Body on royal estate was Latvian girl, 17
Alisa Dimitrijeva last seen Aug. 31 getting into a car in nearby town,
ANMER, England — The quintessential English sleepy hamlet of Anmer on the edge of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite country estate in Sandringham, Norfolk, looks like the kind of place a young Agatha Christie might have scouted out for her next detective novel.
Now, the tiny village of 29 houses and 63 residents, many of whom work on the royal estate and who, out of loyalty to the queen, don’t like talking to outsiders, is the setting of a reallife British murder mystery.
British detectives on Sunday identified the young woman whose remains were found here just days after the British royal family gathered at Sandringham House for its annual Boxing Day pheasant shoot.
Alisa Dimitrijeva, 17, was last seen Aug. 31 getting into a car in the medieval town of King’s Lynn, 10 miles from where her body was found by a man walking his dog on New Year’s Day. She was lying unburied in woodland a mile from the house where the queen and her closest relatives were spending the Christmas holidays on the 20,000-acre estate. Much of the land is open to the public.
Detectives told reporters they are interviewing gamekeepers and the manager of the royal estate for help, and are looking to pin down the girl’s final days.
The region around the estate, where Princess Diana was born, is marked by stately homes, farmworkers’ cottages, rolling fields, isolated woodlands, pretty churches with lichen-covered headstones in the graveyard and, of course, the aristocracy.
Taxi driver Robert Sharp, 36, says the murder shocked the community.
“You expect this kind of thing in big cities but not out here,” he says. “They say the body might have been there for months. It’s not a surprise, really, because around here everything is so spaced out.”
There is very little of this type of crime in this remote part of Norfolk where you might not come across another soul for miles.
The last time the community dealt with an unidentified body in its midst was in 1974, when the headless body of a pregnant woman was found. She has never been identified. That same year, a young woman disappeared from a campsite but no corpse has been found.
Residents say there has been some speculation about the latest grim discovery but people aren’t worried for their safety. They believe whoever dumped the body must have known the area, an obscure woodland at the end of a farm track not far from the royal stud farm where the queen breeds racehorses.
Neville Bromwich, 76, has been going to the Sandringham estate to walk his dog for the past two years. People he has met on his walks don’t say much about it.
“There was one chap, though, who wondered how many more bodies might there be out here,” he says, gesturing to acres of woods beyond a patch of grass where his terriers are playing.
Millicent Langford, 72, and her husband, Rex Langford, 75, live in Cambridge and have been visiting the estate to go walking for the past 50 years.
“There are so many people who come walking around here, it must have been a midnight job,” says Rex Langford, speculating on the time of day the body might have been left. “There have been so many murders over Christmas, every time you open the paper, there’s another. It’s getting like America.”
The royal family is popular here. On the day the body was discovered, about 1,000 residents turned out to applaud the queen’s husband, Prince Philip, who had coronary surgery. Philip walked with his son, Prince Charles, from Sandringham House to the nearby church for a New Year’s Day service.
The area is home to a substantial number of Eastern Europeans. Dimitrijeva was Latvian. Her family lives in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, 11 miles away, and had moved to Britain in 2008 to find a better life.
In the shadow of immense hereditary wealth, the area is one of high unemployment. And a glance at help-wanted ads in the newspaper shows few jobs paying more than minimum wage.
The poor prospects do not affect people’s love for the royals, says Jon Buss, editor of the Lynn News newspaper in King’s Lynn. People here have a more intimate relationship with the Windsors than Londoners have.
“You often see them around,” Buss says. “The queen always attends the January meeting of the Sandringham Women’s Institute. They often visit local businesses and charities. The Queen Mother used to pop into a local department store to do her clothes shopping.”
Mr. and Mrs. Swallow, a couple who usually live on a boat but are house-sitting near the estate, found solace in Dmitrijeva’s final resting place.
“We live on a canal and dead bodies are always being thrown into the water,” says the woman who wants to be identified only as Mrs. Swallow. “This is a much nicer resting place, especially after such a violent crime.
“It’s so peaceful.”