Twenty-seven-year-old Julie Smailes was described as a fun-loving young woman who worked as a sales manager at Sun Micro Systems in Greencroft, County Durham, England. She lived alone in a house on Wingrove Terrace in nearby Leadgate.
On the night before Halloween of 1996, Julie was at home, watching TV and chatting on the phone with her boyfriend. At some point after she hung up, however, a dreadful fate befell her.
In the early morning hours of October 31st, firefighters were called to the residence. After extinguishing the blaze, they found the body of Julie Smailes. She hadn’t died from smoke inhalation, though; she had been tied up, strangled, and stabbed nearly four dozen times.
From very early on in the investigation, suspicions swirled around a twenty-seven-year-old man named John Thompson, who was believed to be one of the perpetrators. Authorities were convinced that two people had been involved in Julie’s murder directly and that Thompson was likely one of them. They also surmised that two additional people were involved indirectly, one to ransack the house and one to possibly act as a lookout.
Thompson was reported to have known Julie, having sold her drugs on a handful of occasions. Later evidence demonstrated that Julie had received a large payout from stocks relating to her job shortly before she was murdered, a sum that may have been as much as £20,000. It was theorized that Thompson somehow found out about this windfall and went to Julie’s house with the intention of robbing her. Notably, traces of Thompson’s blood were found in the bedroom of Julie’s house.
In August of 1998, John Thompson was the prime suspect in the murder of eighteen-year-old Rachel Tough, who had been babysitting for him. Rachel was bludgeoned to death in Thompson’s home. Before Thompson could be arrested, however, he committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree branch.
In early 2002, another man charged in the Julie Smailes murder case, thirty-year-old Darren Willis, was released from custody after it was determined that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a trial.
The case has appeared on the popular Crimewatch TV program and a substantial reward is still on offer for information leading to a conviction, but there have sadly been no updates, and as of May 2024, the murder of Julie Smailes remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 