Clocaenog Forest Man

On November 14th, 2015, brothers Andrew and Mark Middle were camping in Clocaenog Forest while watching that year’s Wales Rally GB. While out looking for firewood that night, Mark stumbled across a skull partially hidden in the mossy undergrowth.

When police arrived, they determined that the skull belonged to a human male. A further search of the woods over the ensuing weeks yielded the remainder of the skeleton, and forensic examination determined that the body had likely been dumped in the forest between 1995 and 2005.

The victim, who came to be known as Clocaenog Forest Man, was most likely murdered by blunt force trauma to the head at some point around 2004; he had probably been killed elsewhere and dumped in the woods at a later time.

The man was believed to be older than fifty-four at the time of his death, and likely in his sixties. He was thought to have been well-built and stood between five-foot-eight and five-foot-ten.

Clocaenog Forest Man had several distinctive attributes that authorities hoped would make him easier to identify. He suffered from a spinal injury and fused vertebrae that would have limited his mobility, as well as arthritis and an inflammatory condition of the joints. He had also injured his wrist and had broken his nose at one point.

Further, he was missing several teeth, which suggested that he had ignored his dental health earlier in life. A number of complex dental procedures, though, had been performed when he was older, and the work was so unique and of such high quality that investigators were confident that the dentist who performed it would be able to recognize it.

There was clothing found near the remains, but it wasn’t clear whether the items were linked to the victim. The clothing consisted of a dark red pair of underwear that Marks and Spencer had sold in 1999 and a dark green sweater manufactured by Pringle of Scotland between 2000 and 2004.

Serial killer Peter Moore, who was convicted of murdering four men in 1995, told police he knew the identity of Clocaenog Forest Man, and that he was a mature student at Aberystwyth University who had gone missing in 1996. Moore claimed he didn’t know the victim’s name, but authorities were willing to listen to his information since one of Moore’s known victims, twenty-eight-year-old Edward Carthy, had been dumped very near to where the body of Clocaenog Forest Man was found.

Police determined that a forty-six-year-old man named Roger Evans from Stoke-on-Trent did indeed disappear in January of 1996 during his first year at Aberystwyth University, but further investigation found that the timelines did not match up and that Roger Evans was likely not Clocaenog Forest Man.

The case was featured on Crimewatch in 2016, and flyers featuring a facial reconstruction were distributed at the 2017 Wales Rally GB, but as of this writing in July 2024, the victim and his killer remain unidentified.