Jacqueline Ansell-Lamb death location

 

The media branded the perpetrator of two unsolved murders in 1970 the "Monster of the Motorway". The bodies of two young women were found sixty miles apart but shared similarities. Both women were last seen hitch-hiking along motorways and both were sexually assaulted before being strangled to death. One was called Jacqueline Ansell-Lamb and here I am by some woods in the countryside where she was found.

 

Jacqueline was an 18-year-old secretary who worked in Manchester. In March 1970 she had attended a party in Earl's Court in London. She attended a party while the and met a man. The next day - a Sunday - she tried to hitch-hike back home about two hundred miles away. The man she'd met at the party gave her a lift to a slip road in London. She then thumbed a lift with another man 50 miles up north. It’s not known how she travelled further north from here but she was murdered as the next day she didn’t arrived home and was reported missing. She was last seen a few miles from where I’m standing between 9pm and 10pm at a transport café just off the M6 motorway. Witnesses saw her there talking to a man dressed in "business-like" clothing before she got into his car. He may not have been the murderer as there was one unconfirmed sighting of her thumbing for a lift on an "A" road just a mile from where her body was dumped.

 

Six days later her partially clothed body was found by a boy and his dad walking through Square Wood where I’m stood in these photos. Bruises and cuts on Jacqueline's neck and face indicated she had fought with her attacker. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The murderer left her body in a posed position. Seven months later another woman hitchhiking - 24-year-old teacher Barbara Mayo - was also murdered. She had been thumbing a lift two hundred miles north to pick up her boyfriend's car which had broken down. Her body was found up about sixty miles away from where I'm stood, dumped in a quiet wood. She had also been raped and strangled.

 

Both murders remain unsolved despite massive police hunts. With no solid clues twenty years passed before Cheshire and Derbyshire police forces appeared on a joint appeal on a 1990 episode of Crimewatch as there were "striking similarities" between the cases. The “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe who started his killing spree in the 1970s was formally questioned but ruled out by investigators in 1997 through DNA.

 

On a sunny Thursday afternoon I visited Square Wood where Jacqueline was found. It lies off a single track road cutting through countryside and smells strongly of cow manure. In the thirty minutes I was there nobody passed me. Some cows were lying together in the middle of a field and got up to enquiry what I was looking at. I had photos of the crime scene with me and could see from the contours of the open field adjacent to Square Wood whereabouts the body had been dumped. Was she murdered here or just dumped here? We'll probably never know.

 

A ten-year-old lad and his dad from the nearby farm found the body (I'm sure they've relived the memory many times.) If you'd wanted to hide a body here you could have hid it deeper into the wood but Jacqueline's body was left on show not far from the gate. Is the killer still alive? Did he kill Barbara Mao too? Has he killed another else? Is he still alive? One day will I be watching the teatime news to see police have arrested someone for both murders having taken DNA and found it matched that on the women's ripped-off clothes? Probably not.

 

I stroked the cows hot heads and had a coffee in the car. Still nobody passed down the lane (more of a track.) The poor lass is buried with her dad in a cemetery in Cambridgeshire. I did a salute and left.