Forty-one-year-old Julie Foster lived in Elsenham, Essex, England with her eight-year-old son Jay. She ran a pet shop in Thorndon, and until recently, had been dating a former professional soccer player named Kim Wassell.
At around eight-forty-five on the morning of Tuesday, July 10th, 2001, Julie’s son Jay overslept, realizing upon waking that he was late for school. He headed into his mother’s bedroom to ask her about breakfast but saw to his horror that Julie was lying naked in a pool of blood, her head bashed in with a blunt instrument. The traumatized child called emergency services.
It was soon discovered that Julie had been beaten to death with a cricket bat, likely at some time between midnight and seven a.m. Jay told authorities that he thought he’d heard a creaking floorboard in the house overnight, which was presumably the killer creeping through the residence.
Police pursued several leads, including the driver of a transit van seen in the area at around the time of the slaying, a man spotted running along Station Road at around six a.m., and another man seen on the street talking on a cell phone on two consecutive nights, including the night of the crime. The running man was described as white, aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, with short blond hair. He was carrying a white plastic bag. The man on the cell phone was also white, in his mid-twenties, with short, wavy brown hair. None of these individuals was ever tracked down.
The main suspect in the brutal murder, though, was Julie’s ex-boyfriend Kim Wassell. Julie had broken up with him two weeks before she was killed, and detectives surmised that his anger had motivated him to break into her house and savagely beat her to death. Wassell was arrested shortly after the crime and released but was re-arrested sometime later and subsequently placed on trial.
At the hearing, prosecutors argued that Wassell had a motive to kill his ex-girlfriend, and pointed out that fibers found on the back door of Julie’s house matched fibers on a pair of Wassell’s gloves. The defense countered that the fibers could have matched any number of different items of clothing. Wassell did not take the stand.
In the end, the lack of evidence led to Wassell being acquitted of the murder in May 2002, and since that time, there have been no further developments in the case. The slaying of Julie Foster is still unsolved as of November 2024.
Crime Immemorial 