The last time Caroline Pierce, 20, was seen alive was in November 1987 at her bedsit in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Her body was found in a ditch 40 miles away three weeks later. She had been strangled.

Lynne Weedon was 16 when she was bludgeoned to the ground, hurled over a fence into an electric sub-station, raped and left in a coma.
She died in hospital a week after the attack in Hounslow, Middlesex, in September 1975.

Natalie Pearman, a 16 year old drug addict and hooker, was found strangled at a beauty spot on November 2nd, 1992 in Norwich.
All her body hair was shaved off.

Wendy Knell, 26, was found dead in her bedsit in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on June 23rd, 1987.
She had been sexually assaulted and battered to death.

Schoolgirl Kate Bushell, 14, had her throat cut by a maniac as she walked a neighbours dog in Exwick, Devon, in November 1997.
Her body was found in a field 300 yards from her front door by her horrified father.

Linda Bryant, 41, died from stab wounds to her neck and chest when she was subjected to a horrific attack while walking her dog in Truro, Cornwall, in October 1998.

Claire Tiltman, 16, was stabbed more than 40 times in an alleyway yards from her home in Greenhithe, Kent, as she took a short-cut to visit friends in January 1993.

Dorothy Leyden, 17, was raped and beaten to death in Manchester in April 1971 as she walked home from a concert by soul singer Jimmy Ruffin.
Dorothys battered body was found dumped on a patch of waste ground behind a pub.

Josephine Backshall, 39, was found savagely murdered on November 1st, 1974.
Her fully-clothed body was discovered face down in a pond near the village of Little Hadham, Hertfordshire, more than 30 miles from her home in Maldon, Essex.
Josephines hands had been tied tightly in front of her with a cord before the killer strangled her.

Melanie Road, 17, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death on June 9th, 1984 as she walked home from a nightclub.
Melanie was only yards from her home when the killer pounced.
Her body was found soon after dawn next day by a milkman.

Eve Stratford, 22, was raped and killed at her home in Leyton, East London, in March 1975.
Eves bloodstained body was found by her boyfriend who shared the flat with her.
A nylon stocking was tied around one of her ankles, her hands were bound behind her back with a scarf and her throat had been slashed up to a dozen times.

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He had been beaten over the head with his own stick; his throat had been slashed with the billhook, then the pitchfork driven through his neck at an acute angle. That wound appeared to have been the one that killed him; it had bled far more copiously than the other. The tines of the fork were driven so far into the ground, moreover, that it took two constables to remove it when the body was taken from the crime scene. Worse yet, the billhook had been used to carve a cross into his neck and chest.

Warwickshire is, as one chronicler describes it, Shakespeareland; the great Tudor playwright was born in Stratford-on-Avon. It was also, in 1945, still quite rural, small farming villages being the norm. Charles Walton lived and died in the village where he was born, Lower Quinton, which in 1945 had a population of 493.

Old Charlie Walton was well-liked by his neighbors, although they regarded him as strange. He had an almost uncanny rapport with horses, wild birds would eat from his hands, and rumor had it that he kept an odd kind of toadnatterjacks, which run instead of hopfor pets. He was a widower with no children, although he and his wife had adopted his niece, Edith Walton, when the girl was three. His wife had died in 1927, and Edith stayed on to keep house for him; she also worked days at a local factory. Charlie had always been a hard worker, although rheumatism compelled him to walk with a stick for support, and he still performed odd jobs for the villagers. On February 14, 1945, he had been hired to cut brush on Meon Hill for a farmer named Alfred (or Albert; both names have been given for this man) Potter, whose farm was called The Firs. He left early that morning, taking his toolsa pitchfork and a device variously called a billhook or a trouncing fork, with which he actually cut the brush, his lunch and his walking stick with him. Potter apparently was the last person to report seeing him alive, around lunchtime.

Ordinarily, Walton would have been home by 4 PM, as the advancing February darkness made working difficult and temperatures dropped. Edith, therefore, was alarmed when she arrived home at six oclock to find the cottage they shared deserted. Had it been anyone else but her uncle, she might have thought he had stopped in at the local pub, but Charlie Walton was not a pub type of man. She finally summoned a next-door neighbor named Harry Beasley, and they set out looking for Walton. They first stopped in at Potters, since Charlie had been working for him that day. Potter led them to the place where he had last seen Charlie.

Charlie was still at that spot, but he was dead. He had been beaten over the head with his own stick; his throat had been slashed with the billhook, then the pitchfork driven through his neck at an acute angle. That wound appeared to have been the one that killed him; it had bled far more copiously than the other. The tines of the fork were driven so far into the ground, moreover, that it took two constables to remove it when the body was taken from the crime scene. Worse yet, the billhook had been used to carve a cross into his neck and chest.

Granted, the story is strange enough to this point, but it got stranger.

Warwickshire hadmay to some degree still havea long tradition of witchcraft and ghost stories. Some of Charlie Waltons neighbors seem to have regarded him as a witch, because of his uncanny way with animals. Certainly that aspect was in the mind of the first man in charge of the investigation, Superintendent Alex Spooner of Warwickshire CID. Joined shortly by Robert Fabian and Albert Webb of Scotland Yard, Spooner pointed out a number of oddly coincidental occult links. The first one was a mention, in a 1929 book about Warwickshire folklore, of a story about an adolescent boy named Charles Walton who had seen, in 1885, a ghostly black dog for nine days straight, after which the boys sister died. Spooner was of the opinion that the 1885 Charles Walton was the dead man of 1945, grown up.

Then the tale was raised that the murder was an exact duplicate of one committed in the nearby village of Long Compton in 1875. The perpetrator, one John Haywood, is described as simple; he was also drunk on hard cider the day he attacked an old woman named Ann Tennant, who died of her wounds later that night. Heywood was convinced his victim was a witch and had put a hex on him. Spooner wondered if perhaps Charlie Waltons killer had committed the murder in the same fashion because Charlie Walton was a witch, a supposition not easily shaken off when some neighbors mentioned a poor harvest the previous year and left the inference dangling that it might have been the result of witchcraft.

And then the witchcraft expert Margaret Murrayshe of the theory that a witch-cult had survived intact, running parallel but secret to Christianity, for many millenia in Europeweighed in. According to Murray, it was a case of blood sacrifice; she argued that February 14 was, on the old Julian calendar abandoned in 1752, February 2, Candlemas Day, a day when a blood sacrifice was made by witches for the sake of the coming crops. Her argument was promptly contradicted by Gerald Gardner, founder of one branch of the modern practice of Wicca, who said that Charles Walton was far too old to make a suitable blood sacrifice; a sacrifice had to be a person at the peak of youth and strength.

Fabian and Webb of the Yard found all this highly diverting but impractical; they were convinced that Walton had been murdered by a maniac, but came up frustratingly short on evidence. Another motive they tried diligently to follow up was raised when it was learned that Charles Waltons wife had, on her death in 1927, left Walton nearly three hundred pounds, which he had banked and had never been known to draw fromyet it was discovered that at his death barely three pounds of the money was still in the account. Edith, who had her own job and account, knew of the money but had no idea where it had gone, leading to another dead end.

By the time the investigation was closed, all four hundred ninety three residents of Lower Quinton had been interviewed. Not one of them gave Fabian and Webb any usable information. In part this could be laid to the clannishness of small communities and the pairs outsider status; in part, it may have been fear. It may have been they knew who committed the crimeand covered up for that individual or individuals.

The only arrest ever made in the case was of an Italian POW from a nearby camp who was in the habit of sneaking out of the camp to supplement his diet by poaching rabbits; found hiding in a ditch shortly after the murder, covered in blood, he was released when the blood proved to be rabbit.

The case was officially closed when a coroners jury brought back a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. Charlie Walton was buried at St. Swithins, the parish church directly across the road from his cottage. He had a headstone which is no longer extant; it was apparently lost when the churchyard underwent renovation some fifty years after his burial, and his gravesite cannot be pointed out with any precision.

Some of the wilder tales have been disproven in the sixty-four years since his death. The Charles Walton mentioned in the 1929 book as having seen a ghost dog, the sighting followed closely by the boys sisters death, can be proven genealogically not to have been the murder victim of 1945; the victim had two sisters, both of whom married in 1891 and lived into the twentieth century.

The murder was not identical to the Ann Tennant murder at Long Compton; Heywoods attack on the old woman was witnessed by several people who testified that he used only a pitchfork, with which he stabbed her several times; there was no billhook involved, nor, apparently, was a cross carved into her chest, although legend insisted that it was, based on Heywoods own rather incoherent testimony.

The most prevalent theory nowadays is that Alfred Potter, the man who hired Charles Walton to cut brush that February day, was the murderer; this one posits that Waltons bank account was drained because he had loaned money to Potter to cover his gambling debts, and Potter murdered him to avoid repayment he was unable to make. The overkill aspect of Waltons death could be explained by Potter having panicked when the old man put up a more vigorous struggle than expected; the cross carved into the chest likewise might have been inspired by the legend of Ann Tennants death.

But well never know for certain; all the major characters are long in their graves.

One last legendary aspect of the case insists that Fabian of the Yard, on his last day in Lower Quinton, actually saw the black dog who runs like a shadow through the whole story. Fabian wrote of the case in his autobiography, melodramatically describing it as having happened in the shadow of a druidical circle called the Whispering Knights; Gerald Gardner, upon reading this description, drily pointed out that the Whispering Knights is a Stone Age construction, was never the site of druidical rites, and moreover was located some twelve miles from Lower Quinton and did not cast quite that long a shadow, but Fabian never changed that part of the story.

The one most haunted by the case was, however, Superintendent Spooner of Warwickshire CID. He made a pilgrimage to the site on Meon Hill every February 14 for nineteen years, dying shortly after the last one. It galled him till the end of his days that he never caught Charlie Waltons killer.

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Are People Getting Away With Murder?

By Jennifer Kraus
Investigative Reporter

It’s a tale of two murders just days apart. One murder got the celebrity treatment, and the other got the same treatment most murders get.

It’s one of the truths about crime in Nashville uncovered by an exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation. The truth is: most murders in Music City get detectives with very little experience heading up such investigations.

Some insiders said justice isn’t being served.

When Titans quarterback Steve McNair was found shot to death in a downtown condo last summer, Metro police immediately sent their top homicide detectives to the scene.

Metro police spokesman Don Aaron told reporters outside McNair’s condo that afternoon, “The investigation is going to be conducted by the police department’s Centralized Homicide Unit.”

That unit is also known as the Cold Case Unit.

Former Metro Police Chief Ronal Serpas explained to NewsChannel 5 Investigates why the case immediately went to the Cold Case team.

“In this case, we wanted to make sure we had detectives that had more experience,” Serpas said.

The Cold Case detectives have years of experience investigating murders.

“All murder scenes generate the same type of police response, the same experts who came to this scene come to all murder scenes,” Aaron said the same day that McNair was killed.

Yet, when 12-year-old Mikia Woodland was shot to death just five days later by gunmen who stormed her grandmother’s home in the middle of the night, her case was assigned to a detective who had not headed up a murder investigation in almost two years.

When NewsChannel 5 Investigates shared that with Mikia’s grandmother, Shannon Hooten, she reacted with surprise.

“I had no idea and if I had any idea in the beginning, I would have asked for somebody with experience,” Hooten said. “I would have fought for somebody with experience.”

Then, six weeks after Mikia’s murder, the detective was replaced by another detective who we found had not headed up a murder investigation in three years.

Again, Mikia’s grandmother had no idea.

When we shared that information with Hooten, at first, she sat on her living room couch in silence, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Why would they even give the job to an even less experienced detective?” asked Hooten.

When Ronal Serpas became chief in 2004, he decentralized the department. He got rid of Metro’s experienced homicide unit that investigated all murders in Nashville. He also reassigned other specialized detectives and sent them out into the precincts to investigate burglaries, car break-ins, assaults and murders.

“Do you think cases suffered because of this?” NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked former Metro homicide detective Brad Corcoran.

“Oh, I’m sure they did,” Corcoran answered. “There’s no doubt that they did suffer.”

Corcoran said after decentralization, detectives were often sent out on cases they weren’t accustomed to.

“Were there detectives who had not been trained to investigate murders investigating murders?” we asked.

“Yes, and that was taking its toll over time because you had people that were doing jobs that they didn’t want to do,” Corcoran said.

Serpas does not think there’s a problem.

“Our detectives in the precincts have solved some really big cases, Bellacino’s, the professor in East Nashville,” Serpas said.

Since Serpas decentralized detectives, the number of unsolved murders has shot up. He said the same thing was happening across the country. Both former and current investigators said decentralization is why it’s happening here.

“Are people getting away with murder?” NewsChannel 5 Investigates wanted to know.

“Obviously,” Corcoran responded, blaming the decentralization of the detectives. “It’s not working. And I think somebody’s going to have to step up and say we need to do something different.”

Under the current system, detectives no longer focus on just solving murders. In fact, NewsChannel 5 Investigates discovered multiple examples of where detectives were given other crimes to solve just as they were starting work on a new murder case.

In Mikia Woodland’s case, police insist they worked around the clock to find her killers.

“Ever since July when this murder happened, this has been the first thing they thought about when they came in to the office and the last thing they thought about when they left,” said Hermitage precinct commander Todd Henry at a news conference last week.

But we discovered that, just two weeks after Mikia was killed, the lead detective started getting new assignments: two shoplifting cases, an assault, a vandalism and two burglaries — all while he was supposed to be finding the young girl’s killer.

“A murder case should be focused on until it’s solved,” Mikia’s grandmother said, “and if you have a lot of other things that you have to focus on, there’s going to be some neglect there.”

For ten months, Mikia’s murder remained unsolved. After NewsChannel 5 Investigates began asking questions more than a month ago, police announced last week they’d finally found Mikia’s killers.

“They [detectives] spent well over 400 to 500 hours in the last month,” Commander Henry revealed. “It’s another murder off the books.”

Hooten said her granddaughter deserved better.

While Steve McNair’s murder was solved in five days, Mikia’s took ten months.

“If we had a more experienced detective, I believe it wouldn’t have gone on this long,” said Hooten. “Mikia was just as important to me as McNair was to any and everybody else.”

Serpas insisted that murders these days are tougher to solve and detectives across the country are having the same trouble solving these cases.

But one of the police department’s own audits two years ago found Nashville was solving fewer murders than other cities similar in size.

A year after this sketchy scuffle, a headless corpse was found in a village and oddly enough the authorities arrested Zhao Zhensheng for the murder of Zhao Zuohui. It’s also unknown how they were able to tie this headless body to the original hatchet fight. One can’t help but wonder whether there were any eye-witnesses at this hatchet battle?

The Chinese police were able to elicit an iffy confession out of poor Zhao, after forcing him to drink chili water and setting off fireworks over his head to scare the poor man out of his wits. It was a slipshod confession secured by way of duress only. While very corrupt, the Chinese court system favors this method of ‘justice’, so that cases will have the appearance of closing.

hatchet and Chinese flag
What does a hatchet have to do with a Chinese flag? Not much, unless you examine the curious case of a Chinese hatchet scuffle between two Zhaos, and its bizarre consequences that could only be out of Ripley’s Believe it or not!

This sensational case is bringing this fallacy in the Chinese justice system to light. There are many other cases of falsely accused people, such as She Xianglin, that are now public record. Yet the paltry Zhao Zhensheng rotted away in a Chinese jail for ten full years. Zhao narrowly escaped execution for ‘the hatchet incident’, but eventually his sentence was commuted to 19 years. That’s still a long stretch in the Big House, by anyone’s measure.

A darkly footnote to this bizarre account is that the misbegotten Zhao lost his wife to another man while he did his time, and get this, his children were adopted by other families. He lost it all, only sweaty memories remain under a hot lamp, the flash of fireworks, and the bitter wormwood flavor of chili water in his steaming red-hot mouth!

Now for the upshot to our account, teeming with incomprehensibility as it may: the supposed victim, Zhao Zuohui, who had lost his head, returned to his village on May 2 to try to claim welfare. Ten years ago, according to Zhao, he fled the crime scene since he believed that he had killed the other Zhao. Where he was hiding out and what was going through his mangled mind all those years is unknown?

So now one wonders just who the real identity is of the headless body that was discovered one day? The killer of that wretched soul got off Scott-free. Perhaps there are many serial-killers in China too? That’s a possibility. Hopefully, once Zhao gets out of the slammer he won’t run into the other Zhao ever again. The paths of those two need not cross ever again.

And I’m most curious just how many other victims there are simply doing hard time in a Chinese jail for crimes they never committed? Maybe thousands? But we should talk, just look at how many wrongly persecuted people are getting out of jail right now as a result of DNA technology exonerating them of the dastardly deeds they were once accused of!

The lion share of my curiosity lies in the question of how frequently do hatchet fights break out in China? Are there gangs of thugs roaming around the countryside engaging in hatchet warfare? If there is that is primitive. The unsolved case of Lizzy Borden’s parents getting hacked to pieces is the only case I know of in the U.S. that involves a hatchet. Statistics of hatchet homicides are scarcer than finding headless corpses-they spring up each and every day in Ciudad Juarez!

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The murders have not been solved to this day

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Grand Rapids Serial Slayings

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Serial mutilator of Canada

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Then look at the "victims" in these street killings. Mainly bangers and dealers, hardly deserving cases…compared with public officials who died trying to protect heir community.

Finally when an officer is killed, most officers will work unpaid overtime to catch the POS killer.