The Oxford Murder

Rachel McLean, 19, was a second-year English student at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and lived in a shared house on Argyle Street. Her boyfriend, John Tanner, 22, was a New Zealand national studying classics at the University of Nottingham. On the evening of April 14, 1991, Rachel refused his marriage proposal once more, and he killed her.

Tanner strangled Rachel inside the house and pushed her body into a narrow space beneath the floorboards under the stairs. Once she was reported missing, he played the anxious boyfriend. He said he had last seen her at Oxford railway station, where, he claimed, a long-haired acquaintance of hers had offered her a lift, and on April 29 he took part in a televised police reconstruction and appealed for information. Detectives were not convinced by his story. On May 2, officers went back to the house, lifted the floorboards beneath the stairs and found Rachel’s body.

Tanner was arrested in Nottingham and admitted strangling Rachel, but he claimed he had not meant to kill her. On December 6, 1991, a jury at Birmingham Crown Court convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2003 after about 12 years and sent back to New Zealand. In 2018, a court there jailed him for two years and nine months for repeated violent assaults on a partner, and the Parole Board refused to release him early in 2019.