Fifty-four-year-old Dr. Helen Davidson had been practicing medicine in the market town of Amersham, Buckinghamshire for more than two decades. On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 9th, 1966, after her husband had gone off to work, Helen hopped into her car, accompanied by her beloved terrier Fancy. Presumably, Helen was heading toward Hodgemoor Wood to take the dog for a walk and do some bird watching. She would never return from this excursion.
Finding his wife not home upon returning from his part-time job that evening, Helen’s husband reported her missing, and the police began an intensive search. On the following morning, Helen’s car was discovered abandoned on the side of the road that traveled between Amersham and Beaconsfield. Investigators and search parties fanned out from there, and several hours later, a soldier found the doctor’s body in a clearing almost a mile away from her vehicle. Her dog Fancy was still at the scene, frightened and huddled against the corpse.
Dr. Helen Davidson had not been robbed or sexually assaulted. It appeared that she had been killed by a single blow to the back of the head from a burned poplar branch, though the killer had continued to beat her long after she was dead. Not only that, but he had also used his boot to grind the doctor’s face into the dirt with such force that her eyes were shoved back into their sockets.
Because the weapon used seemed to be one of convenience, authorities speculated that the murder had been a spur-of-the-moment affair, leading them to believe that perhaps Helen had accidentally stumbled across some illegal activity in the woods, or that she had run across a former patient who might have had some beef with her that he spontaneously decided to settle once and for all.
At a loss almost from the beginning, investigators began questioning every known criminal and psychiatric patient in the immediate vicinity, but none of them seemed viable suspects. After an initial flurry of activity, in fact, the inquiry very quickly hit a brick wall, and only a few weeks later, police seemed to have resigned themselves to the fact that the slaying had been completely random and would likely never be solved.
The case languished in partial obscurity until 2016, when a crime writer named Monica Weller published a book called Injured Parties that reexamined the killing of Dr. Helen Davidson. Though Weller did not have access to the original police files in the case, she did manage to interview several of the original investigators and potential witnesses in the Amersham area.
According to Weller’s theory, the most likely killer was a man named George Garbett, a gardener who lived near Hodgemoor Wood and was regarded with some suspicion among the locals. Though Garbett had not been scrutinized by police at the time, he was known to have mental problems stemming from his service in World War II, during which he had suffered a brain injury that necessitated a metal plate being inserted into his head.
Similar to the supposed motive in the case of Elsie Frost in Yorkshire from the previous year, Weller hypothesized that George Garbett was in Hodgemoor Wood engaging in then-illegal homosexual activity when he was spotted by Dr. Davidson through the binoculars she had brought along for bird watching. Garbett then presumably murdered Helen so that she would not report his illicit rendezvous.
Whether George Garbett was indeed the murderer will probably never be known, as he committed suicide by setting himself on fire five years after the crime took place.
Crime Immemorial 