In spring of 1969, a thirteen-year-old girl in Norfolk, England would go missing in the middle of the afternoon, and while her body was never found, her probable murder has been linked to two of the UK’s most diabolical serial killers.
On April 8th, April Fabb was riding her bicycle from her home in Metton to her sister’s house in nearby Roughton. She carried a small amount of money, and a pack of cigarettes that she was planning to give to her brother-in-law for his birthday. At around two p.m., April was seen by witnesses as she rode her blue and white bike down the road, seemingly without a care in the world.
Fifteen minutes later, a pair of passing surveyors spotted April’s bicycle lying on its side in a field just off the roadway. No other trace of the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was ever found.
In later years, April’s disappearance and likely murder has been speculatively attributed to one of two well-known Scottish serial killers. The first of these is known child murderer and pedophile Robert Black, who was convicted of several counts of murder, rape and kidnapping stemming from crimes committed between 1981 and 1986. Black died in 2016, but is suspected in many more crimes other than those for which he was ultimately imprisoned, including the unsolved 1978 disappearance of Genette Tate.
The other possible culprit is the oft-mentioned serial killer Peter Tobin, who was incarcerated at a prison in Edinburgh for three murders until his death in October of 2022, but at various times was suspected of involvement in as many as forty-eight killings, including the infamous Bible John slayings.
Investigators found it telling that April Fabb had disappeared on Easter Monday, since Peter Tobin was known to often spend long holiday weekends in Norfolk and might conceivably have been in the area on the day April vanished.
In 2006, after Tobin’s first murder conviction, British authorities launched Operation Anagram, a wide-spanning investigation that sought to connect the serial killer with several unsolved murders and missing persons cases in the UK that shared similarities with crimes known to have been committed by Tobin. Though the inquiry essentially went into hibernation in 2011 after being unable to definitively pin any new charges on him, its findings suggested that Peter Tobin was a likely suspect in at least nine unsolved murders and disappearances.
Crime Immemorial 