Fifteen-year-old Andrea Troupe lived with her family on Pencraig Way in Peckham, southeast London, and attended Silverthorne School. According to her mother, she was a friendly, happy-go-lucky girl who loved life and had a good relationship with her boyfriend Steven.
Monday, May 2nd, 1983 was a bank holiday, and by all accounts, Andrea was acting normally throughout the day. Sometime in the dark early hours of Tuesday morning, however, it’s believed that she snuck out of her house for reasons unknown.
Later on that Tuesday morning, a friend of Andrea’s dropped by the house and Andrea’s sister Audrey went to her room to get her. It was then that she discovered Andrea missing. The family wasn’t initially alarmed, thinking that Andrea had perhaps already left for school.
When she didn’t return home that evening, though, they began to panic. Worse still, they saw on the news that a body had been found about a mile away, in Warwick Gardens park. Ten minutes after the broadcast, police knocked on the door of the Troupe residence to inform them that the body belonged to Andrea.
The teenager had been brutally stabbed in the neck and heart a dozen times. A post-mortem also revealed a fact the family hadn’t known: Andrea had been six months pregnant.
Andrea’s boyfriend Steven was questioned about the murder but quickly dismissed as a suspect, and after that, no further arrests were ever made. It is still unclear whether Andrea was met by someone in a car who took her to the park, or whether she walked there in the middle of the night, though the former is considered more likely.
In 2021, it was reported that a double murderer then known as Michael Smithyman (now known as Michelle) confessed to a fellow inmate that he had killed Andrea Troupe. Smithyman had been given a life sentence in 1993 for the execution-style shooting of his pregnant twenty-two-year-old girlfriend April Sheridan in 1990, as well as the gangland stabbing of thirty-year-old drug dealer Terence Gayle only days later.
Although Smithyman retracted his confession in 2015 when he was up for parole, the Troupe family is still pleading with authorities to reopen the case and interview the imprisoned killer about Andrea’s slaying. As of this writing in September of 2024, however, the crime is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 