Crime Immemorial

In the winter of 2000, in England, a young woman who occasionally resorted to sex work would be found dead in a particularly grisly fashion. It has been speculated that her murder may be linked to several other killings and disappearances that took place from 1999 until 2002, some of which have been attributed to serial killer Anthony John Hardy, also known as the Camden Ripper.

Zoe Louise Parker had been born in Weston-super-Mare, but she was only eighteen months old when her mother Jackie, following a bitter divorce, put her into care. Zoe spent much of her childhood bouncing from foster home to institution and back again. She began getting into trouble with the law at a fairly early age, stealing and getting into fights, but according to her aunt Pauline Knott, who would often help Zoe out when she was in dire straits, all the young woman really wanted was to be loved and to have a normal family life. Because of her upbringing, Zoe had a tendency to be outgoing and friendly, but also naïve, needy, and too trusting of strangers, her aunt further stated.

In 1995, Zoe was sectioned under Britain’s Mental Health Act and was sent to a facility in the village of Abbots Langley, in Hertfordshire, for treatment. And in 1998, Zoe did a stint in Holloway Prison following an assault charge; after her release, she was sent back to the mental health facility for a time.

In September of 2000, twenty-four-year-old Zoe—who also used the name Cathy Dennis—left the hospital in Abbots Langley and began traveling around London. Though she was not believed to work as a prostitute full-time, she did resort to sex work on occasion when no other options were available to her; it seemed that she mostly tried to crash with friends, sleep outdoors, or pick up men in pubs and offer sex so that she would have a place to stay. Because of her propensity to wander, she had acquaintances all over the capital, as well as in Colchester and Bournemouth.

For several days prior to her disappearance, she had been spotted by numerous witnesses in pubs and bars around Hounslow, southwest London, soliciting men for a place to stay overnight. Zoe Parker was last seen alive on December 17th, 2000. CCTV footage showed her browsing around an HMV store, where she often went to listen to CDs, and she was later seen in the city center in the company of two dark-haired white men: one clad in a white jacket, dark pants, and white tennis shoes; the other wearing dark clothes and having a much stockier build than his companion. After that time, her whereabouts were unknown.

Less than two weeks later, on December 28th, a man named Troy Moore, who owned a houseboat in Battersea, spotted something floating in the Thames: the severed upper torso of a woman. Authorities fished out the decomposed remains, but for a time were unable to identify the victim. However, following a public appeal in which they published photographs of the woman’s unusually twisted incisor tooth and a distinctive rose tattoo reading “Zoe” on her shoulder, the dead woman was identified by relatives as Zoe Parker.

An autopsy determined that Zoe had been strangled to death, and then sliced in half by what was believed to be a samurai sword. Her lower half has never been found. Police were unable to determine exactly where the body was thrown into the river, speculating that it was most likely at a location somewhere between Isleworth and Battersea.

Investigators dubbed the inquiry into Zoe’s murder Operation Sidbury, and began a hunt for the two men seen with the victim before her disappearance, as well as a friend of Zoe’s named Carmen or Carmel who, it was hoped, might know something about Zoe’s movements in the days before she died.

The authorities have not ruled out the possibility that Zoe Parker’s murder could be related to a disturbing series of disappearances of women from the London area in 1999 and 2000. A nineteen-year-old Thames Valley University student named Elizabeth Chau, for example, went missing in April of 1999, and twenty-seven-year-old Lola Shenkoya disappeared on January 3rd, 2000; both women lived in Ealing, a suburb of West London.

Additionally, Iwona Kaminska, a twenty-year-old Polish student who was vacationing in London, also vanished from Hammersmith in mid-July of 2000, and the exact same area was likewise the last known location of twenty-six-year-old Sinead Healy, who disappeared after leaving her apartment in Fulham on October 18th of 2000. Three of these young women have not been found, though the body of Sinead Healy was recovered in March of 2001; her killer, Kenneth Lynch, was convicted and sentenced to life in the summer of 2002, though it is unlikely he is responsible for the other murders in the series, as he knew his victim directly.