Only weeks before Christmas of 1984, a young schoolgirl would be waylaid on the way home from a holiday party in England, and her murder would remain unsolved nearly four decades later.
Fourteen-year-old Lisa Hession had been attending a small celebration with friends, as well as her sixteen-year-old boyfriend Craig Newell, in the town of Leigh in Greater Manchester on the evening of December 8th. As she had promised her mother she would be home before eleven, she left the party at around half-past ten after kissing Craig goodbye at the front gate. She then began the short walk home, but she never made it there.
When eleven o’clock came and went with no sign of her daughter, Lisa’s mother Christine phoned the police, then set out on her own to look for the child. But not long after that, Christine received a phone call that no mother ever wants to receive: authorities summoned her to Leigh Infirmary in order to identify a body.
Lisa Hession had been punched in the face, brutally raped, and strangled with her own t-shirt. Her violated remains had been found in an alley only a few hundred yards from her home.
Several other women had been assaulted in the same area of town over the previous four months, and another victim was attacked five months later. None of these women was killed, and all described a dark-haired, “baby-faced” individual between eighteen and twenty years old with a local accent. One man was arrested a short time after Lisa’s murder, but was later released on bail. He died in 2005, but investigators have confirmed that he remains a person of interest.
The case was reopened in 2011, with police offering a reward of 50,000 pounds and attempting to obtain DNA swabs from all males in the towns of Leigh and nearby Wigan. So far, there have been no matches, and the investigation is ongoing.
Crime Immemorial 