Thirty-three-year-old Mark Yendell was a married father of one who worked as a British Rail steward at Bristol Temple Meads station. Although he and his wife Sue had separated for a year, they had recently reconciled and were planning to buy a house together.
On Monday, September 10th, 1984, Mark left work at around nine-thirty p.m. and walked toward his red Lancia in the parking lot. It was at this point, however, that something dreadful befell him.
Mark’s whereabouts were unknown for several days, but on the morning of Tuesday the 11th, a security guard spotted Mark’s car parked at a strange angle near the water’s edge at Welsh Back. The car was unlocked and the keys were still in the ignition.
More ominous still, there were bloodstains on the driver’s side window as well as on the back seat.
Investigators fanned out from the vehicle to search for the missing man, and eventually his body was recovered from the fourteen feet of water beneath the Bristol City Docks. He had been bludgeoned a number of times in the head before being tossed into the water.
Authorities found a large amount of blood in the train station lot near where Mark usually parked his car, leading them to suspect that he had probably been ambushed as he walked to his vehicle, after which his assailant had stuffed him into the back seat of his own car and driven to the waterfront, where he dumped the body. Because Mark was a large man and wouldn’t have been easily thrown into the water by a single individual, detectives theorized that there may have been at least two attackers.
The motive for the crime, however, was a complete mystery. Robbery didn’t seem likely, as £100 had been left untouched in Mark’s vehicle. On the other hand, it wasn’t clear if anyone would have held a grudge against Mark or sought to take revenge on him for whatever reason.
Seven people were subsequently arrested in Bournemouth in connection with the crime, though six were released without charge. The seventh, though, was initially charged with the murder. Edward Witt had been running a pub in Bournemouth with Mark’s wife Sue during the year that Mark and Sue were estranged; it’s possible Sue and Edward also had a romantic relationship.
Edward denied killing Mark, claiming that he knew perfectly well that Sue and Mark were getting back together and that he had even helped Sue move back in with her husband. Sue also told police that Mark and Edward were good friends and that Edward held no animosity at all about the situation. The charges against Witt were dropped in December of 1984.
The case was featured on Crimewatch in 1985, and a new plea for information was released in 2017, but as of September 2024, neither the killer nor the motive in the Mark Yendell homicide has been identified.
Crime Immemorial 