An e-fit of the passenger seen in Penny Bell's car.
Nov 15 2018
rbbm
The Inside Story of Britain's Most Notorious Cold Case Murder
"What is known about the day of Penny's murder is as follows. At 8.30AM, Alistair left for work as usual. The family were in the midst of house renovations, and builders were already at work.
Penny left the house at 9.40AM, telling the builders she was running late for 9.50AM appointment. No record of any appointment was listed in her diary and it has never been established who Penny had arranged to meet.
Three days prior, on the 3rd of June,
Penny had withdrawn a sum of £8,500 from her and her husbands joint bank account. Again, it has never been established what this money was spent on.
It's believed that
Penny was murdered around 10.30AM. She'd been seen motionless in the driver's seat of her car, parked in the leisure centre, at 11AM. Passersby had presumed she'd been sleeping. At 12.15AM, a member of the public alerted the police. They discovered Penny had been stabbed 50 times in the chest and arms, the latter presumably defensive wounds, with a three to four-inch blade. Forensics would later say the wounds indicated that
Penny had initially been stabbed from the passenger's seat. Then from the driver's window.
At the time of the murder, the leisure centre car park would have been full, though Penny's car was parked in front of a high hedge that ran around the perimeter of the park, meaning the view from the front would have been obscured. The Jaguar was essentially soundproof. Nevertheless,
the question as to how the killer – who would have been severely bloodstained by the attack – was able to leave the scene without being seen has perplexed anyone who has ever studied the case. Police quickly ruled out the motive of robbery due to Penny's handbag being left in the car with seemingly nothing removed. Police later reported that she hadn't been sexually assaulted."
"By 1992, 4,000 people had been questioned. Some witnesses recalled that they'd seen a Jaguar XJS at around 10AM, travelling at a speed of around 10mph, with hazard lights flashing.
A woman was struggling with a man in the passenger's seat. She'd tried to pull the car off the road, but the man – around 40, dark hair, bearded, wearing a dark blazer and bracelet on his right wrist – kept her on it. Yet the most sombre detail might be that six months after the murder, a witness came forward to tell police that he'd seen Penny driving into the car park with a passenger. She was mouthing the words, "Help me." He'd done nothing."
"My dad always said that prior to
the day she died, my mum was the most stressed he'd ever seen her. He said he tried to talk to her but she just brushed it off as being tired. There's just so many loose ends…"
One of the details of the case that has never been explained is why,
when police came to examine the murder scene, there were wallpaper samples laid out in the back of the car."
