Crime Immemorial

Thirteen-year-old Lindsay Rimer lived with her parents and three siblings in a house on Cambridge Street in the market town of Hebden Bridge, in West Yorkshire, England. She had been there on the night of Monday, November 7th, 1994, but at about ten p.m., she decided to walk to a nearby supermarket to buy a package of cereal.

On her way to the store, she dropped into the local pub, the Trades Club, where her mother was having a drink with a friend, to say hello. Lindsay’s mother asked the girl to stay and have a soda, but Lindsay declined, and headed back out into the street.

At ten-twenty-two p.m., Lindsay appeared on the CCTV footage at the Spar Supermarket as she paid for her cornflakes at the front counter. After that, she mysteriously disappeared into the night. Though authorities initially believed she had been having problems at home and had simply run away, her family denied this assertion, and feared the child had been abducted.

Lindsay’s whereabouts would not be established until five months later. On April 12th, 1995, two workers dredged the remains of the teenage girl from Rochdale Canal. Her body had been weighted down with a concrete block, and was discovered about a mile upstream from where she had last been seen alive. Though it did not appear that she had been sexually assaulted, she had been strangled to death.

Authorities looked into possible links with several local killers and rapists, including John Oswin, who was convicted of two rapes in 1998; and John Taylor, convicted in 2002 of the murder of Leanne Tiernan in Leeds. Unfortunately, none of these avenues of inquiry panned out.

In April of 2016, investigators announced that they had successfully extracted a DNA profile of the probable murderer, and approximately seven months later, arrested an unnamed, sixty-three-year-old man in connection with the slaying. He was later bonded out, and his current status is unknown. A second suspect, a sixty-eight-year-old Bradford man, was arrested in April of 2017, but was likewise released. The investigation is still ongoing.