Thirty-nine-year-old Derek Grain had been living in Hertfordshire, England, but in the late summer of 1980, had moved to Bristol for work. Friends described him as something of a loner who enjoyed his drink, but nonetheless a cheerful, friendly fellow who was generous to a fault.
Derek had been staying at the Unicorn Hotel, and on Halloween night of 1980, decided to avail himself of a couple of the nearby nightclubs along Park Street. The bearded man was seen by several witnesses drinking in two different clubs, Vicki’s and Curves, before heading out at two a.m. toward Brandon Hill Lane. Authorities would later find this route unusual, as it wasn’t necessarily a route Derek would have taken to get back to his hotel.
A few hours later, a nurse named Sally Isaac was walking to work at St. Mary’s Hospital when she saw Derek Grain’s lifeless body, lying in a pool of blood on Brandon Hill.
When police arrived, they discovered that Derek had been brutally beaten to death with a sand-filled traffic cone, which was found about eighty yards from his remains. It also appeared that the assailant or assailants had kicked the victim in the head and body as he lay prone on the road; a bloody footprint was found on the back of Derek’s shirt.
Because Derek’s jacket had been forcefully torn off and sixty pounds in cash was missing from his pockets, investigators surmised that the attack had been a robbery gone horribly wrong. They further hypothesized that someone may have seen Derek spending significant sums of money in the nightclubs and had followed him with the intention of theft. The savagery of the assault did give officers pause, however.
During the inquiry, several witnesses came forward and claimed they had seen what appeared to be a fight occurring in the area at about three a.m., and more than one of these individuals stated they saw a red Jaguar in the vicinity which may have had some connection with the crime. The owner of this vehicle was eventually traced at his home in Reading, but he had not been in Bristol at the time of the attack; interestingly, however, the car was registered in Hitchin, the same town that Derek Grain was originally from.
Police also sought a “foreign-looking” man who had been seen running along Queen’s Road at around the time of the assault, though he was never tracked down. Officers did manage to locate a gang of five teenagers who had been spotted walking down Park Street at around two-thirty a.m. wearing witch hats, but they proved to have no link with the murder.
A new bid for information was launched in 2016, but as of this writing, the horrific slaying of Derek Grain remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 