Forty-six-year-old James “Jimmy” Adams worked at the New Beehive pub in Westgate, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. At fifteen minutes past midnight on Tuesday, May 26th, 1981, Jimmy finished his shift and began walking toward home.
He stopped at the public toilets at the intersection of Carlisle Road and Bavaria Place, and after leaving the facilities, witnesses saw a man following him into the darkness. A short time later, these same witnesses heard a man screaming, and chased after an individual who appeared to be running, though they failed to catch him. Jimmy Adams was then found, bloody and dying, near the public toilets. He had been stabbed twenty-two times.
Witnesses described the killer as a white male in his mid to late twenties, standing about five-foot-five to five-foot-nine, with a medium build and fair hair. He wore a pair of very distinctive spectacles that gave him a passing resemblance to the American country and folk singer John Denver. Significantly, the killer left a mile-long trail of his own blood as he fled the scene.
The case sadly went cold not long after it occurred, and though the investigation was reopened in 2003 after new DNA evidence came to light, there has been no further progress toward solving the murder since that time, and the motive for Jimmy Adams’s brutal slaying remains a mystery.
Crime Immemorial 