Thirty-five-year-old Jackie Waines made her living as a sex worker, and was also known by the alias Linda Guest. She had three children and lived on Hepburn Road in St. Paul’s, South Gloucestershire, England. She also kept a flat on Bevin Court where it’s believed she took her clients.
At a little past eleven p.m. on Saturday, April 21st, 1985, Jackie was spotted on Ashley Road, walking in the direction of her flat. It was the last time she was seen alive.
At twelve-thirty a.m. on Sunday, a young couple knocked at the door of Perrinpit Farm and told the woman living there that there had been a rape. The three of them hiked out to a bridle path, where they saw the half-nude body of Jackie Waines lying in the dirt, covered in blood. Her minidress was disordered and one of her shoes was missing. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed multiple times. The spot where her body lay was about ten miles from where she was last seen.
Police immediately launched a massive investigation, but leads were thin on the ground. Many men who frequented sex workers in the area did not want to cooperate with police for fear of being exposed.
However, witnesses did report seeing a plain white van with no windows and damaged paint on one side near the area where the body was found, and this same vehicle was spotted more than an hour later at the intersection of Iron Acton and Latteridge Road.
These witnesses described the driver as a slim man, aged anywhere from twenty to forty, with short dark hair and clad in a bomber jacket. He had reportedly been seen putting a big white bundle on the ground beside his van.
The couple who found the body also reported that they’d seen a dark Ford Cortina in the area shortly before they happened upon the scene.
Coincidentally, Jackie’s friend, neighbor, and fellow sex worker Margaret Crowley had also been murdered, four years before in 1981. Her killer, Brian Peel, was eventually caught and imprisoned.
The slaying of Jackie Waines, though, remains unsolved, nearly forty years later.
Crime Immemorial 