Fifty-two-year-old Esther Soper was a widow who moved alone to a home in Mutley, Plymouth, Devon, England, after the death of her husband. She was a devoutly religious woman, and was very active in the Plymouth Brethren’s Exclusive Order, a strict group that discouraged contact with outsiders.
At around nine p.m. on New Year’s Day of 1976, two members of the congregation grew worried when Esther hadn’t turned up for their regular meeting, which was unprecedented for her. Upon arriving at her residence, they discovered Esther’s lifeless body lying in the hallway. She had been beaten in the head with a cider bottle and strangled with her own stockings. The killer or killers had then wrapped her remains in a curtain.
The house looked as though it had been ransacked, leading authorities to believe the murder was a robbery gone wrong. Because Esther’s home was up for sale at the time, police checked to see who might have had appointments to come look at the property. Following this lead turned up the name of Clifford Sparks, a man who had come to the house to look at it a few days before the murder and had an appointment to see it again on the day the crime occurred.
Though investigators tracked down nine men with the name Clifford Sparks, none were the suspect they sought, and they began to speculate that the name the man had given the real estate agent was possibly false.
Despite a massive investigation that comprised tens of thousands of interviews and dozens of detectives working the case full-time, the killer was never located, and the case was tenuously closed after only seven months.
In 1997, police attempted to get DNA evidence from some items of clothing found at the crime scene, but were unsuccessful, and in 2006, a cold case review unit was set up to look anew into the murders of Esther Soper and others. But just as before, no new leads emerged, and the horrific crime remains unresolved as of 2024.
Crime Immemorial 