The Beast of Buckland

Linda Cook, 24, worked behind a bar in Portsmouth, on England’s south coast. Late on December 8, 1986, she left a friend’s house and cut across a patch of wasteland called Merry Row, beside a school in the Buckland district. She was raped, strangled and then stamped on with such force that her jaw, spine and larynx were broken, and the tread of the attacker’s trainer was left on her body.

Half a dozen sexual assaults in Buckland had already given the local papers a name for the man responsible. Police arrested Michael Shirley, an 18-year-old Royal Navy sailor who had been in the area that night after a date failed to turn up. The case was built on a common brand of shoe in a common size, a blood group shared by roughly a quarter of British men, healed scratches, and a gap in his account. A jury convicted him in January 1988 and he was given a life sentence.

Shirley refused to admit guilt across sixteen years of prison, staging two hunger strikes. In 2001 Hampshire police located a slide of evidence they had said was destroyed. Testing showed DNA that matched neither Shirley nor Cook. The Court of Appeal quashed his conviction in 2003, the first British murder conviction overturned on DNA. Linda Cook’s killer has not been identified.