died in 2011, was a violent criminal with a long rap sheet of robberies and assaults, and had escaped from prison in his wife’s blue Ford Orion. Authorities looked into the possibility, but determined that Benson had likely been living abroad at the time of Ann Heron’s murder; he has never been considered a viable suspect in the crime.

The strange case, sometimes known as the Beauty in the Bikini Murder, is Durham County’s only unsolved homicide.