Twenty-year-old Jane Bigwood was an art student, living as a squatter with several other people in a block of flats in south London. On October 21st, 1976, she was found stabbed to death in her apartment.
The knife she was stabbed with belonged to another squatter named Mervyn Russell, who was thirty-two at the time. He admitted to police that the knife was his, but stated that all the other residents used it; he vehemently denied stabbing Jane. Nonetheless, he was arrested and charged.
A tuft of the killer’s hair was found clutched in Jane’s hand. Though the hairs were sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis, they were not introduced as evidence at Russell’s subsequent trial, and were likewise not mentioned at the 1977 appeal following his conviction.
Russell spent six years in prison before a television show called Rough Justice decided to reexamine his case in 1982. Upon further examination of the hairs, it was positively determined that they did not belong to Russell, and he was freed in 1983.
A man named Miklos Molnar, who had also lived in the same building as the victim and frequently used Russell’s knife, was then suspected, but he had since died. His body was exhumed in 1983 to compare his hair with the sample, but the results were inconclusive owing to the fact that Molnar’s hair was heavily dyed.
Sadly, Russell never really bounced back from his false conviction, and had something of a tragic life before passing away in 1995 at the relatively young age of fifty-one.
Jane Bigwood’s brutal murder has never been solved.
Crime Immemorial 