Twelve-year-old Keith Lyon was a talented classical musician, the son of a Brighton band leader named Ken Lyon and his wife Valda. Keith also had a seven-year-old brother named Peter, and lived with his family in the village of Ovingdean, Brighton and Hove, Sussex, England.
At a little past two p.m. on the afternoon of Saturday, May 6th, 1967, Keith left his house to walk to nearby Woodingdean to purchase a geometry set. Even though it was the weekend, he was wearing his school uniform.
Keith was walking in an area called Happy Valley, a bridleway between his home and his destination. At approximately three o’clock, as he was en route to Woodingdean, he was attacked by an unknown assailant or assailants.
An hour and fifteen minutes later, a teenage girl walking her dog discovered Keith’s body under some bushes; it appeared that the boy had been thrown down the bank from the path. Authorities determined that the child had been stabbed eleven times in both his chest and back, and the four shillings of pocket money he had been carrying were missing.
Several days later, the knife believed to be the murder weapon was found at a school about a mile away from the scene of the crime; it was a steak knife with a white handle. Police were also able to determine that the killer had likely washed Keith’s blood off of themselves in the public bathroom nearby.
A number of witnesses came forward during the course of the investigation. Two of these witnesses claimed to have seen four boys fighting on the bridleway at around the time of the murder, and a bus driver later reported that he had noticed two boys on his bus who appeared to be very agitated.
More than five thousand area teenagers were fingerprinted, and two thousand schoolchildren interviewed, but no leads were forthcoming, and no arrests were made.
Many years later in 2002, the evidence was rediscovered in the basement of a police station in Brighton, and the case was re-examined. Two men were arrested at this time, but were eventually released, and police later announced that neither man was a suspect any longer.
Four years after that, in 2006, authorities announced that they were searching for a family that had emigrated to Canada shortly after the murder; it seemed that they were interested in the son in particular in connection with Keith Lyon’s slaying.
After that, though, the investigation seemed to stall once again, and there have been no updates since.
Crime Immemorial 