The bikini bloodbath murder
Has infamous case finally been cracked after 30 years?
IT was memorable as one of the hottest summer days ever recorded – and as the date for what would become one of the country’s most baffling and brutal unsolved crimes.
As temperatures soared on August 3, 1990, Ann Heron was murdered after sunbathing in the garden of her home.
The 44-year-old Glaswegian was found on the lounge floor, lying in a pool of blood with the radio still playing in the background. Her bikini bottoms had been removed and her throat slashed.
Eye-witnesses later described seeing a man, with a deeply suntanned complexion and in his 30s, driving a blue saloon car away from the property at high speed around 5pm – an hour before her husband arrived back home and discovered her body.
Yet despite a number of TV appeals on BBC’s Crimewatch programme, her killer was never caught. Now, however, in a remarkable breakthrough that could finally solve the riddle of who killed the mother of three, police are investigating a new lead provided to them by an expert criminologist working with Mrs Heron’s still-grieving family.
Today, as the 30th anniversary of the crime looms, the Scottish Mail on Sunday can identify the new suspect as former Army chef Michael Benson, a travelling criminal with a history of violence and knife crime and who was on the run from prison at the time of Mrs Heron’s murder.
And we can reveal police have now obtained DNA samples from Benson’s family, hoping to match them against evidence collected from the crime scene.
For Mrs Heron’s relatives, the move brings hope that they could soon finally discover the truth, three decades after her murder.
Last night, her daughter, Ann Marie Cockburn, said: ‘This is the type of breakthrough and developfriends ment in the case that the family have been looking for. We’re hoping with this new information our nightmare will soon be over and we can get some justice for our mother.’
The breakthrough has been made by lecturer and private investigator Jen Jarvie, a former head of undergraduate policing at Sunderland College, whose specialities include cold cases and missing persons.
After studying the circumstances of Mrs Heron’s murder, she was able to find gaps in Durham Police’s biggest ever manhunt, which spanned an estimated 100,000 hours and saw around 7,000 people being interviewed and 4,000 statements taken.
Ms Cockburn added: ‘There are a lot of things that Jen has brought up which are credible and should be investigated. It’s good that the police appear to be taking them seriously.’
What is known is that in the hours before Mrs Heron, a former nurse who worked part-time in a local residential home, died she had been making the most of the August heatwave – the hottest for 80 years – to sunbathe in the grounds of Aeolian House, the large detached home on the outskirts of Darlington, County Durham, where she had lived with her husband, Peter, 55, since marrying him four years earlier.
The pair had first met in 1980, on the Isle of Bute, Argyll, where she lived with her first husband and children. Wealthy Mr Heron, who was operations director for a successful haulage business in the North-East of England, had been on a golfing holiday to Scotland and was instantly smitten with the vivacious blonde. Soon afterwards, both left their spouses and set up home together.
On the fateful day she died, Mr Heron was at work but she had asked him to come home earlier than usual because she planned to go out with that night. Fresh from sunbathing in the garden, she was still in her bikini when she was murdered. Whoever killed her is believed to have been at the house an hour or so before Mr Heron arrived home.
For her husband, now aged 85, the horrific scene he found that day is forever etched on his memory.
Yesterday, he recalled: ‘The first thing I noticed when I drove up the drive that day was the door was open and the dog was outside. Ann was going out that night with friends and she had pleaded with me to come home at a reasonable time.
‘I walked into the hall and shouted her name, there was nothing. I then opened the door of the lounge and found her. I went straight to the phone and called the police and they were there within ten to 15 minutes. That was the beginning of the horror.’
Ms Jarvie, who was attracted to the case as it was her local force’s only unsolved murder since 1952, began her investigation into Mrs Heron’s death four years ago.
She said: ‘There were a lot of unanswered questions about the original police inquiry. The police at the time placed a lot of emphasis on that blue car but never traced or eliminated the driver from the inquiry. It was seen leaving the driveway of the Herons’ home at high speed just before 5pm, shortly after Ann’s death. Why did the driver never come forward?’
Ms Jarvie also discovered that Benson had bases in his hometown of Leeds – 45 minutes’ drive from Darlington – and Southampton.
Furthermore, he had convictions for firearms offences, burglary and robbery with a carving knife. He was given a life sentence in December 1972 for grievous bodily harm. In May 1989 he absconded from prison while on a day release programme and remained under the radar of the authorities until his death in 2011.
During his time on the run, he married but left his wife in June 1990, taking her blue Ford Orion car – similar to the car seen leaving the murder scene. Ms Jarvie believes Benson is
‘The door was open and the dog was outside’
the mystery man who sent letters in 1994 to a local paper, the police and Mr Heron, claiming to be the killer.
One letter began: ‘Hello editor, it’s me. Ann Heron’s killer’, while another made a reference to Parkgate, an area of Southampton where Benson had lived with his wife.
Ms Jarvie added: ‘Benson trained as a chef in the Army and would have been handy with knives. He had a history of violence and burglary. He ticks quite a few boxes.’
Ms Jarvie passed her file on Benson to police in October 2018 and there have been further meetings, most recently in January.
The criminologist said: ‘Michael
Benson is a viable suspect who should be investigated and either ruled in or out by Durham Police.’
Mrs Heron’s children now hope a DNA match will prove that Benson is the killer and end their ordeal.
Ann Marie Cockburn, a medical receptionist, who lives in Wemyss Bay, Renfrewshire, with her two grown-up sons, last saw her mother alive two weeks before the murder when she came to visit her with Mr Heron and they went for lunch in Largs, on the Ayrshire coast. She had lived with the couple for several years from the age of 17 before returning to Scotland.
Yesterday, she said: ‘It’s very difficult to comprehend why someone would kill my mother, who was such a loving and caring woman.
‘The trail has gone cold and will probably only be solved now if someone comes forward with new evidence.
‘Anything we can get from someone like Jennie should be taken seriously. We deserve closure’
Meanwhile, her brother, Ralph Cockburn, then a Detective Constable with Strathclyde Police in Glasgow, had to quit on the grounds of ill health in 1996 due in part to the trauma of his mother’s murder.
Now an insurance claims investigator in Leicestershire, the 56-yearold said: ‘This guy from Southampton needs to be considered seriously by Durham Police. We want to find the person who did this.’
Last night, a Durham Constabulary spokesman said: ‘Any new information which comes to light will be fully considered and the necessary action taken.’
With hope of closure now in sight, it remains to be seen if Ms Jarvie has indeed found the answer to the three-decades-old mystery.