Thirty-two-year-old Carol Clark had grown up with her parents in Yate, South Gloucestershire, England. She’d apparently had a normal upbringing, but at the age of seventeen, she began getting into drugs, and by her early twenties, took to working as a prostitute to pay for her addiction. Her family was unaware of her profession.
On the evening of Friday, March 26th, 1993, Carol was seen in Montpelier, Bristol, not far from the flat on Picton Street that she shared with her boyfriend. She was clad in a black sweater, a blue denim skirt, and a brown leather jacket.
It’s assumed that she picked up a customer sometime that night, but her movements after that last sighting are unknown.
Two days later, on the afternoon of Sunday the 28th, Carol’s partially nude body was discovered lying in the undergrowth on the banks of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. She had been strangled and had a broken neck. The location where she was found was about thirty miles from where she’d last been seen alive.
Forensic examination determined that Carl had likely not been killed until late Saturday night or early Sunday morning and that she’d eaten a meal only two hours before her death.
Several known rapists and killers of prostitutes were questioned about Carol Clark’s murder. The first of these was Alun Kyte, whose arrest for rape in 1998 put him on the police’s radar. Though Kyte was eventually convicted for the slayings of two sex workers—Samo Paull and Tracy Turner, both of whom were strangled and dumped alongside country lanes in Leicestershire—he was never able to be linked to Carol’s murder.
Gloucester serial killer Philip John Smith also became a suspect in 2000 after he was convicted of killing three sex workers in Birmingham: Carol Jordan, Jodie Hyde, and Rosemary Corcoran. But again, there was no evidence linking him to the death of Carol Clark.
Strangler Tony King was also questioned during the investigation but was never charged.
The case went fallow for many years, but in 2023, an unnamed sixty-six-year-old man was arrested after some undisclosed new information was provided to authorities. However, this suspect was eventually bailed, and there have been no further developments since that time.
The murder of Carol Clark remains unsolved, more than thirty years later.
Crime Immemorial 