Pressure on police to find Wimbledon killer put the wrong man in the frame

In its awful way, it had all the ingredients of the classic media murder story: the beautiful blonde victim, the lyrical summer setting, the child witness, the murderous stranger at large - and all taking place in Greater London. Inevitably, the police were under enormous and immediate pressure to capture the killer of someone whose face smiled out of the front pages of every newspaper.

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"Someone out there must know who did this," said Detective Superintendent John Bassett as he made the first of what were to be many appeals. "He had to be covered in blood so I would think that some mother, wife, lover, sister or even boyfriend must know who perpetrated this crime." The pace of arrests and the quantity of information given to the police led most of us to imagine that a murder charge would follow swiftly. Within a day of the murder, more than 500 calls had come in, many of them giving information about the many men who liked to expose themselves on Wimbledon Common or who had made approaches to women in the area...more

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