Chats cheer lonely OAPs
NEARLY 3.5 million over65s rely on chats with their neighbours to combat loneliness, research shows.
Around 1.7 million go a month without meeting up with a friend, with 300,000 not even talking to family in the same period.
But a simple conversation with a neighbour could brighten their day, according to Age UK.
Director Caroline Abrahams said: “A friendly chat with a neighbour can do more good than most of us would ever guess.” A CRIME expert reckons he has cracked the biggest unsolved serial killer case in British criminal history.
The murderer known as Jack the Stripper claimed more victims than his Victorian namesake Jack the Ripper during a grisly spree in the 1960s – but the monster was never caught.
Now, new information could lead to the identity of the man behind the Hammersmith nude murders.
David Wilson, a former prison governor and professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, has handed evidence he collected to the Met Police, who are considering it.
After a 15-month probe – detailed in a BBC4 documentary tonight – Prof Wilson is convinced Jack the Stripper was Welsh child killer Harold Jones.
He says he found crucial links between Jones and the murder of at least six sex workers in the then red light district of West London around Shepherd’s Bush.
The sadistic crimes, in which the killer strangled and stripped his victims before removing their teeth, sparked one of the biggest manhunts in history.
“Lots of people put forward different theories about the identity of the killer,” says Prof Wilson.
“But, frankly, only one really stands out. And if we could prove this theory, it has every possibility of delivering to the Met something they didn’t have 50 years ago, and that’s a genuine prime suspect.”
Jones died of bone cancer in Hammersmith in 1971, and the children of Jack the Stripper’s victims still await justice.
One of the first victims, 30-year-old prostitute Hannah Tailford, originally from Northumberland, was found dead on February 2, 1964, her body fished out of the Thames at Hammersmith.
She had been strangled, several of her teeth were missing and her underwear had been forced down her throat.
Her son Steven Sloman, 61, said: “The general attitude then was just, ‘Well, it’s just a prostitute’. At the end of the day, whatever happened, she was a mum.
“Justice was not done and I would like them to open to case, find evidence and maybe come up with closure, and say, ‘It could have been this person here’.”
By the time of the killings – the other victims were pregnant Irene Lockwood,