BRUTAL MURDER OF YOUNG FEMALE CABBIE SHOCKED A TOWN
Taxi driver Linda Thomas disappeared after picking up a passenger from a Port Talbot pub 49 years ago. Jason Evans looks back at a horrific crime that shook the local community and beyond...
THOSE who knew Linda Thomas described her as a happy and outgoing young woman who lived with her mum, liked listening to Cliff Richard and The Hollies, enjoyed having a shandy with her friends, and loved animals.
Her dream was to win big on the football pools, buy a large house on a hill above her native Port Talbot, and fill it with cats and dogs.
She also knew her own mind, and was something of a trailblazer who worked as a taxi driver – an unusual occupation for a woman in the early 1970s.
It was this job which was to bring the 22-year-old into contact with Trevor Howell.
Howell grew up in the same town as Linda, though he was six years older. He had apparently been a bright boy and a hard worker on his grandparents’ farm near Margam.
In adulthood he was described as a “roamer” who moved from town to town and temporary job to temporary job.
But he was also a child sex offender with a violent streak and a string of convictions.
The paths of these very different people crossed on the afternoon of Thursday, June 20, 1973, when Linda picked up Howell in her cab for what should have been a short trip up the Afan Valley.
But the taxi driver would never return home. The murder of the young woman shocked Port Talbot and made the headlines around South Wales and beyond.
Linda grew up in the Sandfields area of Port Talbot and attended the local secondary school.
She then took a clerical course at college with the aim of becoming a shorthand typist but instead began work at a local laundry before taking her driving test and becoming a driver for the firm.
Then in early 1973 she began working as a cabbie.
By the June of that year Linda, who lived with her mother on Harlequin Road in Port Talbot, was working hard at the job she enjoyed and was saving money to go on a Spanish holiday with a friend.
Just after 2pm on June 20 the landlady of Port Talbot’s Hong Kong pub rang the firm Linda worked for to book a cab for a customer who wanted to get to Cwmavon – just over two miles away up the Afan Valley – to buy a second-hand car.
That passenger was 28-year-old Howell, and he was described as having a “wad of money” in his jacket pocket.
Like Linda, Howell had also grown up in Port Talbot but went on to be a “bit of a roamer”, moving from place to place and working in a variety of casual jobs from scrap metal dealer to hotel kitchen cook, building labourer, farmhand and fairground worker.
He was also no stranger to prison, having finished his last sentence just eight months earlier.
He hadn’t been into the Hong Kong for a couple of years, and he told staff he had been working as a sheep shearer in Australia, though that was a lie.
That day he had drunk six or seven pint of beer along with whiskies. He had apparently also taken a number of mandrax and dexedrine tablets during visits to a number of pubs.
Linda collected her fare from the pub, and they set off for Cwmavon.
Exactly what happened over the next couple of hours remains unknown, but the cab was seen by a witness in Maesteg, more than 10 miles away from its original destination.
When Linda failed to return to the taxi office her boss became concerned – he contacted her family to see if she had gone home, but they had not seen her either.
As worries for her welfare grew, the police were contacted.
Later that day Linda’s dark blue Singer Gazelle cab was found abandoned on the grass verge of Afan Way in Sandfields.
The police began to piece together the cabbie’s movements that day, and found that an hour after leaving the pub the taxi had been seen on the Bryn to Maesteg road.
What officers knew – but did not initially make public – was that two of Linda’s false teeth had been found in the abandoned car, indicating considerable violence had been visited upon the young driver.
But what had happened to her? Had she been abducted? Was she being held against her will? Was she lying injured somewhere? Or had she been killed?
Officers launched two major search operations – one for Linda and one for Howell, whom police believed could hold the key to the case.
Soon more than 100 officers from across South Wales were searching
the hills, woods and lanes between Port Talbot and Maesteg for Linda, as well as the sand dunes in Kenfig burrows and common land around Porthcawl.
They were joined by scores of RAF mountain rescue experts, forestry workers, police cadets and volunteers from the community.
Divers from South Wales Police’s sub-aqua team were drafted in to check Port Talbot docks, Eglwys Nunydd reservoir, and drainage culverts on Baglan moor.
Forensic experts began comparing ferns and grass found on the underside of Linda’s car with flora from mountain lanes around Port Talbot in the hope of narrowing down the search locations. While the search for Linda was drawing a blank, detectives were soon on the trail of their prime suspect.
It emerged that on the evening Linda disappeared Howell had bought a grey and red Commer Cob van from a garage in Baglan for £19 cash, telling the business owner he wanted something “to knock about with on the farm”.
Welsh police contacted colleagues in Kent to check a travellers site in Orpington where Howell was known to have stayed recently, but he had not been seen there.
The hunt for the main suspect then switched to Sussex with news that the Commer van had been sold at a scrap yard, and the South Wales Evening Post reported that a team of 10 Welsh detectives was dispatched to Brighton to follow up the lead.
The officers, whom the paper reported “mingled with hippies on the seafront”, discovered Howell had previously spent a lot of time in the resort town.
There were reports of their man sleeping on the beach and of being seen “sunbathing” in overalls.
Howell, who was known to the “hippies” as Taffy, had apparently told them he was a rally driver.
South Wales Police Detective Chief Superintendent Maddy Williams said at the time: “If this is our man we are not far behind him.”
While the suspect remained tantalisingly out of their grasp, officers did, somewhat bizarrely, recover his shoes when he swapped them with “local hippies” after telling them his footwear was making his feet sore.
The shoes were sent back to Wales for forensic tests.
Police also found Howell had tried to sell a Seiko divers watch at a jewellery shop in Brighton – something which detectives believed indicated he was running short of cash – and had tried to get jobs in a hotel and with a transport company.
Police also found the suspect had cut his hair short and changed his clothes: he was now wearing “a dirty eggshell blue shirt, chocolate coloured trousers frayed at the bottom, and black heavy duty boots”.
As the search for Howell continued on the south coast, back in Port Talbot his father Thomas – a driver for bus firm Red and White – made an appeal in the press for his son to contact police.
He said: “I have been worried sick and appeal to Trevor wherever he is to come forward to the police.
“If he knows anything about the girl I would like him to tell the police. I would like him to go to them anyway.”
Meanwhile the search for Linda was continuing, and a week into her disappearance an army helicopter from Netheravon in Wiltshire joined the operation.
Then on June 29, nine days after Linda disappeared, came the news the community of Port Talbot had been fearing.
The body of the taxi driver was found by dog walker William Harrison, a Port Talbot steelworker, in an airshaft of a disused mine off Lady’s Walk forestry track on Baglan mountain. She was lying face up, and had been covered in what was described as a “blanket” of stones.
Detective chief superintendent Williams said: “It is obvious she was pushed down there. Even if there had been a manual search we would never have found her. There is deep vegetation there and the shaft is completely out of sight”.
A later post-mortem examination found Linda had broken ribs, and tears to her liver, spleen and bowel.
There were no injuries to her skull and no evidence of any sexual assault.
Police had found Linda, and within days they had their suspect too after officers received a tip-off – not from Brighton but from Pembrokeshire.
Howell was arrested as he worked on a potato farm near Milford Haven.
The suspect was charged with murder and pleaded not guilty, and in November 1973 a week-long trial took place at Swansea Crown Court.
It was the prosecution case that Howell subjected Linda to “gross physical violence” before dumping her body in the mine.
Pathologist Dr Owen Glyn Williams told the court considerable force such as kicking or stamping would have been required to inflict the injuries the taxi driver sustained.
The jury heard evidence from two women who had been taking their grandchildren for a walk on the day Linda disappeared and who saw a taxi on Lady’s Walk. They said there was a man behind the wheel and a “young and attractive” woman beside him in the passenger seat.
The witnesses reported the passenger did not speak or move, and her face was blank and expressionless.
Howell accepted hitting Linda while they were in the taxi, but said he had no recollection of carrying her body to the mine.
When Michael Williams QC, for the prosecution, put it to the defendant he had intended to cause Linda serious injuries, the defendant replied: “The only thinking I can think of is it started with slapping her in the car.”
When it was put to Howell he had been fully aware of what he was doing when he inflicted “terrible violence” on his victim he replied: “No sir, I can’t remember.”
He told the court he had taken mandrax and dexedrine tablets as well as drinking up to nine pints of beer and three or four whiskies on the day in question.
Howell said he could remember being a passenger in the taxi and talking to somebody but “it was as if I was watching myself talking and somebody was doing the talking for me – it was as if I was in a world of my own”.
Howell said he drove to Brighton that same night where he stayed in a squat with people he knew. He said when he subsequently saw a picture of himself in a paper with a police appeal for information he decided to go on the run.
In his closing speech to the jury Howell’s barrister Aubrey Meyerson QC said: “You may have thought that Howell both by his behaviour and by the testament he gave exhibited a degree of callousness that would be hard to equal, and how he did not really give any consideration as to the fate of that poor girl once the realisation dawned on him that something had happened to her.
“You are not trying him for cold bloodedness or callousness, you are not here to try him for his emotions or his inability to express himself.”
The 11-man jury convicted Howell of murder.
The judge, Mr Justice Wein, told the defendant: “The jury have unanimously convicted you of the brutal murder of a completely innocent young woman. I am satisfied you were bent on sexual assault. I regard you, on the information I have, as a person who is likely to be a danger to women for an indefinite period.”
Howell was sentenced to life in prison, and as he was taken down to the cells a woman in the public gallery shouted out: “I hope she haunts you.”
After his conviction it could be reported that Howell had 15 previous convictions including for burglary, theft, sexual offences involving a 14-year-old girl, and inflicting grievous bodily harm on a woman – an assault which left his victim with a broken jaw. He had been released from his most recent prison sentence in October 1972. It also emerged that just six days before he murdered Linda he had been charged in connection with a serious assault on a woman in Porthcawl.
Howell died in Norwich prison in August 2017 at the age of 72, the cause of death given as sepsis, pneumonia, chronic obstructive airway disease, and general frailty caused by severe mixed dementia.