Fifty-two-year-old Joy Hewer was a retired primary school teacher and devout Christian who lived alone in a sixth-floor flat on St. David’s Court in Walthamstow, London, England. According to her family, she was a kind, dedicated woman who spent her retirement volunteering for various charities in the area.
She was involved in just such an endeavor on the afternoon of October 17th, 1995, when she visited the London Healing Mission in Notting Hill. She left there at around three-thirty p.m. and was later seen at a drugstore near her home shortly before six p.m. She then presumably returned to her residence.
Later on that night, at around ten-thirty, a neighbor heard loud banging coming from Joy’s flat but didn’t think much of it. Nearly an hour after that, though, an unidentified man phoned the emergency number from a phone box on Fulbourne Road to report that there was smoke coming out of Joy’s apartment.
When firefighters arrived at eleven forty-five p.m., they extinguished two small blazes in the lounge and the bedroom that seemed to have been deliberately set. Once the smoke had cleared, they discovered Joy’s lifeless body lying across her bed. She had been raped, beaten, and stabbed to death.
There was no sign of forced entry and nothing appeared to have been stolen, leading authorities to suspect that Joy might have known her killer and that he had targeted her specifically for sexual assault.
During the investigation, detectives attempted to locate the person who had phoned in the fire, as well as another individual who had been waiting for a bus near the phone box and whose voice was heard when the caller asked what street they were on. Neither of these individuals has been identified.
A man was also spotted on CCTV cameras entering Joy’s apartment building at around ten-thirty p.m., approximately the same time as Joy’s neighbor heard banging. The suspicious man is white, was aged between thirty and forty at the time of the murder, had short dark hair, and was wearing a light-colored jacket. This individual has likewise never been found.
The case was featured on Crimewatch in late 2015, but as of August 2024, the horrific rape and murder of Joy Hewer is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 