In the autumn of 1967, nineteen-year-old WRAF aircraftwoman Rita Ellis was getting ready for a babysitting job on the RAF Halton base in Buckinghamshire, England. She had joined the WRAF the previous April, and by the time November rolled around, she was working for the St. Mary’s Hospital catering department on base, though she periodically took babysitting jobs for fellow service members to make some extra cash.
On the evening of November 11th, the base was alive with people, as there was a dance going on as well as a bingo game, both of which were open to the public. Rita had agreed to babysit the child of Wing commander Roy Watson; Watson told her that he would pick her up in front of her quarters in the female block at a little before eight p.m., specifically adding that she should not be late.
Roy Watson arrived at Block A in his large white car at about seven-forty p.m., but Rita was nowhere to be seen. Irritated, Watson waited for ten minutes, then drove back to retrieve his wife, since men were not allowed to enter the female block. Mrs. Watson searched the women’s quarters, but saw no sign of Rita.
The following morning, a man was walking his dog near an unused railroad track on the far western perimeter of the base when he spotted the dead body of a young woman partially concealed in the bushes. She was naked from the waist down, had been sexually assaulted and beaten, and had been strangled with her own underwear.
The investigation into Rita Ellis’s murder was complicated immensely by the presence of so many people on the base who would not normally have been there, but were only in the area due to the two events taking place that evening.
From the outset, police theorized that Rita had been waiting outside of her quarters for Roy Watson to pick her up just as planned, but that an unknown individual had seen her and stopped his vehicle, at which point Rita got into the car, thinking it belonged to Watson. It was also possible, they speculated, that the perpetrator had been following her movements and knew that she would be waiting there at that specific time.
The inquiry quickly ran into a wall, with no viable suspects emerging. Authorities feared that the murderer, whoever he was, might strike again, and on December 28th, it appeared that their concerns were realized. On that evening, an unnamed student nurse from Tring, three miles away from the RAF base, was raped, beaten over the head, and left for dead by a man she later described as being in his late twenties, with a thin face and puffy eyes. A month after that, a fifteen-year-old girl in a nearby town also came forward and reported that she had been attacked by a man fitting the same description.
Police investigated a possible link between the three crimes, but still ultimately came up empty. In 2007, Rita Ellis’s murder case was reopened, and a DNA profile of her killer was successfully extracted. Using this profile, investigators were able to eliminate more than two hundred persons of interest, but unfortunately, the profile did not match that of any other criminal already on file. While authorities and the family of Rita Ellis are still hopeful that the culprit will be found, they fear that he could be in his eighties by now, or possibly already dead, and therefore unable to face justice.
Crime Immemorial 