UK UK- Deborah "Debbie" Linsley, 26, brutally stabbed to death, enroute from Wood train station to London Victoria service, 23/03/88, *photofit & DNA*

[dotr]

by Holly Evans 16 APR 2022 rbbm.

Murder of woman, 26, on train still unsolved despite killer's blood at scene

Deborah Linsley was stabbed 11 times while travelling between Petts Wood and London Victoria

www.mylondon.news

''Deborah Linsley, known as Debbie to her friends and family, had relocated from Bromley to Edinburgh in the years before her murder, where she worked as a hotel manager. She had travelled back to London during the week of her murder to attend a hotel management course, and to spend time helping with the preparation of her brother's wedding, at which she was due to be a bridesmaid.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 23, 1988 she was taken by her brother Gordon to Petts Wood train station at 2pm, where she boarded the Orpington to London Victoria service at 2:16pm. This was the last time she would ever be seen alive.''

....

''At some point during her journey, Debbie was viciously stabbed to death. She sustained 11 stab wounds to her face, neck and abdomen, five of which were to the area around her heart. She also had defensive wounds to her hands.


The Metropolitan Police had said it was possible the attack had started as an attempted rape, however there was no concrete evidence of sexual interference. She was eventually found at 2:50pm while the train was at Victoria's platform two after a British Rail porter walked through the train.

Both the carriage floor and seat were covered in blood, with some of this later discovered to be that of her killer, who had also been injured during the struggle. When her body was found, she was still in possession of her jewellery and a £5 note from her brother, ruling out the possibility that she had been the victim of a robbery gone wrong.

The weapon used was never recovered, although it is believed to have been five to seven-and-a-half inches long with a heavy blade. The police later described it as a good quality kitchen knife, and stated their belief the murder had been premeditated as it was likely the killer had left home and travelled with the weapon.''


''Over the course of the initial investigation, 650 individuals were questioned and ruled out. Certain individuals remained of interest to the police, specifically a "scruffy man with dirty blonde hair" who was seen leaving one of the compartments on the train at Penge East, and was believed to have then re-boarded, possibly into the same seating area as Debbie.

A photofit was also released of a man the French au pair had noticed getting off the train in Victoria, who was described as being aged about 40, well built, muscular and with a moustache and wearing a light sweater and grey trousers.''

 

[CocktailQueen]

The case was featured on Crimewatch.

 

[dotr]

Clipping from The Observer - Newspapers.com

Clipping found in The Observer in London, Greater London, England on Mar 27, 1988.

theguardian.newspapers.com

2003

Gone but not forgotten

The faces of these murder victims may be fading into history, but an elite squad of detectives has been brought out of retirement to find their killers using DNA. Can science succeed where conventional methods have failed?

www.theguardian.com

''In the Linsley case, there was a small sample of blood at the scene that did not belong to the victim, but in 1988 there was no way of testing it. The first successful DNA match wouldn't take place for another year and even then it required a bucketful of blood for any hope of a result. Now they can get a DNA profile from something invisible to the eye, and last year they did so. Chamberlain says they know a lot about the killer from that drop. They just don't know the suspect's name. The DNA profile has been put on a database to be cross-checked against the 1.7 million that are already held there - from recent convictions, from serving prisoners - but there have been no matches.

In the meantime, they are following other routes. 'You need to take yourself back to the original scene,' Chamberlain says. 'We try to look at it and say what would we have done in this situation.' They have stood on the platform at Pett's Wood to get a sense of the landscape. They have taken the train, studied the timings. On the wall of the office is a diagram of the 1988 carriages. They believe around 70 people travelled on it. They know the identities of 55 of them and their names appear on the diagram, alongside information about when they got on and off, the banal detail of a March day lived by dozens of people nearly 15 years ago.

All the evidence points to the killing having taken place in the six-minute journey between Brixton and Victoria.''

rbbm

Gone but not forgotten

The faces of these murder victims may be fading into history, but an elite squad of detectives has been brought out of retirement to find their killers using DNA. Can science succeed where conventional methods have failed?

www.theguardian.com

''Arthur was an insurance broker before he retired. Marguerite, the more watchful of the two, was a DSS fraud investigator. Both know about police processes and systems, and what they didn't know they have taught themselves. They even developed a correspondence with a double murderer, who told them about a ruse used by prisoners to buck the sensitivity of DNA profiling. 'Prisoners spit into each others' mouths just before DNA swabs are taken,' Marguerite explains to me. 'It contaminates any samples.' This is the kind of expertise you develop when your daughter is murdered.''