It was about quarter to eleven on the morning of Saturday, March 28th, 1987. Sixty-six-year-old Helen Fleet had bundled her two dogs, Bilbow and Cindy, into her blue Datsun and was driving out to Worlebury Woods near her home in Weston-super-Mare, in North Somerset, England, to take her beloved pets for a walk. She was last seen parking the vehicle at the side of the road at ten-fifty a.m. and setting out into the trees.
Two hours later, another dog walker named Sylvia Lewis came across Helen Fleet lying across the path, not moving. Sylvia, who knew Helen quite well, hurried to a nearby house and called police, but by the time they arrived, it was too late; Helen Fleet was dead.
It appeared that the victim had been beaten, strangled, and stabbed to death. She had been neither robbed nor sexually assaulted, giving authorities little clue as to what the motive for this random, broad-daylight attack could have been.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen a young man running down a few nearby streets on the morning of the murder, and that he looked to be carrying a helmet or a hard hat. Other witnesses stated they had seen two different teenagers—both clad in ski jackets—fleeing through the woods at around eleven-thirty that morning. A composite sketch of the first of these individuals was produced, but led to no significant suspects.
Years later, however, another witness came forward and asserted that Helen Fleet had been talking to a young man in the woods on the day of her death, and that she appeared to know him well. The witness further stated that the teenager had been playing with Helen’s dogs. The description of this person of interest very strongly resembled the description of one of the teenagers seen running through the woods by separate witnesses.
The case remains open, with detectives operating under the assumption that Helen Fleet may have known her killer, and that he was a local boy who was familiar with the area and had some unknown grudge against the victim.
However, another possibility being considered is that the murder was the first committed by an as-yet unidentified serial killer. Two later murders, discussed below, have been tentatively linked to the killing of Helen Fleet, as the modus operandi was similar enough to warrant further investigation.
At around four-thirty p.m. on the afternoon of Saturday, November 15th, 1997, fourteen-year-old Kate Bushell left her home in the small village of Exwick in Devon, England to take her neighbors’ dog—a Jack Russell terrier named Gemma—for a walk. Her neighbors were away on vacation, and Kate had promised to walk their dog as a favor.
Approximately twenty minutes later, locals spotted Kate and Gemma walking down Exeter Lane, but at some point shortly after that, both the teenager and the dog disappeared.
When Kate had not returned home by six-thirty p.m., her parents Jerry and Suzanne became alarmed and began searching the area for her. Failing to find her, they phoned police at seven o’clock. Only half an hour later, during a search conducted by police officers, family members, and volunteers, Kate’s father himself came across the dead body of his daughter, lying in a field not far off Exwick Lane, only a few hundred yards from her family’s home. Her throat had been savagely slashed.
The tight-knit community was appalled by the randomness and violence of the slaughter. It didn’t appear as though Kate had been raped, though an attempted rape could not be ruled out, as her clothing was reportedly “disordered.” The wound to her throat had been administered by a large knife with a six-inch blade, most likely a standard kitchen knife. The murder weapon was never found. The only other significant forensic evidence recovered from Kate’s remains was a sizable number of very distinctive orange fibers, thought to have come from some work-related article of clothing, such as an apron, a boiler suit, or perhaps a pair of work gloves.
Gemma the dog was later discovered unharmed, and though the animal was also examined for forensic evidence, none was found that would result in any leads.
After the slaying of Kate Bushell was made public, several witnesses came forward and reported various sightings of two different men at around the time the girl was killed. The first of these individuals was a thirty- to forty-year-old white male, of average height and weight, with dark, collar-length hair, who was standing by a blue car parked in a layby near the walking path where the teenager’s body was ultimately found. Another couple who drove through the area only a few minutes later spotted the same car, but noted that they had not seen the man. This individual was sought for questioning, but did not come forward and has never been identified.
Two other witnesses separately reported seeing a man running very quickly from the direction of the field where Kate was found, somewhere between five-ten and five-forty p.m. This individual allegedly looked disheveled and possibly had blood on his clothes; he was last seen entering a nearby housing estate. The identity of this man was likewise never established.
Because the site where Kate’s remains lay was a somewhat remote walking path accessed by passing through at least two stiles, authorities surmised that the killer was perhaps someone who lived or worked in the area, as the path was unknown to outsiders, but was commonly used by local dog-walkers. However, despite a massive examination of the surrounding area, including five-thousand DNA tests, five-thousand interviews, and two-thousand vehicle inquiries, the case remains unresolved. Three suspects were arrested over the course of the early investigation, but all were quickly dismissed.
Though it seems that police are still focusing on suspects who lived or worked in the Exwick area, at least one investigator has put forward the theory that Kate Bushell may have been slain by a serial killer, specifically the same assailant also responsible for the murders of sixty-six-year-old Helen Fleet in March of 1987, and forty-one-year-old Lyn Bryant in October of 1998. Though the victims were all of different ages and lived a significant distance apart—Helen Fleet was killed in Weston-super-Mare, Lyn Bryant in Truro, Cornwall—some have speculated that because the women were all targeted while walking dogs and none of them were robbed or sexually assaulted, there is a possibility that the same attacker murdered all three victims. The latter two cases also reportedly featured sightings of a pale-colored van.
A new push to solve the case was commenced in 2017, on the twentieth anniversary of the schoolgirl’s tragic murder, and the investigation is still open.
Forty-year-old Lyn Bryant of Truro, Cornwall set out to walk her dog Jay on the early afternoon of Tuesday, October 20th, 1998, but at some point along her journey, she ran across a killer. Only an hour later, at approximately two-thirty p.m., her body was discovered lying in the gateway to a field in the village of Ruan High Lanes. She had been stabbed multiple times in the back, chest, and neck, possibly with a small kitchen knife or penknife, and though she had not been raped, her clothing was in disorder, just as in the prior case of Kate Bushell. Also like the earlier crime, some witnesses reported seeing a pale-colored car or van near the scene of the slaying.
Another witness reported seeing a bearded male in a shabby white van pulled into the same gas station as the one Lyn Bryant was seen at before she went for her walk. According to this witness, the same man had been spotted around the area a few times in the days prior to the murder, and was probably not a local.
Yet another witness reported seeing Lyn speaking to a clean-shaven man in his early thirties outside Ruan High Lanes Methodist Church between one-forty-five and two p.m. on the day she was killed. A farmer saw what might have been the same man walking through the field near the murder scene at some time between two-forty-five and three p.m.; the farmer noticed this individual because he didn’t appear to be dressed for walking, and was not in an area with a foot path. None of these men has been identified.
Investigators speculated that another dog-walker murder—that of fifty-two-year-old Julia Webb of Northwich, who was bludgeoned to death while walking her dog in July of 1998—might possibly be linked, as witnesses also reported seeing a bearded man, this time carrying a cane, in the vicinity of the crime scene.
In an odd twist, investigators found Lyn Bryant’s tortoiseshell glasses in the mud near the gate where her body was found, four months after her murder. The glasses had not been noticed at the time, and authorities presumed that the killer had returned to the scene to place them there as a taunting rebuke, or alternately that a random citizen had found the glasses and just left them there so they wouldn’t have to become involved in the investigation.
In July of 2000, a forty-six-year-old woman named Carmen Boxwell was walking her dog near Salcombe, Devon, and reported that the killer might have actually followed her for a time, but was evidently frightened away by the growling of her Alsatian, Topsy. Carmen claimed that the man was about forty years old, tanned, and clean-shaven, wearing green corduroy pants and a blue sweatshirt, and carrying a six-inch knife. She further asserted that he had emerged from a blue Volvo, a vehicle similar to that seen by two witnesses parked near the site where Kate Bushell was murdered.
A partial DNA profile of the killer has been extracted, but no match has been determined thus far. Police also recovered some distinctive, bright blue fibers from Lyn’s remains, which they believe to have come from the murderer’s clothing. These fibers are of a type commonly seen in sweaters and polo-style shirts.
In 2018, there was a renewed push to solve the case on the twentieth anniversary of its occurrence, but despite new leads and a large reward on offer, the stabbing death of Lyn Bryant remains cold and unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 
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