Seventy-one-year-old Leonard Farrar was a retired merchant navy captain who lived alone in a home left to him by his parents. The residence was a semi-detached house on Cardinal Road, Beeston, Leeds, England.
In the spring of 2002, he had a strange incident occur at his home. Apparently, a couple he didn’t know showed up on his doorstep asking about his house, which they said they thought was for sale. While he spoke to the man about the mix-up, he realized that the woman had gone into the house without permission, and Leonard Farrar later found that £40 worth of tobacco was missing from the home. Though he didn’t report this odd theft to police, he did tell a neighbor about it. It’s still unclear whether this event had anything to do with the horrific fate that would befall him just a few short weeks later.
On May 3rd, 2002, authorities found a blue Fiat Panda burning on a swath of unused land. Witnesses reported seeing a man standing near the car and watching it burn, but this man was never identified.
Tracing the vehicle registration to Leonard Farrar, officers then proceeded to his home on Cardinal Road.
When they arrived at the residence at around six-thirty p.m. on May 4th, however, they found that Leonard had been brutally murdered, and was lying slumped over in his hallway. The cause of death was stabbing, but it appeared that Leonard had suffered a prolonged bout of torture before his death, which may have included multiple stab wounds that were not immediately fatal. There were a few defensive wounds, and Leonard’s clothes were askew as though he had tried to struggle with his assailant or assailants, but there was little evidence of disarray in the rest of the house.
A neighbor reported that they’d heard a loud thud at around two in the morning, followed by two smaller thuds. The witness had looked out the window as the thuds had shaken the walls, but hadn’t seen anything suspicious and had gone back to bed.
Police called the attack “sustained and controlled,” though the motive for the torture and murder is still unknown. It’s believed that at least two attackers were responsible; three persons of interest—a woman and two men—were interviewed about the crime in June 2002, but none of them was charged.
The slaying of Leonard Farrar remains unsolved more than two decades later.
Crime Immemorial 