On the afternoon of Sunday, March 8th, 1970, eighteen-year-old Jackie Ansell-Lamb (whose first name is sometimes spelled Jacci) was in London, picking up some belongings from her old flat and spending the weekend hanging out with her former roommate and a young man she had met at a party all three had attended on Saturday.
Jackie had recently moved from London to Manchester, where she had gotten a job as a legal secretary. On the Sunday, she was planning to hitchhike back to her new hometown, a mode of travel that seems fraught with danger to modern sensibilities, but in the sixties and seventies wasn’t much remarked upon.
At around two-thirty p.m., Jackie was seen by multiple witnesses standing at the beginning of the M1, waiting for a good Samaritan to drive by and give her a lift. She was reportedly wearing a long, dark blue coat, a blonde wig, and shiny, dark red shoes. She eventually lucked into a ride, and set off on the four-hour journey back home.
At some point along the way, however, her luck ran out, though it would be several days before anyone would discover her fate. On March 14th, a farmer walking down a country road not far from the M6 discovered the remains of a young woman, half hidden in some thick shrubbery. She was nude, but had been partially covered with her dark blue coat, which had several buttons missing. There appeared to be a wound to the back of her head, though cause of death was determined to be strangulation with a length of electrical wire that was still wrapped around her throat. She had also been raped, and some reports claim that her body had clearly been posed by her killer.
During the ensuing investigation, a witness came forward and stated that he thought he had seen a young woman matching Jackie’s description at around four-thirty p.m. on March 8th. She had been getting into a sedan at the motorway services in Keele, which was about a three-hour drive from where she had been picked up, and an hour drive from where her body was found. It is still unknown whether she was murdered by the first motorist who gave her a lift on the M1, or if she later got a ride with another individual who eventually raped and killed her.
It has been hypothesized that Peter Sutcliffe, the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper and ultimately convicted of thirteen murders, may have been responsible for the killing of Jackie Ansell-Lamb, as the manner in which the crime was committed seemed similar to his modus operandi. No solid evidence of his involvement has ever been discovered, however.
Jackie Ansell-Lamb’s death is often linked to another, almost identical murder of a young female hitchhiker in England, though this crime would not take place until the following October.
Crime Immemorial 