Thirty-three-year-old Shelley Morgan was a mother of two who was born in the United States but later moved to Bristol, England, where she was attending art classes at the Bristol Polytechnic Art College.
At around eight-thirty a.m. on the morning of June 11th, 1984, Shelley dropped her children off at school and then went to nearby Leigh Woods to make sketches and take photographs. Shortly after arriving there, she disappeared.
Her whereabouts were unknown for more than four months. Then, on October 14th, a group of kids playing in the area stumbled across Shelley’s remains in a copse in Backwell. She was nude and had been stabbed repeatedly.
Her clothing, red-framed glasses, camera, tripod, sketchbook, and patchwork shoulder bag have never been found. Police were especially keen to track down Shelley’s 35mm Olympus OM20, releasing photos of similar cameras and publishing the camera’s serial number, 1032853. They hoped finding the camera might lead them to the killer, and urged collectors to check their cameras to see if the serial number was a match.
Other than that one lead, the investigation seemed hampered from the start. There were a few witness sightings of Shelley on the day she was murdered, but none of them were confirmed. Authorities surmised that whoever the killer was had likely entered and left the area by car, but further than that, the case remained stubbornly inscrutable.
Investigators made a renewed plea in the media in 2019 for information, but as of this writing in May of 2024, the sexually motivated slaying of Shelley Morgan is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 