Crime Immemorial

On July 8th, 1951, it so happened that Sugar Ray Robinson was in Windsor staying at the Star and Garter Hotel, in preparation for his upcoming fight against British middleweight Randy Turpin. The Star and Garter was only thirty yards away from the Butchers’ home, and Christine begged her parents to let her walk over to see if she could catch a glimpse of her hero. In particular, she wanted to show him a porcelain doll she had that she thought resembled him, in the hopes that he would be impressed enough to give her a ride in his pink Cadillac.

Although her parents were reportedly not in the habit of letting the seven-year-old girl wander around too much on her own, they surmised that she would be safe enough; the hotel was only steps away, after all, and there would be lots of other people and activity around, as befitting the arrival of such a celebrity.

Christine, armed with her porcelain doll and a bag of candy, set out for the hotel between three and three-thirty in the afternoon. While she was evidently spotted by a few other people gathering around the entrance of the establishment, she vanished shortly afterwards.

When Christine hadn’t returned after dark, the Butchers called the police, who immediately began an extensive search for the child. By talking to witnesses and Sugar Ray Robinson himself, it was determined that Christine had likely disappeared from the crowd outside the hotel and never made it inside the building. Robison would issue a statement to the media saying, “I am very sorry about this – if I had known she wanted to see me, her daddy could have brought her in and then this never would have happened.”

Two days later, on July 10th, the disappearance had been somewhat forgotten by the public, as thousands of locals were going to Earls Court to watch the boxing match (which Robinson ultimately lost). However, authorities were still searching, and sadly, as the fight was occurring, they discovered the body of the seven-year-old, lying in a meadow about a mile from the Star and Garter. She had been raped, and strangled with the belt of her blue gabardine raincoat. Investigators determined that she had been murdered where she lay, as some of the grass from the meadow was still bound up in the knot of the belt that had ended her life. Her doll and the half-eaten bag of candy were found nearby.

During the investigation, several witnesses claimed to have seen suspicious people on the day Christine went missing. An older female friend of Christine’s said she had seen the girl on the 8th, walking with a white man in a gray suit, and that Christine had waved to her when she called out. This same friend claimed she would be able to identify this man, but her description was too vague to be of much use.

Additionally, a bus driver asserted that he had seen Christine alive at around four p.m. on July 8th; he said she was standing in the parking lot watching one of the guards. Another woman claimed to have seen the girl less than ten minutes later, walking down the alley alongside the hotel, following behind a group of people.

Three individuals who had been in the crowd that day took videos of the event which they turned over to police, and one of them showed Christine in the crowd, but other than that, the footage showed nothing suspicious.

Authorities released the descriptions of several persons of interest in connection with the crime, including a well-built man in his early twenties clad in a sandy-colored jacket and gray flannel pants who had been seen near Christine in the crowd as it moved down the alley. Two separate women who were seen with children in the same area were also sought, as was a stocky, clean-shaven man in his early forties who stood around five foot nine.

Another individual who may have had some link to the murder included a clean-shaven, hatless man in his mid-thirties with a ruddy complexion and brushed-back fair hair, wearing a navy blue suit. This might have been the same man that detectives later announced had been spotted outside Christine’s house on the same day.

None of these individuals was ever identified, and no arrests were ever made in the murder. However, one further horrific consequence of the crime may have stemmed from the extensive media coverage of the incident, predicated by its indirect connection to a celebrity.

A mentally disabled petty criminal named John Straffen, who at the time was twenty-one years old, read about Christine Butcher’s slaying in the newspaper. Straffen apparently had a particular hatred for police, blaming them for all his problems stemming from childhood, and the coverage of the murder gave him the idea that killing little girls was the best way to cause the most amount of trouble for the authorities. So, on July 15th, 1951, only five days after Christine Butcher’s body was found, Straffen strangled five-year-old Brenda Goddard, who he spotted while she was out picking flowers.

Then, on August 8th, Straffen met nine-year-old Cicely Batstone at a movie theater in Bath, and eventually strangled her as well. Straffen was promptly arrested for the crime, as he had been seen by numerous witnesses, and was subsequently imprisoned at Broadmoor, the infamous psychiatric hospital in Berkshire. However, he escaped from the facility on April 29th, 1952, and hours after his escape, killed another young girl, five-year-old Linda Bowyer.

Straffen was apprehended shortly afterward, and this time convicted of murder and sent to HM Prison Frankland in County Durham. He was initially sentenced to death, but after his mental state was assessed, the sentence was commuted to life in prison. He died there in 2007, after serving more than fifty-five years.

The tragic case of Christine Butcher is still unsolved, and sadly notable today for having been the murder that may have inspired a serial killer.