Lynda Farrow

It was the morning of January 19th, 1979, and thirty-year-old Lynda Farrow had been out on a shopping trip with her mother. Lynda, the mother of two daughters aged eleven and eight, had recently split up with her husband, and was dating a man who ran a produce stall. Lynda and her boyfriend were expecting their first child together; the baby was due anytime now.

After spending the morning with her mother, Lynda dropped by to visit her boyfriend for a brief time before driving back to her flat on Whitehall Road in Woodford, Essex, England. She would never be seen alive again.

When her two daughters came home from school later that afternoon, they found the body of Lynda Farrow lying face down in the hall, covered in blood. She had been raped, and her throat had been slashed with a long, serrated knife, which the killer left behind in the kitchen.

When police processed the crime scene, they also discovered four bloody palm prints on a door frame, and shoe prints from size nine monkey boots, a style popular with mods and similar youth cultures of the time. A canvass of the neighborhood produced a witness who claimed they had seen a man with blond hair and blue eyes who was clad in a long black coat. This individual had allegedly entered Lynda Farrow’s home at around two in the afternoon.

Because there had been no sign of forced entry, detectives assumed that Lynda had known her killer, or had simply gone into her flat without locking the front door behind her.

Though the initial inquiry into the murder soon went cold, for a time investigators believed that Lynda Farrow might have been killed by the same assailant responsible for the March 1975 slaying of Eve Stratford, who had worked at the Playboy Club in central London. Eve Stratford had lived only three miles away from Lynda Farrow, and what’s more, numerous witnesses stated that the two women were at least acquaintances. Further, the modus operandi in both crimes was too similar for investigators to ignore.

If indeed Lynda Farrow was a victim of the same killer as Eve Stratford, that would mean that she was the third casualty of a serial offender, for DNA evidence conclusively connected the murder of Eve Stratford to that of sixteen-year-old Lynne Weedon, which occurred in September of 1975.

Though authorities in 2009 seemed to definitively confirm that Lynda Farrow was not killed by the same perpetrator as the other two victims, as there was no DNA link, some cold case investigators still believe there is a connection, especially considering how similar the murders were. One of these investigators, former Metropolitan Police detective Colin Sutton, published a book in 2022 called The West End Girls in which he puts forward the argument for the same killer in all three cases.