Thirty-two-year-old Wendy Jenkins lived with her mother and stepfather in Barton Hill, Bristol, England, and in the late 1970s, she had turned to sex work because she was short of money. She was described by friends as a nice girl who had simply fallen on hard times.
On the night of Saturday, August 25th, 1979, Wendy was spotted at the Inkerman pub on Grosvenor Road earlier in the evening, then later at the Shady Grove nightclub on Ashley Road. She was seen leaving the club alone at around eleven-thirty p.m.
There wasn’t another potential sighting of her until five-thirty a.m. on August 27th, which was a Bank Holiday Monday. According to a witness, Wendy had been talking to a smartly dressed, dark-skinned man in his thirties at the corner of Drummond Road and City Road. The man stood about five-foot-eight and had short hair.
The following day, at around eight-thirty a.m., a laborer at a St. Paul’s building site found Wendy’s remains beneath a pile of sand that had been delivered on the previous Friday. She had been bludgeoned in the head, and her body had been mutilated.
On the same building site, a coat, pantyhose, shoes, and a purse thought to belong to the victim were discovered in an alley beside one of the warehouses.
During the investigation, a man came forward and reported that he heard screams outside the window of his home on City Road shortly before ten-thirty p.m. on the Sunday before Wendy’s body was found. He then said he saw a white Volvo with only one functioning rear light speeding away from the scene. Attempts to trace this vehicle were unsuccessful.
Wendy’s stepfather Reg Hoskins told detectives that Wendy and her mother had gone to visit friends in St. Paul’s not long before she was murdered and that they had been confronted with a man who got into a vicious argument with Wendy. Wendy had also told her mother that she had been beaten up and threatened. The individual who allegedly argued with her is unidentified.
For a time, Wendy was hypothesized to be a victim of notorious Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who was active at around the same time and likewise bludgeoned sex workers in the head. However, investigators are almost certain that Sutcliffe was not responsible, and that Wendy was killed by someone local to Bristol. Sutcliffe would ultimately be convicted of thirteen murders in 1981.
A new appeal for information was launched as recently as 2017, but as of this writing in September 2024, the brutal slaying of Wendy Jenkins remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 