Sharon Tyler was twenty-four years old and lived on Church Road in Tilney All Saints, Norfolk, England with her common-law husband.
On November 12th, 1991, Sharon’s neighbor had reportedly gone out to get Chinese food when he heard Sharon arguing with a man inside her house. Concerned, he went inside and found a lifeless Sharon lying in a pool of blood in her kitchen. A post-mortem examination determined that she had been stabbed ten times in the chest.
From the beginning of the investigation, the neighbor who found the body was the prime suspect, but unfortunately, the forensic expert who worked on the case made several blunders that muddied the waters. For example, he noted that Sharon had oral sex with someone other than her husband not long before she died, but the expert failed to record the presence of semen in her throat during the initial examination, and only added the information to his findings later on.
Further, hairs found clutched in the victim’s hand were not analyzed properly and were later destroyed. And lastly, spots of blood on the murder weapon were not evaluated sufficiently, as two spots from different time periods may have been conflated into one.
Despite all the mistakes, the neighbor was eventually arrested and convicted of the crime, though he was acquitted at retrial.
Following his acquittal, the case went cold once again, and the murder of Sharon Tyler remains unsolved as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 