Crime Immemorial

In the autumn of 1983, in London, England, a wealthy, professional woman would be savagely beaten to death by the side of the road, and though many strange clues hint at an unusually intriguing mystery surrounding her slaying, it remains unresolved more than three decades later.

Thirty-six-year-old Janice Weston was a successful solicitor, a partner at a firm known as Charles Russell and Company. Specializing in computer law, Janice was considered a brilliant lawyer by her colleagues, and aside from her generous salary, was also quite well-off due to a large inheritance left to her by an elderly associate named Heinz Isner, who she had met when he became a client at her firm. Isner had carried a torch for Janice, despite being four decades older than her, and despite Janice politely declining his advances; but when he died, he bequeathed her a small fortune in cash, art, and antiques. Janice lived in West London with her new husband Tony, a property speculator, who she also met through work.

On September 10th, 1983, a Saturday, Janice was reportedly shopping near her home at around lunchtime, and then went to her office, where she was apparently researching a book she was writing about her field of computer law. Coworkers later told authorities that she had been looking out of the window, as though perhaps waiting for someone. A phone call she took at around quarter to five corroborated her presence at her workplace.

Afterwards, she apparently drove home to her flat and prepared a meal. Her husband Tony was away in Paris all weekend, showing a chateau to a pair of prospective buyers, so it’s believed that Janice was at the flat alone. She had told her colleagues earlier that she was planning on staying in London over the weekend.

At some point before she had finished eating, though, Janice apparently needed to leave the flat, and she did so, abandoning half her dinner and a partially-drunk glass of wine on the table. Oddly, she took an overnight bag with her, as well as a bottle of wine, half a loaf of bread, the manuscript of the book she was working on, and a small purse containing thirty-seven pounds in cash. However, she left her larger handbag—which held her credit cards and her checkbook—behind at home. She then headed out in her silver Alfa Romeo.

Speculatively, she may have been heading to Clopton Hall, Northamptonshire, where she and her husband owned an investment property that they were in the process of refurbishing. The property was at the time unfinished and contained no furniture or amenities, other than a couple of sleeping bags, though Janice and Tony had been known to visit the place often, and were both well-known and liked by the locals.

The following morning, at approximately nine a.m., a cyclist named David Hurst was riding along the northbound A1 when he spotted a body, just half a mile south of the Brampton Hut roundabout. The victim was fully clothed, but her head and face had been bashed in with a car jack, which was recovered not far away. Her facial injuries were so severe that it took police three days to conclusively identify her as corporate lawyer Janice Weston. The victim also had numerous other defensive wounds, indicating that she had fought viciously against her attacker.

On September 15th, Janice’s Alfa Romeo turned up abandoned in Regents Park, smeared with bloodstains on the dashboard and windows, but free of fingerprints. A parking ticket was tucked beneath the windshield wiper. Janice’s driver’s license, a bottle of wine, and the keys to the Clopton Hall property were found inside the vehicle. The location where the car had been discarded was only about three miles from the Weston residence.

As the homicide investigation proceeded, it was confirmed that Janice had likely stopped to change a flat tire very near to where her body had been found, as traces of oil on Janice’s fingers attested. Authorities discovered that on the late morning before her death, she had picked up a repaired tire from a shop in Kensington, which had her husband’s name and phone number written on the inside with yellow chalk. This tire had reportedly been placed in the trunk and the spare left on the rear driver’s side of the vehicle. Bizarrely, though, when police found Janice’s car abandoned, the repaired tire had been put back on the car, and the spare tire was missing; it has never been located.

It was clear from the outset that robbery was probably not the motive, as Janice’s purse, still containing cash, was found beneath the seat of the vehicle. The half-empty bottle of wine in the car might have suggested that someone else had been in the vehicle with Janice, for she was said to be adamant about not drinking and driving.

The moment Janice’s husband Tony arrived home from his business trip in France, police picked him up and commenced grilling him for over fifty hours, though he had several witnesses, both clients and hotel employees, who placed him in Paris the entire weekend. He was subsequently released, though investigators could not rule out the hypothesis that he could have hired someone to kill his wife in his absence, as he did inherit a substantial sum following her murder.

A close friend of Janice’s named Sheila Surgeoner informed detectives that Janice had sometimes been in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, and speculated that one such person may have done her in. Police found little evidence to support this theory, however.

Investigators also looked into the possibility that a relative of Janice Weston’s deceased benefactor Heinz Isner may have had something to do with the woman’s death, as they might have felt as though Janice had received an inheritance that should have rightly fallen to the man’s immediate family. Other disgruntled clients of Janice’s firm were also considered, but nothing emerged from that line of inquiry either.

A few interesting leads bubbled to the surface in the days following Janice’s death. As many as six witnesses came forward to claim that they had seen a man changing the tire on a silver Alfa Romeo by the side of the A1 sometime around midnight on Saturday. This individual was never identified.

Eerier still, a man who owned a tire store in Royston told police that shortly after Janice’s body was discovered on September 11th, a man had come into the shop to purchase two replacement license plates that bore the same numbers as those from Janice’s vehicle. This man was likewise never located, though descriptions of his clothing were similar to those worn by the person seen changing the tire on the side of the motorway.

Many theories have been put forward about the enigmatic case, most of them attempting to account for Janice’s possible destination and her somewhat odd behavior before her disappearance. It seemed that she had left her flat in a hurry, possibly to meet someone who eventually ended up killing her following an altercation. The brutality of the crime, the use of a weapon of convenience, and the fact that the body was not hidden tends to support the idea that the murder was not planned, and perhaps undertaken by someone who knew the victim.

Since the murderer had obviously driven Janice’s car away after the crime, it would seem that he had either been in the car with her or had approached her on foot. Whether this was the same man who was allegedly seen purchasing the license plates the next day is still unknown. And though the spot where she was found and her probable direction of travel indicated that she might have been going to the Clopton Hall property, this is by no means certain, though the keys to the property were found in her car.

Some researchers have suggested that the spare tire could have been the key to the whole mystery, as it may have contained drugs that either Janice or her husband Tony was attempting to smuggle. However, there is little evidence to support this particular conjecture, and it seems unlikely that the wealthy Janice would get involved in drug smuggling when she was definitely not short of money.

The investigation into the murder of Janice Weston was reopened in 2018, but as of this writing, the puzzle has yet to be solved.