On the 25th of January, 2010, a former parking lot in Manchester, England was undergoing redevelopment when a worker noticed a human skull. Further investigation yielded the rest of the skeleton, hidden underneath scraps of blue carpeting.
The victim was found to be female, aged between eighteen and thirty-five, probably standing between five-foot-one and five-foot-seven, and likely European, though possibly Middle Eastern or Indian. She had suffered a particularly violent death, though specific details of the murder were not released to the public.
The woman was clad in a blue sweater, a green pinafore-style dress, a blue bra, and black stiletto shoes, though only one of these was found. There were also several items discovered alongside the remains, such as a purse, a pair of tights, pieces of orange and blue carpeting, and a plastic Guinness measuring chart which dated from the late 1960s. The woman herself is believed to have been murdered at some point between 1975 and 1988.
The victim remains unidentified and has been nicknamed the Angel of the Meadow, on account of the area in which she was found being known as Angel Meadow. Authorities have stated that the most likely candidate for the woman’s identity is that of a young woman from Tanzania whose family had contacted the police to report her missing; as of 2015, a DNA profile of the victim has been completed.
It has been speculated that the woman may have been a victim of either Scottish serial killer Peter Tobin, or killer Ronald Castree, who murdered eleven-year-old Lesley Molseed in 1975. In 2018, a pair of investigative journalists put forward the theory that the Angel of the Meadow’s case may be connected to Christopher Halliwell, who confessed to killing twenty-two-year-old Sian O’Callaghan in 2011, but nothing definitive has yet been established.
Crime Immemorial 