Crime Immemorial

Esme Anne Hoad was born in July 1897 in Maidstone, Kent, England, a short distance from the bustling port of Dover. She lived as a spinster, residing alone at 2a Havelock Road in Tonbridge—a modest semi-detached house in a residential neighborhood lined with similar Edwardian properties. By 1982, at the age of eighty-five, Esme was battling breast cancer, a condition that had weakened her physically. Neighbors and acquaintances remembered her fondly as a “nice lady” who might offer an occasional complaint but was otherwise gracious and self-sufficient.

The exact sequence of events on Wednesday, December 8th, 1982 remains shrouded in uncertainty. Esme was alone in her home when an intruder, or perhaps someone she knew, struck with lethal force. She was battered to death with a blunt instrument, though some reports suggest the possibility of stabbing with a sharp object, perhaps a knife. The attack was so ferocious that Esme may have lingered in agony in her hallway for at least a day before succumbing to her injuries.

Her body was discovered shortly after the assault, though details of the finder’s identity have not been publicly detailed in available records. The scene suggested a personal confrontation: no forced entry was widely reported, hinting that Esme might have opened the door to her killer. The motive appeared opportunistic or driven by rage, with no obvious signs of robbery—though the precision of the attack left little for forensics to grasp in an era before widespread DNA testing.

Kent Police launched an immediate and thorough probe, fingerprinting everyone in the vicinity of Havelock Road. Detectives quickly identified a key lead: a man who had visited Esme’s home multiple times in the month leading up to her death. On December 31st, 1982, just weeks after the murder, they released a photofit image of this suspect—a composite sketch depicting a middle-aged man with distinct features.

The photofit circulated widely in local papers and national news, prompting appeals for information. Despite these efforts, no arrests followed, and the case file grew dusty as leads evaporated.
Over the years, the investigation has seen periodic revivals. In 2018, true crime enthusiasts renewed calls for justice, but as of 2025, Esme’s killer remains at large.

Esme’s murder did not occur in isolation. 1982 was a particularly grim year for women in Kent, with a cluster of unsolved killings raising fears of a serial perpetrator. Just six months earlier, on June 11th, forty-six-year-old mother of three Jean Vera Brook was found clubbed to death in Bedgebury Forest near Goudhurst—a wooded area not far from Tonbridge. Jean, a local resident out for a walk, was savagely beaten, her body discovered by ramblers. The method echoed Esme’s bludgeoning, though no murder weapon was recovered in Jean’s case, and the perpetrator’s identity stayed elusive.

Snippets from contemporary reports describe Esme’s death as the “third” in a spate, following Jean’s and possibly another unidentified attack in the Bedgebury area earlier that year or in 1979 (the “Bedgebury Forest Doe,” an unnamed woman beaten with a wooden stake). These proximity and similarities—blunt force trauma against women in rural or semi-rural Kent—fueled speculation of a linked offender.

The cases resurfaced dramatically in November 2021, when David Fuller—a sixty-seven-year-old hospital electrician dubbed the “morgue monster”—was convicted of murdering two young women, Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce, in Tunbridge Wells in 1987. Fuller, who abused over 100 female corpses in hospital mortuaries over fifteen years, received a whole-life sentence. His crimes, spanning decades and locations near Tonbridge, prompted Kent Police to form a specialist team to scour unsolved files for links. Among them: Jean Brook’s murder and the Bedgebury incidents. Though Esme’s name has not been explicitly tied in public updates, the temporal and geographical overlap—just six months and a few miles apart—has kept her case under review. Fuller, living in the area in his twenties during 1982, has refused to cooperate, but the probe continues, potentially leveraging modern forensics like DNA from archived evidence.