Thirty-year-old Marie Garrity was born and raised in the West Midlands, and was a devoted mother to her three young children, whom she adored despite the circumstances that pushed her into sex work. Hillfields, a rough neighborhood in Coventry, England, was a notorious red-light district in the 1990s, drawing women like Marie to the streets for survival. Friends and family described her as kind-hearted and fiercely protective of her kids, often juggling babysitters to make ends meet while working the local area.
By all accounts, Marie was not one to abandon her responsibilities lightly. On the evening of September 7th, 1995, she made arrangements for a babysitter to watch her children at their modest home in Bretts Close, a quiet cul-de-sac. Around midnight, she kissed them goodnight, promising to return soon. It was a routine she knew well, but this time, the door closed behind her, and Marie Garrity was gone.
The hours ticked by into the early morning of September 8th, and then the day stretched on without word. The babysitter, growing anxious, alerted family members. Marie’s stepfather, Alan Smith, then sixty-two and living in Earlsdon, Coventry, rallied the search efforts. Calls to friends, hospitals, and police stations yielded nothing. Marie’s purse, keys, and personal items remained untouched in her home, suggesting no planned departure.
West Midlands Police launched an investigation, treating the case as a high-risk missing person from the start. Hillfields’ reputation as a danger zone for sex workers amplified concerns; disappearances in such areas often spelled foul play. Local and national media appeals flooded the airwaves, with posters of Marie’s face plastered across Coventry. Her children, too young to fully grasp the loss, were placed in the care of her sister in Wiltshire, where they remain supported to this day.
Despite exhaustive searches—door-to-door inquiries, tip lines, and even psychic-led hunts—no sightings emerged. Marie had simply evaporated into the night, leaving her family in a limbo of grief and unanswered questions.
As years passed without closure, investigators turned their gaze to a chilling suspect: Alun Kyte, the self-styled “Midlands Ripper,” a truck driver whose nomadic life across Britain’s motorways made him a phantom killer of prostitutes. Born in 1964 in Stoke-on-Trent, Kyte was a misogynistic loner with a history of violence, asthma-riddled childhood, and a penchant for fraud and theft to fund his wanderings. By the early 1990s, he had escalated to rape and murder, targeting sex workers at service stations, strangling them in stolen cars, robbing their bodies, and dumping remains near highways, often stripped and posed in degrading ways.
Kyte’s confirmed victims included twenty-year-old Samo Paull, abducted from Birmingham’s red-light district in December 1993, raped, strangled, and left in a Leicestershire ditch; and thirty-year-old Tracy Turner, a deaf mother snatched from an M6 service station in March 1994, similarly assaulted and discarded near the M1. DNA evidence, witness accounts, and Kyte’s own prison boasts sealed his 2000 conviction, earning him a life sentence with a twenty-five-year tariff. In 2023, he received a third life term for historical child sex offenses.
But Kyte’s tally may be far higher. Operation Enigma, a 1996 probe by the National Crime Faculty, linked him to over a dozen unsolved murders of sex workers from 1986 onward, using forensic databases and geographic profiling. Among them: Barbara Finn, a thirty-one-year-old Coventry prostitute who vanished from Hillfields in October 1991 after leaving her daughter with relatives for a night’s work—eerily similar to Marie’s routine. Police believe Kyte, who frequented the Midlands in a brown Ford Sierra, struck in Coventry around these times, his pattern aligning with the women’s disappearances.
Marie’s case was formally tied to Kyte in March 2000, when detectives released his photo and a voice recording to prompt memories of unreported assaults or sightings. Kyte himself bragged of killing twelve women, though no DNA has confirmed Marie or Barbara as victims. A 2002 appeal by Alan Smith captured the family’s torment: “We don’t know if she’s dead or alive… Please, if you know anything, tell us.” That same year, Marilyn Payne, mother of another Coventry missing woman, Nicola Payne (who disappeared in December 1991), penned a letter to Kyte begging for truth—though her daughter’s case is less directly linked.
Hope flickered in June 2002 when police, aided by forensic archaeologist Professor John Hunter of Birmingham University, excavated the garden of a derelict house on Winchester Street in Hillfields. The site, tied to the area’s sex trade, was scoured for remains of Marie, Barbara, or others. Nothing turned up, but the dig underscored the depth of suspicion in Coventry’s underbelly.
West Midlands Police have kept the file open, reviewing Kyte’s records periodically but finding no smoking gun. As recently as 2022, renewed media scrutiny questioned if Kyte’s victim count exceeds his convictions, with Marie and Barbara at the forefront. Advances in DNA and geographic tracking, born from cases like Operation Enigma, offer slim but persistent hope.
As of December 2025, neither Marie Garrity’s whereabouts nor the identity of her probable killer are definitively known.
Crime Immemorial 