Crime Immemorial

It was the afternoon of October 9th, 1965. Fourteen-year-old Elsie Frost had been hanging out with her friends at the sailing club on Horbury Lagoon. It was nearing four p.m., and the teenagers decided to start making their way back home. Elsie’s friends set off along the towpath that lay parallel to the Calder and Hebble canal. Elsie, however, was wearing her brand new shoes, and feared that the mud along the towpath would get them dirty. She opted to take the path that crossed underneath the railway overpass. It was a decision that would ultimately prove to be fatal.

At fifteen minutes past four, a man who was walking along the path with his two young children found Elsie Frost lying prone at the foot of the set of stairs known as the ABC steps (due to there being twenty-six of them). She had been stabbed five times, and had died of blood loss. The wound that had killed her had come from behind and had penetrated her heart, though she had also been stabbed once more in the back, twice in the head and once through the hand, indicating that she had attempted to defend herself from the sudden attack.

The brazen and gruesome crime prompted the largest police investigation in Wakefield’s history. Thousands of persons of interest were interviewed, local residents had their movements monitored, and metal detectors were deployed to track down the murder weapon. Despite all efforts, however, no solid suspects, nor a motive for the grisly killing, could ever be determined.

A few hypotheses swirled, of course, such as the scenario whereby Elsie had unwittingly come across two men engaging in then-illegal homosexual intercourse and had to be silenced to prevent her from going to the authorities.

There was also some conjecture that perhaps Elsie had a boyfriend she had been meeting on the sly who had snapped and killed her; this speculation was bolstered by Elsie’s father’s assertion that on the night before she was murdered, Elsie had gone out to a youth club with fancier clothes on than usual.

Months later, at the inquest, the presiding coroner put forth his theory that thirty-three-year-old Ian Spencer was the murderer, in spite of him having numerous witnesses to his whereabouts at the time that Elsie Frost was killed. In subsequent years, Ian Spencer would be hauled in and questioned whenever a knife crime took place anywhere in the area, even though he had been completely cleared of Elsie Frost’s murder, and in spite of the fact that the Frost family did not believe him to be in any way involved.

Another potential suspect was repeat sex offender Peter Pickering—dubbed by the press “The Maniac in the Marigolds”—who would later be imprisoned after confessing to the brutal 1972 rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Shirley Ann Boldy. He was also considered a person of interest in both the murder of Anne Dunwell from 1964, and the 1966 killing of fifteen-year-old Mavis Hudson.

In 2015, Elsie’s siblings, Colin Frost and Anne Cleave, were able to get the case reopened, and new evidence they produced opened up several new lines of inquiry, although many of the original case files and physical evidence had since been lost or destroyed.

Regardless of these obstacles, though, authorities arrested an unnamed seventy-eight-year-old suspect in September of 2016, who was not only questioned in the Elsie Frost murder, but also in an unsolved kidnapping and rape case from 1972. Two years later, in 2018, it was revealed that the suspect was none other than the aforementioned Peter Pickering; authorities stated that they were fairly confident Pickering has been the man responsible for killing Elsie Frost. Unfortunately, Pickering had died in a secure hospital the day before the announcement.

Although the family of Elsie Frost admitted they felt “cheated” because Pickering’s death meant that he would never face a jury, they were mollified by the December 2018 announcement of a new inquest into the case. The investigation is ongoing.