Crime Immemorial

Thirty-six-year-old Diana Maw was a highly accomplished woman, a fairly well-to-do recruitment consultant who lived in a high-end flat on Woodfield Court in Ealing, London. She was planning on moving into a much bigger house with her boyfriend before too long.

However, she would never get the chance. On July 20th, 1988, Diana was due to give a training seminar, and she was getting ready for work at her home. Sometime that morning, she was on the landing outside her second-floor flat when a crossbow bolt came whizzing at her from afar, hitting her in the back of the head and severing her spinal column. She was killed instantly. Her neighbor, a fifteen-year-old boy, discovered her body at around eleven-thirty a.m.

Diana’s purse had been stolen from the scene of the crime and was found about a month later on a footpath behind her flat.

As police began their investigation, a number of troubling facts began to surface. For example, more than a month prior to the murder, on June 12th, 1988, Diana’s briefcase was stolen from outside her home. The briefcase contained personal information about her, and though locked, could be opened with a combination that would be easy to guess. There were also indications that Diana had been receiving anonymous phone calls for quite some time before she was killed.

From these leads, police discovered that the former girlfriend of Diana’s partner, a woman named Jane Salvesen, had become somewhat obsessed after her boyfriend left her to be with Diana. Jane admitted to following the couple around, including on dates to the movies, and it was implied that she had been the one making the phone calls, and possibly the person who stole Diana’s briefcase.

Although she was fairly open about stalking Diana, she vehemently denied threatening or killing her, but authorities were suspicious, and eventually ended up arresting her and charging her with the murder in November of that year. Prior to her arrest, detectives were also pursuing a man who had supposedly been seen carrying a crossbow in the area at the time of the slaying. The man was described as about twenty years old, standing around five-foot-eight, with reddish hair and “hard” eyes.

The crossbow bolt itself had an aluminum shaft and a steel tip and had likely been fired from an easily concealable mini-crossbow, possibly a Barnet Trident.

Jane Salveson was placed on trial in April of 1990, but no solid evidence of her guilt was presented, and she was acquitted. Only two months later, her former boyfriend’s house caught fire in what was suspected to be an arson attack. Jane was charged for this crime as well, but again was acquitted. In November of 1990, she was taken into custody again after it was believed she broke into her ex-boyfriend’s yacht and stole his diary. Amazingly, she was acquitted a third time, and stated that she believed the police had become “fixated” on her.

Jane Salveson’s involvement in the slaying has never been proven, and the mysterious man with the crossbow seen by one witness has never been identified. The murder of Diana Maw remains unsolved, more than three decades later.