Twenty-nine-year-old barmaid Gloria Booth had been working at the White Hart pub in Northolt on the night of Saturday, June 12th, 1971. Her shift ended at half past eleven, and she began walking home shortly afterward, a journey she had taken countless times.
Early the next morning, a newspaper delivery boy taking a shortcut through Stonefield Park in South Ruislip happened upon the nearly naked body of Gloria Booth, lying on top of a bramble bush near the Polish War Memorial. The boy checked the young woman for a pulse, and finding none, hurried home to tell his parents about his discovery. After he had gone, another individual who was walking his dog through the park saw the corpse as well, and phoned police immediately.
Gloria Booth had been strangled and mutilated, her body covered with ghastly bite marks perpetrated by someone with a gap in their front teeth. Her clothes and handbag were scattered around the scene willy-nilly, though strangely, one of her shoes appeared as though it had been deliberately hidden beneath a nearby hedge. Her skin also bore traces of brick dust and oil, implying that she had been murdered elsewhere, perhaps in a garage, before being dumped in the park.
Though the pathologist’s report at first indicated that Gloria had been strangled with a scarf, a later reassessment of the evidence found latent bruising around the throat that suggested something more like a length of knotted nylon rope. Though the crime appeared sexually motivated, Gloria had not been raped, leading investigators to believe that perhaps the killer was impotent.
Authorities initially focused their attention on Gloria’s estranged husband, who she had been in the process of divorcing when she was killed. However, he was quickly eliminated as a suspect, as he had a solid alibi for the time of the murder.
Also briefly considered was a male friend of Gloria’s who worked as a bartender at the nearby Viking Pub and had been planning to meet her that Saturday night after work. Multiple witnesses, however, informed police that the bartender had been detained and had not left work until well past one in the morning, making it nearly impossible for him to have been the killer.
The case went nowhere for several years, until researchers began speculating that Gloria Booth might have been yet another possible early victim of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, convicted in 1981 of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. Those advocating for this scenario point out that Sutcliffe often used a knotted nylon rope to strangle his victims, and further assert that he could have been in the South Ruislip area in June of 1971, visiting his eventual wife Sonia at her sister’s home, which was only six miles from the scene of Gloria’s murder. It has also been alleged that Sutcliffe was working as a mechanic at the time, which might explain the oil found on Gloria’s body.
Though interest in the case was rekindled in 2014 after Gloria Booth’s sister Elsie Cowen demanded a new look at the Yorkshire Ripper connection, so far nothing definitive has been confirmed.
Incidentally, the murder of Gloria Booth took place only a mile from the site where twenty-one-year-old Jean Townsend was slain in September of 1954. The two murders occurring in such close proximity prompted the media to briefly christen the area, “Ruislip’s Murder Mile.”
Crime Immemorial 