Twenty-five-year-old Alison Morris was a post-graduate student who had just been offered her choice of two jobs as a university lecturer: one of the jobs was in Salford, Manchester, England, and the other was in Liverpool. Alison herself lived in Essex with her mother and father, and had just recently returned from a holiday in Scotland.
On Saturday, September 1st, 1979, Alison told her parents she was going for her usual late afternoon walk along the River Stour, but that she would be back shortly to spend the evening at home with them, watching TV. Although she had specified that she would be gone only twenty minutes, the evening started to grow darker and she had still not returned. Her father, a churchwarden named Joseph Morris, became alarmed and went out to look for her.
Sadly, he found her, lying dead on the side of a lane not far from the family home. She had been stabbed multiple times in the back and chest. Authorities hypothesized that she had been grabbed from behind and then attacked in a frenzy, before she even had time to scream or react.
Police were baffled by the seemingly random and motiveless attack; Alison had been neither robbed nor sexually assaulted. Though a widespread search was undertaken, no sign of the murder weapon was ever found, and no evidence was discovered nearby that would give a clue as to the identity of the killer.
Apparently, there had been at least one couple in a parked car nearby when Alison was attacked, and detectives pleaded with these possible witnesses to come forward, but no one ever did. Another person of interest was described as a man in his fifties, of average height, sporting a small beard and clad in a light-colored trench coat. This individual was also never located.
For a time, it was believed that Alison might have been slain by serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, better known as the Yorkshire Ripper, but this theory was later discounted.
More than forty years have passed since Alison Morris’s bizarre and tragic murder, and investigators are still hopeful that the crime can eventually be solved.
Crime Immemorial 