In spring of 1975, twenty-two-year-old Eve Stratford was living a somewhat glamorous life in east London, working as a “bunny girl” at the upscale Playboy Club on Park Lane, and living with her musician boyfriend Tony Priest and a couple of his bandmates.
On the afternoon of March 18th, at around four p.m., Eve was spotted by neighbors walking down a snow-covered road near her flat in Leyton, and about a half hour later, a witness reported hearing a male and female voice talking calmly inside Eve’s apartment, followed by a distinct thumping sound. Other than that, nothing unusual seemed to be going on at all.
But at around five-thirty p.m., when Eve’s boyfriend Tony got home from work, he discovered his girlfriend lying dead on a mattress in the couple’s bedroom. She was clad in a robe, had her hands bound behind her back with a scarf, and had a single nylon stocking tied around one ankle. She had been stabbed at least a dozen times, and her throat had been savagely slashed.
Police found no sign of forced entry, and this fact, combined with the witness accounts of an overheard conversation, led authorities to believe that the killer may have been a friend or acquaintance. Though a semen sample was recovered from the belt of the robe Eve had been wearing, the technology to identify a perpetrator through DNA obviously did not exist in 1975, and the case very quickly went cold.
Months later, though, another young woman would be murdered in west London, and later forensic evidence linked her murder with that of Eve Stratford, suggesting that a budding serial killer might be on the loose.
Sixteen-year-old Lynne Weedon had been hanging out with friends on the evening of September 3rd, 1975. At around eleven p.m., as she made her way toward her home in nearby Hounslow, west London, she took a shortcut through an alley known as the Short Hedges, and it was here that she met with her killer.
The following morning, a school caretaker spotted the girl lying near an electricity substation across the street from his house. Lynne Weedon had been raped and hit over the head with a heavy, blunt object which had fractured her skull. Though Lynne was still clinging to life when she was found, she died a week later, having never regained consciousness.
Police speculated that the perpetrator must have followed Lynne from Great West Road, after which he approached her as she crossed the alley, hitting her over the head and then tossing her over the fence of the substation, where she was subsequently raped and left for dead.
Authorities had few leads, and the case was at a virtual standstill for decades. But then, in 2007, DNA from the crime scene was tested, and much to the surprise of investigators, the same DNA profile found in the case of Lynne Weedon matched the DNA collected from the body of twenty-two-year-old Eve Stratford, who had been murdered in her Leyton flat the previous March, suggesting that both young women had been killed by the same offender.
A police operation dubbed Operation Stealth was launched in 2008 in order to find the killer of Lynne Weedon and Eve Stratford, and both cases were given a renewed push in the media in the hopes that new leads would be generated. The killer would likely be somewhat elderly at this stage, but detectives are confident that someone will eventually come forward and solve the crimes.
The case remains open, and a large reward for information is still on offer.
Crime Immemorial 