Crime Immemorial

On the afternoon of June 29th, 1964, fifteen-year-old Yvonne Laker got on a train at Southampton Central Station in England; she was on her way back to boarding school after spending the weekend with her grandparents in Barton on Sea.

Seven station stops later, just as the train left Basingstoke, a twelve-year-old boy pushed open the toilet door in one of the carriages and discovered Yvonne’s bloody, lifeless body on the floor. Her throat had been cut with a broken sherry bottle.

Police later found her blue satchel in the middle carriage of the train, and the following day, searchers found her shoes and beret about ten miles south of Basingstoke; the killer had evidently thrown them out of the train while it was in motion.

Also found on the train was a suspicious paper bag with a reinforced bottom; detectives believed that this bag had held the bottle that was used to kill Yvonne. The sack also contained a tin holding four biscuits from Marks and Spencer, and a paper wrapper reading Midland Dairy Maid Farmhouse Bread. Authorities released details of this clue to the public, and the fact that no one came forward to claim the bag heightened their suspicions that it had probably belonged to the killer.

Yvonne was not sexually assaulted, and the attack was so frenzied that investigators were baffled as to what the motive could have been. It was theorized that she had probably been killed just after the train had left the Winchester station, as many passengers had disembarked there, leaving some of the carriages empty. It was further hypothesized that she had probably been knocked unconscious with the bottle as she sat in her seat, and then was dragged to the toilet where she was slain.

The inquiry went nowhere for several days, but then police picked up a twenty-seven-year-old father of three for an unrelated vehicular offense in North Hampshire. While in custody, he told officers that he had been on the train where Yvonne was murdered and that he had seen her being dragged into the toilet cubicle.

The more authorities looked into this man, however, the more they began to suspect that he himself might have been the killer. A railway porter testified that he had seen this man getting into the same carriage as Yvonne on the fateful day, and it also came to light that he’d had some fragments of green glass in his pocket which might have come from the sherry bottle used to murder the schoolgirl.

The man was adamant that another passenger had killed Yvonne, stating that this individual was about thirty years old, of average height, and clad in a white shirt and a tie. The man also stated that he had asked this individual what was wrong with the girl and why he was dragging her, and the suspect told him that she was sick and to mind his own business.

Another witness said that he had seen a man getting off the train shortly after the murder occurred and that he was acting suspiciously, but this witness asserted that the man he saw did not look like the man the police had arrested. Additionally, the accused man had no blood on his clothes, despite the toilet cubicle being awash with blood.

Only hours after all the testimony at the trial was heard, the unnamed man was acquitted of Yvonne’s murder, though he was later sentenced to eighteen months on an unrelated arson charge.

The bizarre, broad-daylight railway murder of Yvonne Laker therefore remains officially unsolved.