Six months after the death of Eve and in the midst of the investigation,
16 year old Lynne Weedon was walking home from a pub with friends after celebrating
her O level results. It was around 11:15pm on Wednesday September 3rd in Hounslow,
west London, 17 miles southwest of Leyton, where Eve was killed.
Lynne had left the Elm Tree pub on Heston Road that night and was heading back to
her home where she lived with her parents on Lampton Avenue. She parted company with her
friends on Great West Road and crossed over to an alleyway known as The Short Hedges,
where she continued the last part of her journey alone.
By this time, her parents, who had begged Lynne not to walk home alone,
were already in bed. At around 11:20pm Lynne was approached by a man and struck
over the head with a blunt, heavy object. It fractured her skull,
and while she lay unconscious the stranger moved her body to the gates on a nearby
electrical power station. He threw her over gates, dragged her out of sight and then raped her.
At 7:30am the following morning, she was found by a man called Mr. Voice who was the caretaker
of nearby Lampton School, the same school Lynne had attended. His house overlooked the grounds
of the power station where she lay. Amazingly, she was still clinging to life when taken to
the hospital. Lynne’s parents, although concerned at their daughter’s absence,
assumed she had stayed at a friend’s house, but they were soon to the learn the awful truth.
Lynne Weedon never did regain consciousness and died a week later on 10th September, 1975
of a brain heamorrage at the West Middlesex Hospital in Isleworth.
Police again had very little to go on until a man by the name of Bernard Andrews made
contact the day after Lynne’s attack. He informed them that he’d been flagged down
by a hitch-hiker at 1am the night before at the Great West Road–Sutton Lane junction,
close to where Lynne had been attacked. He said the man,
who asked for a ride to the west country, was around 26 years of age and seemed agitated.
Mr. Andrews said that his instinct was to get away from him, so he drove on. This ultimately
failed to expose any worthy leads and the strange encounter was eventually forgotten.
The lives of Lynne Weedon and Eve Stratford were polar opposites,
and there was no reason for police to believe their murders were carried out by the same
person. There were no obvious details to link the two, and that’s how it remained, for now.
Almost four years had passed since the untimely deaths of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon when
the body of Lynda Farrow was discovered on the afternoon of January 19th 1979, 19 miles south
west of where Lynne Weedon had been attacked, but only 4 miles north of the scene of Eve’s murder.
Lynda Farrow was a 29-year-old mother of two and four-months pregnant at the time. Sadly,
it was her two young daughters, aged 11 and 8, who found her body at their home on Whitehall Road,
Woodford, East London. They had returned from school at 3:30pm and peeked through
the letter box to see her lying facedown in the hallway. She was fully clothed
and her throat has been so badly cut that she had almost been decapitated.
There was no sign of a break-in and no sign of a struggle, although there was a murder weapon.
A blood-stained serrated carving knife was found in the kitchen. Unidentified palm marks were found on
a door frame, and a clear set of size 9 boot prints were observed in the snow beside Lynda’s car.
There were also witness reports of – and I quote – "a sun-tanned man"
wearing a checked jacket loitering close to Lynda’s home. Another
witness claimed to have seen a man, aged around 30 with thick hair and sideburns,
running along Whitehall road at around the time of Lynda’s death.
Some of the circumstances of Lynda’s death were uncanny similar to those of Eve Stratford,
but these similarities were just the beginning. Until December of 1978, the mother of two had
worked as a casino croupier at London’s International Sporting Club in Mayfair,
less than a mile from the Playboy Club where Eve had worked. Seeing as both women worked at
gambling establishments in the city centre, police began to wonder if they were looking
for a sore loser or a gambler with a grudge. Another similarity, albeit a dubious one,
was that on the days that Eve and Lynda were murdered, it had snowed. Scotland Yard began
to wonder if they were dealing with a man who specifically killed under the cover of snowfall.
Lynda Farrow had recently separated from her husband Paul and was living with her old flame,
Freddie Gay. Both men were questioned by police,
but neither could provide clues. Just like Eve, Lynda’s death remained a mystery.
A man by the name of Abdul Khawaja, who was of Lebanese descent, was a regular at the Playboy
Club. He had befriended Eve, even going to lunch with her on occasion. They were just
friends according to the other bunny girls who knew him. Although he appeared to be well-liked,
he was described as a pimp by The Sun newspaper in 2015 and was also linked to Lynda Farrow,
who was said to dislike him after he had started an argument in the casino she worked in.
The fact that he knew both women made him a prime suspect, and according to him he was
harassed by police. Some of the girls at the club remember how he broke down
one day telling them that police would not leave him alone. Another glaringly obvious
reason why Khawaja was of special interest to Scotland Yard was the report of the so
called “sun-tanned man”, said to be loitering close to Lynda Farrow’s home before she died,
but Khawaja could not be linked to the crime scene, and the mystery man was never traced.
Lynne Weedon’s case was reopened in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2006,
using new DNA testing techniques, that tests were run on semen collected from both the
Weedon and Stratford crime scenes. To the shock of Scotland Yard the DNA profiles matched. Finally,
31 years on, the police knew that the same man had committed both murders.
A new investigation was launched into Eve’s death in 2007, and the DNA profiles of 53
men were compared to samples collected from objects obtained in 1975. From what I can
gather from sources I’ve read, either no DNA was ever extracted from
the materials found at the home of Lynda Farrow, or there was no DNA to be extracted. However,
the new investigation was a laborious one and it took some time for all the men to be tracked down.
Among those men were David Brenner and Ed Alexander,
the editor and photographer for Mayfair magazine. They were cleared.
Abdul Khawaja, the regular at the Playboy Club and friend to Eve Stratford, who was also linked to
Lynda Farrow, had recently died. However, he was officially cleared of any suspicion
when a DNA sample taken from his son did not match the sample taken from Eve’s home.
Tony Priest, who was struck off the suspect list in 1975, left London for the Netherlands soon
after Eve’s murder. He did, however, voluntarily give a DNA sample after detectives traced him
to Amsterdam in 2009 where he worked as a prison warden. He too was cleared.
Although there was a definite forensic link, the police still hadn’t found their
man. They made another appeal on the 40th anniversary of Eve and Lynne’s murders. They asked
anyone to come forward with information to try to narrow down their search to a list of names.
During a 2015 broadcast of BBC’s Crimewatch, it was explained that before 1995 in Britain,
no DNA was taken from criminals. That meant that anyone arrested before that time could
be the culprit. It also meant that the killer had not been arrested since 1995. A rarity
given the 20-year time-frame, which baffled criminologists.
This is assuming he was still alive, of course, or hadn’t moved abroad,
both being distinct possibilities. During the Crimewatch programme, an offer of £40,000 was
made to anyone with information that led to the man’s arrest. 50 calls were
received after that 2015 broadcast, none of which helped bring the killer to justice.
With all modern DNA investigations drawing a blank so far, to this day, the only thing
police have to go on is the criminal profile of the person. They were looking for a white male
who would have been between 17 and 30 at the time of the crimes. According to this profile,
and assuming he is still alive, he would be between between 60 and 73 years old today.
Retired police officer, Chris Clarke, and journalist Tim Tate put forward and argument
in their 2015 book Yorkshire Ripper: the Secret Murders that Peter Sutcliffe,
the famed Yorkshire Ripper, had been responsible for the deaths of all three women.
The book mentions that Sutcliffe was in the area at the time of Eve Stratford’s death,
staying in Alperton, 14 miles west of Eve’s home,
for his sister-in-laws wedding which took place only four days after Eve was murdered.
Although Eve’s murder bore the same signatures as some of Sutcliffe’s confirmed future killings,
it was thought to be sexually motivated. Sutcliffe insisted that his murders were not
sexually motivated. Because of this, and the fact that Sutcliffe had apparently targeted only prostitutes
in the Yorkshire and Lancashire areas, police did not consider him at the time.
This is something Chris Clarke believes was a simple ploy by Sutcliffe to distance himself from other unsolved crimes across the country.
The murder of Lynne Weedon, on the other hand, did match Sutcliffe’s MO. More specifically,
she was hit over the head from behind and she was left partially naked. When you consider
that Sutcliffe was only four miles away from Weedon’s home at the time of her death, shortly
before catching a plane from Heathrow, you can’t help but seriously consider the Ripper theory.
Chris Clarke states that it is entirely conceivable that Peter Sutcliffe was in London when Lynda
Farrow was murdered. He also makes reference to the descriptions given by
witnesses of a man with thick hair and side burns, a description that strongly resembles Sutcliffe.
Peter Sutcliffe was a non-secretor, meaning he did not leave traces of his blood type in his
saliva or semen. Currently, all that police have on record for Sutcliffe are hair and mouth swab
samples. You’d think that all it would take is a simple blood test to find out if he was
the murderer in these cases, but according to Clarke and Tate’s book, it isn’t that simple.
A court order would need to be granted in order to do this. Chris Clarke said:
Although no efforts, as yet have been made.
At the time of Sutcliffe’s killing spree, the West
Yorkshire police had brought him in for questioning on numerous occasions,
letting him go each time to kill again. Following his eventual capture in 1981,
an investigation was launched into why West Yorkshire police took so long to apprehend him.
Lawrence Byford, who was Inspector of Constabulary at the time, undertook
the lengthy investigation and presented the report to parliament in 1982. The Byford
report concluded that Sutcliffe was probably responsible for numerous other killings.
Former detective, Colin Sutton, spoke of the unsolved cases in 2016. He is convinced that
the murderer responsible for the deaths of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon is
also responsible for the death of Lynda Farrow. He told The Sun newspaper: