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.