Twenty-five-year-old Joy Sweatman lived in a semi-detached house on St. Andrew’s Road in Coulsdon, London, England, with her two-year-old daughter Sarah; she also had a five-year-old son named Simon, but he lived with his father Gerald in Purley. Joy also rented out the upper floor of her home to a fifty-three-year-old tenant named Vernon Patton and his two children.
On June 1st, 1977, Vernon returned home at around one-thirty in the afternoon and stumbled into a horrific nightmare. Joy Sweatman was lying in a pool of blood, having been repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer. After she’d fallen to the ground, her killer had stomped on her body, placing a plastic bag and a pillow over her head for good measure.
Even more monstrously, the perpetrator had then proceeded to attack two-year-old Sarah, beating her head so badly that she was unconscious for four days. The child eventually recovered and went to live with her grandparents, but Joy Sweatman did not survive.
Vernon Patton’s two children had been in their flat upstairs at the time of the murder but had not seen or heard anything suspicious.
There were several neighbors about at the time of the incident, as it was during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and people lined the streets nearby to see Her Majesty going by on the train. One witness reported to police that he’d seen a man wearing a fawn-colored coat and a flat cap leaving the Sweatman house, wiping a hammer on his coat and appearing to have a red substance smeared on his face. This individual was then seen getting into a white Austin Maxi saloon car.
Because there was no sign of forced entry, investigators presumed that Joy had known her killer. Her ex-husband Gerald was questioned but dismissed as a suspect, after which authorities hypothesized that the attacker was perhaps someone that Joy had met at one of the nearby clubs she liked to frequent.
Police checked into all 3,500 owners of white Austin Maxi saloon cars in the country, but failed to find the culprit. Blood evidence collected from the scene was all found to belong to the victim; the killer left seemingly no forensic evidence behind, despite the “frenzied” nature of the attack.
The savage murder of Joy Sweatman and the attempted murder of her daughter Sarah remain unsolved, more than forty years later.
Crime Immemorial 