Thirty-one-year-old Perry Wenham was no stranger to hardship. By 1992, he had lived quietly in a flat on Birkfield Drive in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, for three years, keeping largely to himself and avoiding the spotlight. A familiar face at the Nippin Café on St. Helen’s Street, where he was a regular customer, Perry grappled with personal demons, including a history of glue sniffing that had drawn him into brushes with the law. In 1985, he was sentenced to five years in prison at Ipswich Crown Court for a string of break-ins, a chapter that marked him as known to local police.
Yet, Perry was not without compassion. Just two years earlier, in 1990, he had organized a vigil in memory of a friend killed in a brawl on Ipswich’s bustling Cornhill, a gesture that revealed a man capable of empathy amid his struggles. On the night of his death, however, alcohol had taken hold. Witnesses later described him as heavily intoxicated, stumbling out of the Great White Horse Hotel around eleven thirty p.m., his steps unsteady under the dim streetlights.
On January 23rd, 1992, what began as a typical Friday evening for Perry Wenham spiraled into horror in the secluded churchyard of St. Lawrence’s. Sometime after midnight, as Perry and two acquaintances made their way from Cornhill toward the church, an altercation erupted. Eyewitnesses reported seeing the group heading in that direction, but by the time the two men reemerged alone, Perry was gone.
The attack had been frenzied and merciless. Perry was stabbed eleven times, his throat slashed in a deep cut that severed the jugular vein on the right side of his neck. Defense wounds on his arms and hands told a desperate story of resistance; he had fought back as an unseen assailant struck, first knocking him to the ground before delivering the fatal blows. A passerby discovered his body at around two-thirty a.m. on January 24th, sprawled between two tombs in a crimson pool. By dawn, a trail of blood stained the pavement, a macabre breadcrumb leading detectives to the scene.
The investigation moved swiftly in those early days. Fingers pointed toward the two men last seen with Perry Wenham: twenty-five-year-old Shaun Ellis and twenty-three-year-old Andrew Suttle. Witnesses placed them with the victim earlier that evening, and the pair was spotted under the Lloyds Avenue arch without him shortly after, before hurrying away via Tavern Street and an alley off Dial Lane. In interviews, one claimed to have witnessed an unknown man striking Perry, causing him to collapse.
Charged with murder in December 1992, Ellis and Suttle faced trial at Norwich Crown Court. But the case unraveled spectacularly. Judge Patrick Garland halted proceedings, lambasting the prosecution’s evidence as “deplorably weak” and directing the jury to acquit. The not guilty verdicts came swiftly, leaving the courtroom and the public in stunned silence. No one else was ever charged.
For Ellis, the ordeal lingered like a scar. Speaking out years later, he described the night as falling on his twenty-fifth birthday, on which he had downed about twenty pints. He insisted he and Suttle were friends with Perry Wenham, with no animosity in their final moments together.
As of 2025, thirty-three years after the crime, Perry Wenham’s murder remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 