Nineteen-year-old Jennifer Ronaldson was a nurse at Guy’s Hospital in London, England, a quiet and devoted young woman with seemingly no enemies in the world. In late October of 1980, Jennifer was having a cup of tea with her friends in the hospital cafeteria just after her shift ended at two in the afternoon. She then told them she was going down to Petticoat Lane to browse the street market. She subsequently vanished without a trace.
A month later, on November 24th, her body was found floating in the Thames, in East London near Poplar. She was nude except for a bra, and still had a gag in her mouth. Authorities determined she had been savagely raped, beaten, and strangled, the cause of death listed as “asphyxia, gagging and constriction of the neck.” Her purse was later found in a pub about a mile from where her remains were discovered.
The main suspect in Jennifer’s murder was David Mulcahy, a serial rapist and murderer who, along with his partner in crime John Duffy, committed a string of numerous sexual assaults and slayings at railway stations in southern England during the 1980s. The killings therefore came to be known as “The Railway Murders.”
The pair allegedly attacked as many as nineteen women beginning in 1982, with several more assaults occurring in 1984 and 1985. John Duffy was eventually caught and convicted of two murders and four rapes in 1988, and remains in prison as of 2023. Years later, in early 1999, David Mulcahy was arrested also, and later convicted of three counts of murder and seven counts of rape. He is likewise serving a life sentence, and is not expected to ever be released.
Though it remains unknown whether Mulcahy was responsible for the rape and murder of Jennifer Ronaldson, he was questioned in 1980 for another East London sexual assault. The victim, who survived, did pick him out of a police lineup, but there was otherwise no sufficient evidence to bring him up on charges. If Mulcahy killed Jennifer Ronaldson, it’s likely he acted alone, as her death predates his crime spree with John Duffy by two years.
The murder of Jennifer Ronaldson remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 