In January of 1968, young mother Sandra Djan was at home in Carmel Gardens, Norton, Stockton-On-Tees, England. Her five-month-old daughter, Kimberley Jackson, was in her baby carriage just outside the back door of the house while Sandra prepared the baby’s bottle and bath. Five minutes later, Sandra went to retrieve Kimberley, but saw with horror that both her daughter and the carriage were gone.
The rattles that had been fastened to the baby carriage were found in the alley beside the block of flats where Sandra lived, presumably because they made a lot of noise when the carriage moved.
About an hour and a half later, a resident spotted an abandoned baby carriage in a parking lot and thought it looked suspicious, so phoned the police. Upon arriving and beginning a search, investigators discovered the body of Kimberley Jackson lying face down in a large pool of water in Billingham Bottoms. She had been deliberately drowned.
In a heartbreaking twist, it came to light that Sandra had actually seen a teenage boy pushing a baby carriage outside the window of her flat, but hadn’t thought anything about it at the time. She described the suspect as approximately fourteen years old, clad in a long green jacket with a hood.
Detectives launched a nationwide investigation, and Sandra herself began visiting area schools, desperately trying to identify the boy she had seen. For the rest of her life, she remained wracked with guilt that she had seen her daughter being taken but hadn’t realized it in time to stop the tragedy from occurring.
The case went fallow for many years, but in 2004, Sandra pleaded to authorities to reopen the investigation. Sadly, the appeal was evidently spurred by the death of Sandra’s twenty-six-year-old son Aaron from alcohol poisoning and a drug overdose. It was hoped that new advances in DNA might be able to finally bring some resolution to the horrific crime, but as of this writing, there have been no new developments.
Crime Immemorial 