It was the snowy afternoon of Sunday, November 21st, 1993, and twenty-one-year-old Karen Hales was at the home she shared on Lavenham Road in Ipswich with her fiancé Peter Ruffles and the pair’s eighteen-month-old daughter Emily.
At a little before four o’clock, it was already starting to get dark, and Peter left for work. Karen was a little jumpy about being alone, as she thought she had seen someone turning the knob of the front door the previous evening, but she likely thought little about it as she settled in for the evening with her child.
Slightly less than an hour later, at around four-forty p.m., Karen’s parents Graham and Geraldine dropped by the Lavenham Road house for a visit, and were initially unsettled at finding the front door unlocked. They entered the home, and immediately smelled smoke.
Upon entering the kitchen, they discovered a large blaze, with their daughter Karen lying motionless in the middle of it. Baby Emily, sitting goggle-eyed on the kitchen floor, was unharmed, so the Hales scooped the infant up and quickly phoned police and firefighters.
When authorities arrived, they determined that Karen had actually been stabbed multiple times by an unknown assailant, who had then attempted to set her body on fire. Two Laser 7 brand kitchen knives were missing from the home, and these were presumed to be the murder weapons, though neither was ever recovered. Karen’s purse had also vanished, and was never found.
Though there was a fairly heavy snowfall on the ground outside the home, there were no footprints leading away from the back of the house, and as there was also no sign of forced entry, police assumed that Karen was possibly acquainted with her killer and had let him in willingly. Alternately, he may have been posing as an authority figure and gained entry that way.
There were very few clues in the seemingly random attack. One witness claimed to have seen a man clad in a blue parka with a fur-lined hood, lurking in an alleyway between Lavenham Road and London Road at around the same time as the murder, but this man was never traced. In early 1994, two separate men—one in his twenties and one a thirty-year-old—were arrested and questioned, but released shortly afterward.
A later composite sketch of the man in the alley was produced, and a reward of fifty-thousand pounds was offered for information. In 1997, criminal profilers released a psychological description of the possible assailant, stating that he was likely in his late twenties to early thirties, lived or worked in Ipswich, was perhaps an acquaintance of Karen’s, such as a coworker, and had a volatile temper triggered by relatively minor stresses.
In late 2018, authorities made a renewed appeal in the murder, and told the press they were encouraged by some new leads that had emerged in the wake of their announcement. But as of this writing, the case remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 