‘Jack the Stripper strangled my sister & dumped her in an alley. He was never caught...’
COLD CASE BROTHER’S
CHARLES Thomson smiles at the memory of his big sister Helene twirling around the family garden.
She was paying a fleeting visit to her 10-year-old brother at home in Thwaites, Cumbria.
The trip ended in a tiff with her mum Mary. It was the last time Charles saw her alive.
He said: “I remember a beautiful young woman who was always dressed immaculately, was quiet but always had time for her little brother.
“Being much younger than her I was always a bit star struck. I looked up to her and she seemed glamorous beyond words.
“The image of her walking into the front garden, smiling, full of life, has stayed with me.
“It was the last time I saw her. That image is frozen in time and follows me like a ghost.” A few years later, hundreds of miles away in London, Helene Barthelemy was murdered aged 22.
She had been strangled and her naked body dumped in an alley in Brentford, west London, on April 24, 1964.
She was the fourth victim of “Jack the Stripper” a killer who has never been found.
He is suspected of carrying out eight murders between 1959 and 1965.
All his victims were prostitutes working around London’s West End.
Charles, now 65, had no idea his sister’s life had taken a dark turn.
Sitting in his allotment near Doncaster, South Yorks, he remembers a sister full of love.
He said: “She was not a constant in my life and had moved away to Blackpool.
“But she came into it on a regular