Forty-eight-year-old Margaret Lightfoot lived with her husband Roy, an architect, in Loughton, Essex, England. The couple had two grown daughters, who lived elsewhere.
At around noon on November 24th, 1975, a neighbor watched Margaret leave the house with the family’s Airedale puppy and head toward Epping Forest, where Margaret often took the dog for walks.
Sometime later that afternoon, another neighbor noticed the dog running around loose in the street, at which point they corralled the animal and put it back in the Lightfoots’ yard.
As the afternoon faded into evening, however, Roy became worried when his wife didn’t return home, and he phoned the police to report her missing. Authorities searched for several hours and found nothing, then halted the search overnight, though Roy and a handful of neighbors kept looking.
The following morning, a police dog came across Margaret’s nude body, stashed in the thick undergrowth. She had been raped, punched in the face, and strangled with her dog’s leash. Her clothes were scattered around the scene, and her Wellington boots were discovered beneath her body.
During the investigation, over one hundred potential suspects were questioned, but no arrests ever resulted, and the case soon went cold. In 2016, detectives stated that they were hoping to retrieve DNA from Margaret’s boots, which were presumably pulled off by the killer, but admitted they were concerned that fingerprinting of the boots that had taken place in 1975 might have compromised the evidence.
There have been no more recent updates in the case as of 2024, and the savage rape and murder of Margaret Lightfoot remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 