Thirty-three-year-old Miriam Culine was known as The Candy Floss Queen, mainly because she was married to fairground boss Fred Culine, who was more than forty years her senior. The fairground in question was located in Spennymore, County Durham, England.
At around six-thirty p.m. on the evening of August 21st, 1978, Miriam left a friend’s house, stating that she was going to her husband’s caravan. She never arrived there, however, and was duly reported missing later that night.
The following morning at around five a.m., police discovered Miriam’s body inside a burning vehicle at Station Allotments. Forensic examination determined that the victim had been drugged or knocked unconscious and then placed in the car, which was subsequently set on fire with oil and paraffin while she was still alive.
Miriam’s husband Fred was quickly eliminated as a suspect, but it soon emerged that Miriam had been having a not-so-secret affair with a Romany horse trader named Lawrence Wood, who was then twenty-one years old. It was determined that Miriam had sex with someone of Wood’s blood type the night before she was murdered, and thus Lawrence Wood was brought in for questioning.
Though Wood admitted to the affair and to helping Miriam put away money to eventually get away from her husband, he vociferously denied killing her, speculating that Miriam’s husband had likely hired someone to do the deed. Bolstering this possible scenario was the fact that Fred Culine had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife not long before the murder that was set to expire.
Lawrence Wood did stand trial for the murder and for stealing some jewelry from the victim, but was acquitted by a jury.
Despite the verdict, some still believed him to be responsible, and it’s possible that this suspicion ate at his mental health over the years. In April of 2004, Wood was found dead by suicide, having rigged a hose to the tailpipe of his white Mercedes van and dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. Wood left a note, but made no mention of the Miriam Culine case.
Authorities closed the investigation shortly after Wood’s acquittal, and Fred Culine died about a year later, leaving the slaying of Miriam Culine officially unsolved, more than forty-five years on.
Crime Immemorial 