The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
The disappearance of Jessie Earl
On a spring day in 1980, Jessie Earl, an art student living in Eastbourne, disappeared without a trace. Now, 38 years on, her family’s struggle to get justice for her may finally be at an end. Mick Brown and Laura Powell investigate
For almost four decades, the death of an art student has remained unexplained. Now, though, new evidence has come to light. By Mick Brown and Laura Powell
On Wednesday 14 May 1980 Jessie Earl, a 22-year-old student at Eastbourne College of Art and Design, walked into a telephone box on the seafront to call her parents at their home in south London. Jessie had that week received good results in a college assessment, and was looking forward to the visit of a penfriend from Australia. She told her mother she would be home on Friday.
On Friday night there was no sign of Jessie. ‘We thought she must have missed the last train,’ her mother Valerie says. ‘But in the morning there was still no phone call. So I went shopping and came back, and I just thought, there’s something not right. I said to John, “I’m going to go down to Eastbourne.”’
At the house where Jessie lived, her elderly neighbour answered the door. ‘She said Jessie had gone home for the weekend, so I told her she hadn’t.’ The neighbour retrieved a key from the landlady, to let Valerie into her daughter’s flat.
‘I walked into the room and it was extraordinary. The window was open and the curtains were blowing in the wind. There was a mug on the floor by her armchair. Her book was open on the floor. Her reading glasses were on the bed, and her purse. There was a table next to her bed; on it were the remains of a meal, chicken and rice on a plate, a knife and fork. Now I know Jess – she wouldn’t have gone to sleep with those next to her. She hadn’t slept in the bed that night.
‘I remember looking around and thinking, “Where do I go? I’d better go to the police station.” I rang John on the way there.’
Her husband John nods, reliving a moment from 38 years ago. ‘Until then I’d thought, you’ll go down to Eastbourne and you’ll find Jessie. Then the phone rang and you said, “There’s something terribly wrong,” and I thought, “Oh God…”’
It would not be until nine years later that Jessie Earl’s remains were found in dense undergrowth near Beachy Head, three miles from her digs. No clothes or belongings were found, only her brown Marks & Spencer bra, tied in a knot.
The manner of her disappearance, the circumstances in which she was found, might have led any casual observer to the conclusion that Jessie had been murdered. Yet, after just a month, the police closed the investigation classifying it as a ‘suspicious death’ but not murder. Describing the cause of death as ‘unascertainable’, the coroner recorded an open verdict.
In 2000, a police ‘cold case’ enquiry criticised the original investigation and determined that Jessie had indeed been murdered. But that report was not made public, and it is the original coroner’s verdict that remains on Jessie’s death certificate.
John and Valerie Earl have never accepted that verdict and now, with the help of Mark Williams-thomas, a former police officer turned investigator and television journalist, they are applying to the Attorney General to re-open the inquest and have it overturned. ‘The agony of Jessie’s death is a long way in the past and, although it never goes away, you do cope with it,’ John says. ‘But the coroner’s verdict is the one thing we’ve never got over.’
In the kitchen of the home where they have lived for 60 years, and where Jessie and her elder brother Jim grew up, John and Valerie Earl have placed a picture of their daughter on a shelf of the Welsh dresser, a grainy blow-up of the photograph that was reproduced in newspapers and television reports when she went missing. A stack of albums containing more photographs and press clippings sits on the table.
John Earl is now 92, Valerie 87 – decent, kindly people. They have been married for more than 60 years, and have the long-married couple’s tendency of anticipating each other’s thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences.
‘We knew that Jessie wouldn’t just disappear,’ John says. ‘Everything about her life was the reverse of that. She would tell you everything. She was quite close to us, she would seek advice about things, which girls at that age don’t always do.’
Val continues: ‘The last phone call home, she said, “I don’t know why you don’t come down here. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Listen!” Then she opened the door of the telephone box so we could hear the brass band playing on the pier. You don’t do that with parents you don’t talk to.’
Jessie, they say, was a quiet girl, happy in her own company, but with no shortage of friends.
‘She was very sensitive to people’s feelings, intuitive,’ says Valerie. ‘I first realised it when she was about 13. She was sitting next to a man on a bus and when we got off she said, “Oh I do feel
‘We knew that Jessie wouldn’t just disappear. She was close to us – she told us everything’
‘We dealt with it as if it was a murder inquiry, but without a body we had no evidence’
sorry for that man.” I asked her why and she replied, “He was so unhappy. You know how you know about people?” I said, “Well, I don’t know.” And she said, “You would if you let yourself.”’
She was interested in art and in 1978 she moved to Eastbourne to study screen-printing. She was also assiduous in keeping a diary. She loved to walk on Beachy Head, and wrote lyrically about the views, the weather and wildlife she encountered. ‘All I could hear were the skylarks, singing & the thud of my shoes in the thick grass. Rabbits were everywhere and they looked at me in amazement before dashing for cover. Gulls sailed by on level with my feet & they kept their eyes on me all the time.’
Her last entry was on Tuesday 13 May, a colourful account of a night out with a friend that culminated in Jessie reading palms as ‘Madame Zelda, a fortune teller’ in a local pub. ‘We walked back through town, killing ourselves laughing,’ she wrote. ‘We’re going to do it again.’
There is no entry for Thursday 15 May, the day it is believed Jessie died.
Jessie had an upstairs room in a house on a quiet residential street, Upperton Gardens. Around midday on that Thursday another tenant, Ivy Selby, saw Jessie as she was going out; she was wearing a floral dress and carrying a small suede handbag. Jessie told Ivy that she was on the way to the doctor’s surgery to leave a note for a repeat prescription for her asthma. The note was delivered, but the prescription was never collected.
It seems that Jessie returned to her flat, and changed her clothes – Valerie found that same floral dress and handbag in the room – had dinner, then probably decided to go for a walk. ‘She was inclined to make spot decisions,’ says John.
Val nods. ‘And it was glorious weather at that time.’
Ivy Selby had the room directly below Jessie’s, and could often hear her moving around. She was adamant that Jessie had not spent Thursday night in her room. Ivy’s brief exchange with her at the front door earlier that day would be the last known sighting of Jessie.
After reporting Jessie’s disappearance to the police, Valerie returned to the flat. That night she slept in her daughter’s bed, still half expecting her to return. ‘What is terrifying and what you don’t realise,’ she says, ‘is that this is something totally new, the beginning of a whole new way of life.’
The police interviewed Jessie’s neighbours and friends, and searched her flat. ‘When they started going through her things I thought, “God, if she walks in now she’ll kill me,”’ Val says.
Colin Taylor, who was the detective inspector in charge of the investigation, and who now runs a restaurant business in Eastbourne, told The Telegraph in a telephone conversation that he quickly concluded that this was far from a ‘straightforward’ missing person case. ‘She hadn’t taken her driving licence, or used any cash cards. In view of the circumstances it was quite clear that she wasn’t going to come back.’
Taylor says he became convinced that Jessie was ‘somewhere up on the Downs’. Search parties with police dogs and horses were deployed, but nothing was found. ‘We dealt with it as if it was a murder inquiry, but without a body we had no evidence.’
Jessie’s disappearance was reported extensively in the press, and the Earls were interviewed on Terry Wogan’s television show. Then the caravan of news moved on, and John and Valerie were left in limbo.
‘We never stopped thinking about her,’ Val says. ‘Whenever the phone rang we were quite certain it was going to be her.’
‘We had in mind that it was always a possibility,’ John says, ‘a remote possibility, that she could turn up again.’
How did they cope with not knowing what had befallen their daughter for almost 10 years?
‘We decided from the beginning that we were not going to collapse over this,’ John says. ‘However bad it got, we were going to work together, stay together, stick together.’
Their biggest fear was losing each other. In crowds they clung on to one another. ‘You’ve lost somebody once and it could happen again,’ John says.
He saw Jessie everywhere. ‘I used to follow women. I’d see somebody and think, “That’s her!” I’d force my way through and stand in front of the poor woman until I was convinced it wasn’t her. And I didn’t even apologise! I just turned away.’ He shakes his head. ‘How I never got arrested I’ll never know.’
The Earls followed every lead, no matter how improbable. They contacted the Hare Krishna sect, the Salvation Army and
the Moonies (‘not at all helpful’) to see if they had any information. They dangled a pendulum over maps and listened to clairvoyants of all kinds. Val found herself standing on the edge of the A2 near Dartford every Friday afternoon at four o’clock waiting for a red car to pass by after being told by a medium that Jessie would be in it with a commercial traveller.
On another occasion she attended a psychic evening. ‘And she’s the most sceptical person there is,’ John says.
‘A woman was on stage conveying messages,’ Val recalls. ‘She came to me. She said she was getting a name – Jessie. I said, yes? Now I’m getting a death… I said, yes… She said it’s a tragic death, a beheading on a motorbike. I said, no, no… so she moved on. Afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “That message was meant for me. My son Jessie was in Australia and he was in a motorbike accident and he was beheaded.” I asked when, and she said the 15th of May.’ It was the same day Jessie went missing.
In March 1989, Val was listening to the radio when she heard a news report that a body had been found on Beachy Head. ‘It said that it could be Lord Lucan. I thought, “Well Lord Lucan, it could be. But Beachy Head?” I rang the police, and they said no, it’s probably a male and nothing to do with our case.’
The next day Val and John left to go to Paris for a short break. On the first morning, at breakfast, the hotel telephone rang. ‘And the lady said, “Police, for you.”’ The body was Jessie’s. She had been identified by her dental records.
‘That phone call to that little hotel in Paris,’ John says, ‘it was a relief. We both felt much better that day because we knew Jessie was dead.’
Val nods. ‘Because when you don’t know, there is always the possibility.’
But this was just the beginning.
Jessie’s body had been found in a dense patch of brambles and hawthorn in an area of Beachy Head known locally as Well Combe, by a man out flying a kite with his daughter. It was not a place that Jessie had mentioned in her diary. Thousands of people had walked past the spot in the years since her disappearance, but it was so heavily overgrown the man had been obliged to force his way into the thicket to retrieve the kite. Jessie’s bones were scattered. Her knotted bra was buried in earth at the base of a nearby tree. It was the only garment found.
A forensic examination of her skeleton, conducted many years later, showed that Jessie had likely taken her last breath in that spot. Pollen found in the nasal cavity was the same type as in that part of Beachy Head.
Three days after Jessie’s body was found, a post-mortem was carried out by a forensic pathologist, Dr David Rouse. He stated that the bra might have been used to bind her wrists. It would later emerge that a number of police officers involved in the case also believed that Jessie had been restrained, probably with her arms tied around that particular tree. The police commenced a ‘short-term’ investigation, Operation Silk, and a ‘mini-incident room’ was set up. But the small team of officers appointed to the case were told that no overtime should be worked, and the detective chief superintendent overseeing the case directed that ‘the discovery of the skeleton will not be crimed as possible murder’.
Two and a half weeks later, the ‘outside enquiry’ team was reduced to just two officers, and the following week they too were stood down. On 4 May the incident room was closed, exactly one month after it had opened, with Jessie’s case still not classified as murder.
‘When you find a naked body, the hands have been tied with the person’s own bra, in the location where it was found – when you put everything together, to not classify that as a murder was the major failing,’ Williams-thomas says. ‘That decision, whoever made it, was wrong.’
What remained of Jessie’s skeleton was given to the Earls. Her brother Jim travelled to Eastbourne, and returned to London on the train, a cardboard box containing his sister’s bones on his lap. They were donated to Guy’s Hospital, for medical research.
In July 1989, the inquest was held into Jessie’s death. A police officer, detective sergeant Anne Capon, who was very familiar with the case, had examined the site where Jessie’s remains were discovered and had studied her diaries, had not been asked to give evidence to the coroner, but was called to testify at the request of the Earls. She stated that she was in ‘no doubt’ that Jessie had met her death unlawfully. However, the coroner, David Wadman, concluded that the cause of death was ‘unascertainable’ and returned an open verdict.
The Earls were stupefied. Everything, they believed, pointed to the certainty their daughter had been murdered. ‘On Jessie’s death certificate it says “death by unknown causes”, but it’s not unknown,’ Val says. ‘Someone in the future could look at it and think, “I wonder what happened. Did she commit suicide?”’
As part of the assessment a coroner will be presented with the findings of the police investigation, as well as hearing evidence, and they will draw their own conclusions. However, Williams-thomas believes that the decision of the police to not record it as a murder had ‘a huge bearing’ on Wadman’s ruling. He also says his concern is whether there was a ‘specific desire’ on the part of the police for it not to be recorded as an unlawful killing. ‘I have no evidence to support that, but from my policing background I know that forces don’t want unsolved murders. They would have been happy to get it off their books as quickly as possible.’
Over the years the Earls have also speculated about why the police and coroner arrived at their decisions. ‘From the moment Jessie’s remains were discovered it was obviously murder,’ John says. ‘The police did not want an unsolved murder on their patch. I think they were very pleased with the coroner’s verdict.’
In January 2000, following discussion with the Earls, Sussex police re-opened Operation Silk, and began a new investigation into Jessie’s death, which reached a radically different conclusion from the investigation of 1989. Jessie’s
‘Jessie’s bones were scattered. Her knotted bra was buried in the earth at the base of a nearby tree’
bones were recovered from Guy’s Hospital, re-examined and then returned once more to the family.
The report was never made public, but Williams-thomas, who first took an interest in Jessie’s case last year, while researching the disappearance in 1988 of Eastbourne teenager Louise Kay for an episode of his ITV series The Investigator, has seen it.
He says it found that the original investigation had been ‘unprofessional’ and ‘not properly conducted’, had been closed before all lines of enquiry had been exhausted, and had failed to interview important witnesses. In the intervening years, paperwork had vanished and, crucially, the scant physical evidence, including Jessie’s bra and soil from the area where she was found, which could have provided vital forensic evidence, were disposed of by police in the mid-1990s as ‘part of a routine review of property holding arrangements’.
Led by detective chief inspector Steve Dennis, the new inquiry stated that there was ‘a high probability’ that Jessie had been strangled. While the cause of death remained ‘unascertainable’, DCI Dennis concluded that ‘unlawful killing is the only explanation’.
However, without the physical evidence it would be very difficult for anyone to proceed towards an arrest and a conviction. It would be some years before a prime suspect emerged.
In 2007, 27 years after Jessie’s disappearance, a man named Peter Tobin was convicted of the rape and murder a year earlier of a 23-year-old old Polish student, Angelika Kluk. Her body had been discovered under the floorboards of a church in Glasgow where she was employed as a cleaner, and where Tobin was working as a handyman. Following his arrest, Tobin was reported to have boasted to a prison psychiatrist that he had killed 48 times, challenging him to ‘prove it’.
In the wake of Tobin’s arrest, Strathclyde police launched Operation Anagram to look for other possible victims. In 2007 police dug up the garden of the house where he had been living in Margate and discovered two bodies. One was 18-year-old Dinah Mcnichol, who had last been seen alive on 5 August 1991, hitchhiking home from a music festival at Liphook, Hampshire. The other was 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton, who went missing from her home in Bathgate, Scotland in 1991. Tobin, who by this time had been married and divorced three times, had driven the 480 miles to Margate with her body, cut in half, in the boot of his car. He was convicted of both murders in 2009.
Operation Anagram failed to find any link to Jessie’s disappearance. However the criminologist David Wilson, author of a 2010 book about Tobin, The Lost British Serial Killer ,is convinced that Tobin is the prime suspect.
‘There was an association with the modus operandi and signature of Tobin,’ Wilson says.
Tobin, he says, was an opportunistic killer. His victims, who were all young, dark-haired and small like Jessie (she was 5ft 3in), were selected at random – Vicky Hamilton was waiting at a bus stop on a snowy day. Wilson adds that a number of his victims were tied up using not rope but clothing, such as belts, jumpers and bras. ‘That seemed to me to be particularly resonant.’ At the time of Jessie’s disappearance, Tobin, who used a string of aliases, was living in Brighton, 24 miles away, but he is believed to have had connections to Eastbourne.
Williams-thomas also believes that Tobin was responsible for Jessie’s death.
The Earls have spent many years speculating about what might have happened to their daughter. They believe it is most likely that, having gone out for a walk, she was snatched at random. ‘Jessie was a very responsive person,’ says John. ‘So if she’d gone to make a phone call, then left the phone box and gone on walking up to Beachy Head, I could just imagine this guy coming along and starting to talk to her.’ He falls silent, closes his eyes. ‘If it was Tobin, and it ties up with the other girls who were very like Jessie, it just seems to make sense. Otherwise, nothing makes sense.’
The Telegraph wrote to Peter Tobin, who is currently serving three life sentences in HM Prison Edinburgh, asking whether he had any information that might shed light on Jessie’s murder and offer some comfort to her parents. He did not reply.
Following the re-investigation in 2000, a police report was submitted to the coroner for East Sussex suggesting that consideration should be given to holding a new inquest. The coroner declined. No attempt has since been made. John Earl says they had been led to believe the original coroner’s verdict was irreversible. ‘Everybody told us, that’s the verdict. That will stand.’
It was Williams-thomas who informed the family that an inquest verdict can, in fact, be overturned, with an application Above, from left Peter Tobin; investigative reporter Mark Williams-thomas
to the Attorney General. Working with a solicitor, David Wells, he has now taken up the family’s case. ‘It is perverse, unfair and unjust that it remains an open verdict,’ Williams-thomas says. ‘It was clearly a murder, and that verdict has to change. If the Attorney General does not say the original inquest was a failing, then I will eat my hat.’
Jessie’s remains are buried in a child’s coffin in Eltham cemetery. Her tragically abbreviated life is marked by a small plaque, inscribed with three dates: ‘Jessie Victoria Earl. Born 16 December 1957. Died May 1980. Interred 7 July 2000.’ The epitaph reads: ‘Flee as a bird to the mountain’ – a hymn traditionally played at New Orleans funerals.
In the kitchen of their south London home, the Earls are readying themselves for the next chapter in their long struggle to find some resolution to their daughter’s murder.
‘I think we had both always felt we weren’t at the end of it,’ Val says. ‘It would be good to know for certain if Tobin was involved.’ She pauses. ‘Or perhaps it’s better not to know.’
‘I don’t care what happens to Tobin,’ John says. ‘The idea of revenge is quite foreign to us.’ Asked whether they are optimistic about the prospects of a new inquest, and Jessie’s case finally being officially recognised as murder, he falls silent.
‘We don’t allow ourselves optimism,’ he says.
To learn more about Jessie Earl and for interviews with her parents, watch our documentary at telegraph.co.uk/jessieearl
‘There was an association with the modus operandi and signature of serial killer Peter Tobin’