It was April 2nd, 2001, and two friends—thirty-year-old Mark Thompson and thirty-four-year-old George Price—decided to go shooting in a wooded area near the M57 in Huyton, Knowsley, Merseyside, England. It was a hobby they reportedly both enjoyed, as they made frequent appearances in makeshift gun ranges in the local area.
At around seven p.m., a witness saw three men, two of whom were presumed to be Mark and George, carrying an Army-style shooting target shaped like a soldier into the woods. The third man was never identified. Mark and George had also been spotted earlier in a maroon Vauxhall Astra, driving along Knowsley Lane toward the wooded copse.
The following morning, both Mark and George were found dead, lying face down in a field in Ince Blundell near Crosby. They had both been shot in the head, but they’d also been beaten and slashed with a knife; George was stabbed in the chest. The killer had then used gasoline to set the bodies on fire.
In the wooded area where the two men were last seen alive, police found a .25 caliber bullet embedded in a tree trunk that matched the bullets that had killed the victims. These appeared to be from a semi-automatic handgun colloquially called a “handbag gun” because of its small size and popularity with American women.
It was noted that the wooded copse where the men had gone shooting was not the site where the murder took place.
Both George and Mark were known to be small-time criminals, but the exact motive for the brutal execution was unclear. The horrific crime remains unsolved nearly a quarter century later.
Crime Immemorial 