unidentified naked Man

Who is this?

This murder has baffled the town of Burton for decades. On 27 March 1971, an off-duty police officer stumbled across the body of a male in a shallow grave on an island in the River Trent. He was naked apart from pink socks and a wedding ring, and was partially buried in a kneeling position, his hands and ankles tied behind his back. The man, known as ‘Fred the Head’, had been buried for 12 to 18 months. His hair was still in place, but his facial features were unrecognisable. Yet police couldn’t ID him, or work out exactly how he’d been killed. Four decades on, a lifelike facial reconstruction was created using cuttingedge techniques. After a BBC1 Crimewatch documentary, detectives thought the man could be John Henry Jones, 27, who’d vanished from North Wales in 1970. Had Fred the Head been identified at long last, they wondered? Sadly not. Familial DNA ruled this out, and the murder of the naked Burton man remains a mystery.

He was buried in a kneeling position, his hands tied