My brave mum jailed her own killer – She left a clue from beyond the grave
After 46 years, Heidi’s mum solved her own murder
Loretta Jones’ four-year-old daughter, Heidi, was her world. A single mum, Loretta, 23, doted on her little girl.
Thick as thieves, Loretta and Heidi loved to play games and eat ice-cream.
When Loretta ironed, she’d set up Heidi with her own toy iron and board so she could play beside her.
But on the morning of
July 30, 1970, Heidi woke up to nd the house eerily quiet.
Getting up, she peeked through the keyhole of the lounge room and saw something lying on the oor.
At rst she thought it was laundry. Then she opened the door and froze.
There was blood everywhere and lying in the middle of the carpet was her mum’s lifeless body.
Loretta was naked from the waist down.
Heidi ran out of the house and saw a boy on his front lawn.
‘I think my mummy’s dead,’ she said.
Neighbours called the police.
Loretta had been raped, strangled and stabbed 17 times. But she had almost no defensive wounds, and Heidi hadn’t heard her scream.
Investigators believed she hadn’t fought back out of fear of waking her girl and putting her in danger.
Police couldn’t nd any signs of forced entry either.
It seemed Loretta had opened the door to her killer…
DNA was found on Loretta’s underwear, but the technology was still in its infancy and they were unable to nd a match.
They did have another important lead, though.
The same day Loretta had been killed, a man had tried to abduct 10-year-old Lori Kulow Fennel, who lived nearby.
She’d been on her bike when a man grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her mouth. Lori had spat chewing gum into his hand and struggled, and the man had ed.
Given the neighbourhood was normally peaceful, police thought the incidents were linked.
Meanwhile, Heidi, who had gone to live with her grandparents, talked about a man called Tom.
She said she had heard Tom say he was going to kill her mother.
‘Tom is going to come and get me,’ Heidi told her nan.
The worried grandmother went to the police and, in Loretta’s diary, they found entries about a man named Tom Egley, 30, who she had dated for a couple of months.
Police questioned Egley, who’d been set up with Loretta on a blind date, but he denied murdering her.
He said on the night of the crime, he’d been across town having drinks.
A bar owner con rmed seeing him, adding he’d had red spots on his shirt.
Convinced that Loretta’s murder and Lori’s attempted abduction were connected, police put Egley in a line-up and asked Lori to pick out the man who’d grabbed her.
She immediately picked Thomas Egley.
He was charged over the attempted kidnapping, and also charged with Loretta’s murder but a judge found that there wasn’t enough evidence for him to stand trial.
Egley served just 90 days for the attempted abduction, and the murder case went cold.
Years passed.
Heidi grew up with her grandmother, remaining convinced that Egley had killed her mother.
Then, in 2009 – 39 years after the brutal murder – Heidi ran into an old school friend, Dave
Brewer, who was now a detective.
She asked him to look into her mum’s murder and he agreed.
By then, police records had been lost but David was undeterred.
Tracking down Egley’s old girlfriend, she said that, on the night of the crime, Egley had come home late and, bizarrely, had taken a bath with all his clothes on.
The next day, he’d visited the laundrette.
The detective was convinced he had his man but he needed to prove it.
There was a startling claim, though.
Of cers who’d been at the crime scene recalled seeing a ‘T’ and an ‘O’ written among the bloodstains on the carpet.
However, that evidence had never made it to a court hearing, and the police held no photos from the case.
But, amazingly, Heidi did. For some reason, a relative had snapped an image of the little girl at the scene and, looking at it, Brewer could clearly make out the letters.
Loretta had tried to daub her killer’s name in her own blood. Her last act proved to be a vital clue.
David Brewer called in Egley for questioning and it wasn’t long before he confessed to Loretta’s murder, admitting he had gone to the house for sex, and attacked Loretta when she refused.
He was arrested in August 2016, 46 years after the murder – and seven years to the day since Heidi had asked for Brewer’s help.
Appearing in court aged 76, Thomas Egley pleaded guilty to murder in exchange for the rape charge being dropped.
He was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison.
‘I expected a monster,’ Heidi said after seeing Egley at the hearing, ‘but he was just an old man.’
Giving a statement in court after the sentence, Heidi said she had missed out on ‘every mummydaughter moment’ because of Egley’s evil actions.
‘My mum was my hero that terrible night. She never screamed nor made a sound. She did everything she had to, to prevent me from coming out of my room,’ she said.
And nearly ve decades after her death, the clue Loretta left had nally put her killer behind bars. ●
‘My mum was my hero that terrible night.
She never made a sound’