Eighty-two-year-old Isabelle Gray lived alone in a Victorian-style terraced house on Austhorpe Road in Crossgates, Leeds, West Yorkshire. She was a somewhat frail woman, relying on a mobility scooter when she went out and a stairlift when she was at home.
At around one o’clock on the afternoon of January 27th, 1997, neighbors saw Isabelle arrive home from a shopping trip and park her mobility scooter outside. It was the last time she was seen alive.
From a later reconstruction of events, it was determined that two individuals likely knocked on Isabelle’s door a few hours later, probably offering handyman services. These men then allegedly forced their way inside the residence, where they dragged the helpless old woman into the kitchen and brutally assaulted her, trying to get information about any valuables in the house. The perpetrators made off with Isabelle’s purse and a significant sum of cash they found in a bedroom drawer.
The following day at around noon, a Meals on Wheels worker arrived at Isabelle’s home, and finding the front door unlocked, went inside. There, she discovered Isabelle’s lifeless body in the kitchen. The victim’s spine was fractured from the severe beating, and her cheekbone was also broken.
During the course of the investigation, authorities discovered that Isabelle had been ripped off by some builders not long before, and that she had paid them in cash. It was therefore surmised that these same builders had either returned to rob her, or told associates about her stash of money. A neighbor of Isabelle’s reported to police that two men in a white Transit van had knocked at the door two weeks prior to the murder; the men asked if the hedges needed pruning, but the neighbor turned them away.
The only other clues found at the scene were a set of keys on the stairs of Isabelle’s home, and a series of footprints in the attic that detectives believed belonged to the killers.
The case was featured on the Crimewatch program twice and remains open, but as of August 2024, the shocking murder of Isabelle Gray is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 