Crime Immemorial

The first week of June of 1991 would see the appalling slaughter of a successful businesswoman in broad daylight in a parking lot in England.

Ruth Penelope Bell, better known to family and friends as Penny, was a forty-three-year-old woman who ran a thriving employment agency called Coverstaff Ltd., which placed candidates in catering positions. Her husband Alistair was an estate agent, and the couple lived in an elegant detached home near Denham in Buckinghamshire with two children: eleven-year-old Matthew (from Penny’s previous marriage), and nine-year-old Lauren.

On the morning of Thursday, June 6th, the family was getting ready for the workday, as they normally did. The household had been in a bit of disarray since the previous November, as the Bells had hired builders to renovate portions of the home, but by this point they seemed to have gotten used to the disruptions. On this particular day, workers were continuing construction in the kitchen, which was undergoing a significant expansion.

Alistair left for work at approximately eight-thirty a.m., and though his wife usually waved goodbye to him from the kitchen window as he drove off, on that day she failed to do so. Alistair didn’t think a great deal about it, as perhaps the kitchen renovations were preoccupying her. In addition, he noticed that she had seemed a little more stressed out than usual the past couple of days, though again, nothing that struck him as overly alarming.

A little more than an hour later, at around nine-forty a.m., Penny told the builders that she was heading out for an appointment; she was late, she said, and had to meet the client in ten minutes. The workers, at least one of whom was also a close family friend, later reported that nothing at all seemed to be amiss; Penny was acting completely normally. She took her handbag and some wallpaper samples and climbed into her powder blue Jaguar to drive to her scheduled meeting.

At around ten o’clock, several witnesses later reported seeing Penny’s car driving very slowly down Greenford Road in west London, and observed that the hazard lights were on. In light of subsequent events, the location of the vehicle was noted as unusual, as Penny’s office was in the opposite direction of where she was seen to be driving.

A half-hour after that, another witness who later came forward stated that he saw Penny’s Jaguar pulling into the parking lot of the Gurnell Leisure Centre. There was a man in the passenger seat of the vehicle, the witness said, and this man and Penny appeared to be struggling. The witness even claimed that Penny had mouthed the words, “Help me,” out the window at him, but that he had not heeded her pleas at the time. The witness also hadn’t got a very good look at the man in the Jaguar’s passenger seat, saying only that he looked to be in his forties, with dark hair and possibly a beard, clad in a dark-colored blazer and wearing a bracelet on his right wrist.

Two women walking through the parking lot to go swimming at the leisure center at around eleven a.m. noticed Penny slumped over the steering wheel of her car, but initially thought she was only sleeping. However, when they exited the building at a little past noon, they saw that Penny hadn’t moved, and also spotted some blood spatter inside the vehicle. They phoned the police at approximately twelve-fifteen p.m.

Authorities arrived to a scene of almost unimaginable brutality. Penny Bell had been stabbed upwards of fifty times in the chest and arms by a knife with a three- to four-inch blade. From the position of the wounds, it appeared that the killer had begun stabbing her from the passenger seat, then had exited the vehicle, walked around it, and continued stabbing her from the driver’s side, either through the window or after opening the driver’s side door.

Penny’s handbag was discovered inside the vehicle untouched, indicating that robbery had probably not been the primary motive. The wallpaper samples that Penny had taken with her were spread out in the car, as though she had been showing them to someone. Penny had not been sexually assaulted, though the frenzied nature of the attack did seem to indicate a personal vendetta of some kind.

From the very beginning of the investigation, police were baffled by the bizarre details surrounding the crime. One of the most puzzling was how the murderer—who would have been covered in blood—had managed to get out of the parking lot without being seen by anyone. The spot where the Jaguar was parked faced a high hedge which concealed it from view from the front side, but the lot was nearly full, and people had been coming and going all morning. Though the Jaguar’s back window was small enough to have partially masked the slaying as it was happening, and though the car was largely soundproof, which would have muffled any screams, it still seemed very odd that no one had seen or heard anything unusual. This has led some researchers to surmise that the killer may have already had a getaway car parked at the site, and left the scene in that, rather than fleeing on foot.

And as the inquiry continued, more and weirder aspects of the case began to come to light. For instance, it was discovered that three days prior to the murder of Penny Bell, she had withdrawn the sum of eight-thousand-five-hundred pounds from the joint bank account she shared with her husband. Apparently she had not told Alistair about the withdrawal or made a note of it anywhere, which was unprecedented for her, though a few of the builders who had been working in the Bell home told police that Penny had the cash in an envelope which she took with her to her purported appointment on the morning she was killed. The cash has never been recovered.

The appointment was yet another bone of contention, as Penny hadn’t made mention of it in her diary, which she was usually meticulous about doing. Alistair later suggested that perhaps the meeting had been set up by a last-minute phone call, but workers in the home claimed they had not heard any phone call on the morning of June 6th.

Alistair Bell was initially scrutinized as a person of interest, especially since he inherited the bulk of his wife’s estate after her death, and also received a substantial payout on her life insurance policy. Alistair had a solid alibi for the morning of the murder, and seemingly had no motive to kill his wife, as the marriage appeared to be stable. However, when police discovered that prior to marrying Penny in 1981, Alistair had been in an eleven-year relationship with a man, they redoubled their investigative efforts, suspecting that perhaps Alistair’s former lover had been responsible for the slaying, either of his own accord or at Alistair’s behest.

It seems, though, that some amount of homophobia may have played a part in this particular avenue of questioning, as according to everyone who knew the Bells, Alistair had never made a secret of his bisexuality, and in fact, his former boyfriend had attended his and Penny’s wedding. Both Alistair and his ex-partner were eventually cleared.

The following year, though, a strange twist in the case would occur. A family friend of the Bells named John Richmond approached a tabloid newspaper and told them that he knew who had killed Penny, and would reveal this information for the sum of eighty-thousand pounds. He alleged that Penny’s murder had been a contract hit; he and Penny had been having an affair, he claimed, and had met on the morning that Penny was murdered. He further stated that Penny had asked him to recommend a hit man, which he apparently did. He said that he had not killed Penny, but knew who had.

Police did arrest John Richmond, and his fingerprints were found in Penny’s Jaguar, but as he and Penny were friends, this particular clue was not all that significant, and many of his other claims could not be corroborated. While his involvement in some capacity has not been ruled out, investigators seem to think it highly unlikely that he and Penny were seeing each other, and equally implausible that he knew who killed her.

The mystery surrounding Penny Bell’s death endures, and while the possibility remains that she was the victim of a random attack, perhaps perpetrated by killer Robert Napper, also believed to be responsible for the similar stabbing murders of between three and six other victims, the Bell family as well as investigators are leaning toward the theory that she was killed by someone she knew. The case remains one of the U.K.’s most infamous unsolved murders.