On the afternoon of May 10th, 1982, forty-four-year-old mother of two Ann Lee walked out of her house in Highfield Gardens, Aldershot, Hampshire, England. With her was her beloved Labrador retriever, Monty, who she was taking for a walk.
Ann stopped at the nearby home of her friend, sixty-six-year-old Margaret Johnson, who had her own dog, a red Irish setter named Tara. The pair and their dogs were taking their usual walk around the common.
About halfway along their route, an unknown individual leaped out and attacked them, stabbing both women multiple times with a double-edged knife before fleeing the scene. Ann was later found lying dead on top of a small hill, her dog whining beside her. Margaret had attempted to run but had died slumped against a gate near the periphery of the path. Her dog was also unharmed.
Neither woman had been raped or robbed, and police were baffled as to why someone would commit such a vicious, random crime in broad daylight. Although the path was quite close to an army base, no one had seen or heard anything particularly unusual.
One witness later reported seeing a man in a camouflage jacket in the area at around the time of the murder, and another said they’d seen a truck driver in the vicinity, sitting in his vehicle with his hands over his face as though he was crying. Neither of these leads seems to have been followed up on.
Several hours after the murder, however, a forty-year-old man named Peter Fell phoned the police from outside a pub and confessed to the crime. He gave the wrong date and was clearly very inebriated; he even said that he knew who the killer was before giving his own address. Officers, unsurprisingly, didn’t take his story seriously.
But Fell called back the next day, drunk again, and stated that he was the killer. Investigators were still reluctant to entertain his claim, and it would be another two weeks before he was brought in for questioning. After ten hours of interrogation, authorities determined that he could not have murdered the women and was simply a fantasist, and let him go.
A year went by, and the crime was still unsolved. Peter Fell had since moved to Bournemouth, but he was evidently insistent that police back in Hampshire needed to pay attention to him. He phoned them again and drunkenly told them that he was responsible for the double homicide.
Fell was brought in again for questioning, at which point he retracted his confession before later confessing again and taking that statement back as well. He even got details of the crime wrong, stating that he had hit one of the women with a stick because she looked like his mother.
Despite this back and forth, and despite the fact that Fell had confessed to crimes he didn’t commit before—such as claiming responsibility for the Yorkshire Ripper murders—police eventually arrested him and placed him on trial. Unbelievably, he was convicted in August of 1984, although by that time he was vehemently protesting his innocence.
Peter Fell served seventeen years in prison before new evidence in the case completely exonerated him and he was released.
The identity of the person who stabbed Ann Lee and Margaret Johnson to death, therefore, remains a mystery.
Crime Immemorial 