[eerie music]
Rita Ellis, an unsolved murder.
1967, a brutal attack on a cold November night.
She was an RAF service woman.
[David] Yeah.
And it's remained unsolved for 53 years.
[eerie music]
[woman singing in foreign language]
[eerie music]
[David] I've got Rita Ellis's inquest here from 1968,
which is very detailed.
It describes a lot of background on the case
and where her body was found
Rita Ellis was murdered on the 11th of November, 1967.
So it was the night before Remembrance Day.
She was a cook, wasn't she?
Yeah, she'd been at the camp
for five months before her death,
and this was her second posting.
Now, this is interesting.
According to the inquest, she was due to babysit that night
for a Wing Commander Watson.
We've got also a report that she's seen walking
towards a red car and she was found dead here
at RAF Halton, one of the largest RAF training bases
in the UK.
And at the time of Rita's murder,
there were 2000 people working on the camp.
I think a starting point is to walk Rita's last moments
and see what that could tell us about her death.
Let's head to the crime scene.
[eerie music]
[car rumbling]
According to the inquest,
her body was found in a copse beyond these trees.
-[eerie music] -[birds chirping]
I think this is it.
Rowborough Copse.
-[birds squawking] -[eerie music]
So Rita's body would have been found
up against one of these posts.
So eerie, isn't it?
She was partially clothed.
She had been strangled,
it looks like by her own knickers.
And there was a crude attempt at covering her,
wasn't there, with foliage?
Yeah, rather inexpertly, if you ask me.
It was relatively easily found the following morning
by a dog walker.
These posts mark the western perimeter of RAF Halton.
So the very edges of the camp.
-[eerie music] -[wind whooshing]
How do we think that Rita got here?
Did she come willingly in the car?
Did she realise something was wrong and try and run away?
Was she dragged here?
I just don't know the answer to that.
Does the inquest tell us anything?
Well, the inquest gives us
a bit more definitive information
and it was Keith Simpson that was the pathologist.
He put the time of death about 9:00 PM.
This area would have been dark.
We were in November.
This is isolated.
It's a disused area.
So the perpetrator would have had time to do what it is
that they wanted to do.
And here, again,
there's something that might be significant.
She was virgo intacto,
so there had been no penetration,
although there was chafing at her vagina.
But crucially, she was still a virgin.
[eerie music]
What do you do with a case like this
which is over 50 years old?
Can it ever be solved when the possible perpetrator
might even be dead now?
[eerie music]
Well, it's not easy is it?
It's 1967, so we don't have ANPR.
We don't have mobile phone records.
We don't have CCTV.
[Emilia] Forensic evidence?
[David] Rita's case was reopened
by the Thames Valley Police in 2007.
And, surprisingly, they have been able
to generate a full DNA profile of the perpetrator.
[Emilia] That's gonna be useful.
Yeah, but any testing they've done
in the investigation hasn't led to a conviction.
[eerie music]
I think we should guard against simply thinking
of Rita as just another murdered girl.
We've gotta build up a picture
of what she was like when she was alive.
Have a look at this.
[eerie music]
I've managed to uncover some footage
of her passing out parade at RAF Spitalgate,
where she did her training.
Look, there they are having a laugh.
Still haven't seen Rita though.
-There she is. -Where?
[David] There she is, just there
with her hand on her mouth.
So on the outskirts of the fun.
[David] Here she comes
She looks shy, doesn't she?
Being in front of the camera, with her head down.
And that totally fits with the descriptions
that we have of her.
The inquest describes her
as a lonely girl looking for company.
She didn't have a boyfriend.
She didn't drink or smoke.
And she spent her time off duty reading
or watching television.
And another description is that she was a shy person
that, if an officer came along,
she wouldn't dare to say to him,
are you the wing commander?
She'd have just got in the car, assuming it was him.
That might be quite important.
Another contemporary described her as a gentle soul
who wouldn't have been able to put up much of a fight.
She had no aggression in her.
All of these descriptions paint a similar picture
of her, don't they, that she was a lovely girl, gentle.
quiet, timid, shy, and vulnerable to other people.
But I suppose
if we're trying to discover who it was that killed her,
we really need to know much more
about that final hour that she's alive.
[melancholy music]
[traffic whooshing]
[phone rings]
[Emilia] David, I tracked down this guy called Steve Tank
who was an apprentice at RAF Halton.
Apparently he saw Rita on the night she died.
Steve, how well did you know Rita?
Well, I didn't know Rita at all until that night.
And, as it transpires, I might well have been one
of the last ones to see her alive.
[Emilia] So what happened that night?
I was going out with a trainee nurse
and I'd arranged to meet her
outside the WAF block that night.
Where was that, the WAF block?
It was just at the top of this hill.
[Emilia] Yeah.
And to the left.
It was about quarter past seven,
I turned up to meet Liz, Liz Hearn,
and she came out of the WAF block with her friend
who I later found out was Rita Ellis.
She said, Rita's gonna be babysitting.
Can we walk her down to the guard room?
November night, it would have been dark
at that time as well.
It was cold and it was foggy, misty.
Right.
So I said, yes, but you know, I don't really want to
because at that time we weren't allowed to associate
with any of the other staff.
I could have got thrown out of the Air Force.
-For being with Liz? -Yes.
Right.
So we walked down to the guard room here.
So I think we were only there
for about three or four minutes.
She said, well, you might as well go.
I'll be all right.
I'm getting picked up.
[Emilia] Rita said that?
Rita said that, yeah.
So what time do you think you left Rita?
Between 25 past, half past seven.
And that was the last time you saw Rita?
That's the first and last.
-First and last. -Yeah, yep.
And when did you find out about what had happened to Rita?
It must've been about two days later, I suppose,
when we were all being interviewed by the police
'cause they'd said the name.
It was then I realised it was Rita Ellis
that we'd walked down to the guard room with.
Yeah.
[melancholy music]
Do you have a theory of who you think might be responsible?
[Steve] No, I haven't a clue.
Honestly, I wouldn't know.
-[eerie music] -[birds chirping]
I've dug out some newspaper articles
and taken some facts from the inquest
to try and work out Rita's last movements.
So let's see if we can actually plot them down.
Steve says he thinks that he might have been one
of the last people to see Rita that night
and he escorted Rita and Liz from block seven at 7:15 PM
to the guard room, which was about five minutes walk away.
Then he and Liz left Rita there
at the guard house at about 7:25 PM.
Okay, the next thing that we know for sure
from the coroner's inquiry is that the wing commander
is gonna leave his house at 7:31
and therefore it's gonna take some minutes
to get to the camp,
but the key thing is he's already running late.
And there was confusion
about where he was going to pick up Rita, wasn't there?
So it was possible that Rita was at the guard house
whilst the wing commander
was outside the women's accommodation block.
So they would have missed each other.
Well, and he can't go into it because he's a man.
Therefore, he had to return home
because he wanted to get his wife
because his wife could go into the female accommodation.
So then the next known thing is
that Rita was seen by Sylvie Banks who said in the inquest
and that her friend Rita was in block seven at 8:00 PM
and Sylvie asked her what she was doing that night
and Rita said that she was going to babysit.
Now, meanwhile, the wing commander has gone home.
He's got his wife with him now, but crucially,
they searched block six, not block seven.
[Emilia] Oh, so he's made a mistake.
Yeah.
And the next thing that we know from the police report
is that there was a sighting of Rita
between 8:00 and 8:15 at the gymnasium.
And then there's this account in the newspaper
that she's seen walking towards a man driving
a red Cortina around about 8:10
and then the next definitive piece of information
that we have, according to the coroner's inquiry,
is that she was murdered at 9:00 PM.
[eerie music]
But just to make things even more complicated,
on the 50th anniversary appeal,
the Thames Valley Police say that night,
two events, that civilians could come to, were being held.
There was bingo and a disco on camp.
And therefore who actually is responsible here?
Is it someone on the camp or someone from the community?
Well, whoever they are
they committed a terrible crime and we need their name
and we need to find them.
[wind whooshing]
[suspenseful music]
I've traced a policeman who worked in the incident room
on the first investigation into Rita's murder.
His name is Michael Clanfield.
I'm hoping he can give us some information.
Have you had any luck with former officers?
[David] Yes, I have.
I've tracked down an ex policemen
who was actually there
on the day that Rita's body was found.
This is the actual incident room.
That handsome chap there is me with dark hair.
Oh my goodness.
What were the early theories
about what had happened to Rita?
I think the feeling was that maybe she mistook
the car that pulled up.
At that time, when we used to go out to any nightclubs,
the girls would stand on the road for a lift home
and thumb a lift home.
It was like normal practise.
Chaps, you always used to go there and pick girls up
they didn't know just to give them a lift home
to start a relationship.
How does that fit though, with Rita,
still thinking that she was going babysitting?
Now, if the offender pulled up and she was anxious to go,
she could have volunteered that information quite easily.
Have you come to pick me up for babysitting?
And all he's got to say is yes and she gets in.
That's what sits with me more logically.
So random opportunity was taken.
And was the wing commander,
by virtue of having been the man
who was meant to be picking up Rita
for babysitting that night,
was he an early person of interest in the investigation?
At the beginning, he was obviously a first one,
needs to be seen.
From what I've heard, he was quite angry.
He was not happy.
I mean, he was a high ranking officer
and this was a young apprentice and she'd let him down.
So she was going on my report,
which is not the reaction
of someone who's took her up in the woods and murdered her.
Right.
And were there people
of interest early in the investigation?
Because this was a sexual offence.
[Emilia] Yes.
A lot of the inquiry was based on people
who might have a sexual tendency.
Right.
Most of the information seemed to come from the females
of having bad experience with males.
We call them stalkers now, don't we?
Right?.
But in them days, they were just creeps, weren't they?
But they were the same type of person
that gave a female an uncomfortable feeling.
So in the statement taken, if it was a person of interest,
they would take swabs
and do the basics and the fingerprints and things like that.
And why did the police take DNA swabs
at the time when DNA testing wasn't common practise?
My opinion is it was an avenue
that hadn't been used
that would have possibly ruffled the suspect's feathers
and cause some sort of irrational behaviour.
And because it was a murder,
you'd get a Home Office pathologist and forensics.
They would retain everything
in any shape or form for future examination.
[eerie music]
[bell clanging]
[traffic whooshing]
[David] You're the last person alive
who attended the crime scene on that Sunday morning.
That's right, yeah.
[David] When you walked into the murder site itself,
what were your first impressions?
Yeah. Shock.
Shock, really.
You couldn't take a lot of it in.
All around was items of her clothing
on the trees and things.
It implied to me that she'd been terrified.
and running around, fighting for her life, so to speak.
The body was not a pretty sight.
Poor girl was lying there, on her back,
almost naked.
-[eerie music] -[officers shouting]
Been to many, many death scenes before,
but this was one which you can't forget it, to be honest.
Was there evidence
that she had been sexually assaulted at the time?
It appeared to me she had, yeah.
Just the way she was lying,
her clothing removed and
and just, why was she lying
there like that in the first place, you know?
[David] Doug, if she had screamed at this spot.
Nobody would have heard, no.
The garage would've been closed.
Tea rooms was closed.
It's a good 50 yards in from the main road.
Why would they go to such a remote spot
in the first place?
Was she going there willingly
or was she forced there?
The only sense I can make is
that she was taken there by the perpetrator.
Whether it was someone she knew
or a complete stranger, I can't say,
but I mean, I can't see him dragging her there,
to be honest.
I mean, there would've been plenty of time to escape.
[eerie music]
Did you or your colleagues form any impression
as to who this might have been that killed Rita?
Initially? No, no.
But afterwards, you just sort of start thinking, you know,
is it somebody local?
Is it somebody from the camp?
Someone she knew?
One fellow was sort of suspected.
He used to live in the scrapyard
down at Rosie Bridge.
[David] Who was that?
That was a fellow named Fletcher.
[suspenseful music]
[phone rings]
I've got a suspect.
It's a guy called Fletcher.
[Emilia] Right, tell me what you know about him.
Well, at the minute, not very much,
but apparently he lived in a scrapyard near
to where Rita was murdered.
And here's the thing, he'd previously been investigated
for sexual assaults.
Well, I'll look into that
and try and find out some more information.
-[suspenseful music] -[traffic whooshing]
This is our man.
His name was Joseph Hulson Fletcher.
He was a scrap metal dealer
and he lived in a caravan in the woods around the RAF camp.
And a short time after Rita's murder,
he was arrested for the sexual assault
of a 17-year-old girl.
[David] How old was he?
He was 49.
But there's just one problem.
I contacted Thames Valley Police because, as you know,
they've got a DNA profile of the killer.
They won't give specific details
about the DNA profile they have,
but they have told us that we can rule out Fletcher
because his DNA doesn't match the DNA they have
of Rita's killer.
And neither does Wing Commander Watson's.
[David] Well, it's back to square one then.
[suspenseful music]
[Emilia] Well, I've arranged for us to speak
to some apprentices from RAF Halton who were there in 1967.
Will you tell me how you learned about Rita's murder?
I don't think it was straight away.
It was about the time that we were asked to go
and give witness statements to the police.
[David] Were you shocked that this murder
could have taken place on the camp?
Yes, definitely.
It's just not something we'd never thought would happen.
In 50 years, has there been another murder at Halton?
No, so it was pretty unique.
Pretty shocking, to be honest.
Do you remember rumours about any suspect
who people thought might have been responsible?
There were a couple people in the frame.
One was an apprentice who was a bit
of a loner, an oddball.
He was also a boxer who was notorious
for his ability to be physical.
[Emilia] Get into fights?
Yeah, he'd get into fights.
My abiding memory is of him holding a guy's belt
and his neck and ramming his head into a stone wall,
which resulted, as it turned out, with a fractured skull.
[Emilia] Oh my goodness.
So if you were going to look at someone
to put in the frame,
probably he would be an ideal candidate.
But there was also a corporal
that lived with us in the block.
The corporal was a very strange bloke.
You could never get to know him.
He was slightly remote,
and he was quite a tough guy, you know?
Why did he become a suspect?
The first time I heard it mentioned
was at this reunion in 1989.
You know, we had discussed, who do you think did it?
One person said to me, I'd heard
that this guy had blood on his hands or his shirt.
That's, again, hearsay and second thing,
but that's the first time I heard about that
and that was quite a shock.
[suspenseful music]
So that's two more suspects,
the apprentice and the corporal.
What do you remember about the investigation at the time?
That's interesting.
The apprentice.
[David] He was known to be a boxer.
Now he was described to me
as someone who was pretty violent
and got into horrible fights, but it's not him.
I've spoken to the police and he was a person of interest,
but they did a DNA test on him
and he's been forensically eliminated.
That's a bit of a surprise.
The second suspect was a corporal.
It was a story that seemingly emerges,
not during the investigation,
but several years later.
It was never reported to the police at the time,
but I still think about him being seen
with blood on his hands.
On the night of Rita's murder?
Yeah.
I don't know how much to give credence to that story.
Rita's murder was a strangulation.
It doesn't say anywhere in the inquest
there was blood from her injuries
and indeed, it wasn't mentioned by Doug Manderfield,
who saw her body.
So it could just be hearsay years later.
[Emilia] Well, I checked with the police.
They confirmed that they have this person's details,
but we can't take it forward anymore
because the files are closed to us.
So with all these names out of the frame as suspects,
we're still no farther forward.
Where next?
[dramatic music]
Well, we might not have any suspects,
but I don't feel we're at a dead end.
I just think we need to broaden the search
to find out what was happening at the area at the time.
I'm gonna reach out to some local newspapers
to see if we can get more information.
[Emilia] Good idea.
I'm gonna head to the archives
to see if any historical newspaper reports throw up
any new leads.
Because this case is so old,
I think it's key to try to understand that late 60s period.
Politics and attitudes towards women were
so different back then, things could be pretty repressive.
And Rita worked on an RAF base,
a highly masculine military world.
[David] I agree.
And you've got to ask,
did all of that have a bearing on Rita's murder?
[melancholy music]
Three girls have been savagely attacked in seven weeks.
One of them, Rita Ellis of RAF Halton, died.
Ann Simmons was attacked on her way home
on November the 25th.
Janet X was the victim of a brutal attack
at Little Tring.
Another girl has been accosted by an assailant,
and this time in Wingrave.
[phone rings]
I've just discovered there were a number of attacks
on women in the same area
in the three months after Rita was killed
and police at the time clearly linked the offender
to Rita's murder.
Well, sadly, you may be able
to add another attack to the list.
Through speaking to the local newspaper,
I found a woman who was attacked four months
after Rita was murdered in the local area.
She was only 15 when it happened and she never reported it
to the police at the time.
She says she's happy to talk to me,
but she doesn't want to be identified.
Linda, can you tell me what happened
to you in the spring of 1968?
[Linda] Well, I'd been to a discotheque
and gets very hot in there,
so I decided to go for a walk
and post a letter at the same time.
This is in Aylesbury?
[Linda] In Aylesbury.
And a car stopped and he called me over.
The man, I think he was in his 20s,
was fair haired, and he had a distinctive chin
and he was well spoken.
Well spoken?
[Linda] Yeah.
He said he had medical supplies and if he didn't get them
to Halton Hospital, somebody was going to die,
and could I show him the way?
[eerie music]
He opened the door and I did get in the car.
He drove down a little lane and he said,
I've got to stop the car.
And I tried to get out the car
and I couldn't get out.
I just couldn't.
I don't know why I couldn't get out.
And he got really, really angry.
I start panicking.
I knew I was in trouble.
I'm trying to fumble around and get out,
and he just puts his hands around my throat,
starts strangling me.
And said, you're not going to give me trouble as well.
You're not going to give me trouble as well?
What did that make you think?
[Linda] He's done it before.
And then I immediately thought,
you're the one that killed Rita.
Linda, did you feel fear for your life?
[Linda] I think he would have killed me
if I hadn't quietened down and done what he told me to do.
He pulled me over onto his lap
and then he assaulted me.
Are you able to describe the things he does to you?
[Linda] I'd rather not.
-Too painful? -[Linda] Mm.
And in the end he drove me home.
And when you got home,
did you tell anybody that night?
[Linda] No.
You just didn't feel able?
[Linda] No, I couldn't, no.
[David] Linda, when did you report this to the police?
[Linda] About 12 or 13 years later.
[David] So we're in the 1980s?
[Linda] Yeah, early 80s.
Years ago, you didn't talk about those things.
You know, I'd have been probably frowned on.
But it was different times.
-It really was. -[melancholy music]
I'm glad times have changed
and women can talk about them now,
and you're not looked down on or frowned on,
but years ago, you couldn't.
And I'm sure there's other people out there
and the same thing's happened to them.
[melancholy music]
[traffic whooshing]
[Emilia] What did you find out?
[David] You know those sex assaults that you uncovered
-in the newspapers? -[Emilia] Yeah.
At the time after Rita's murder.
I've interviewed one woman,
who didn't want to be identified,
who said that she was attacked by this man.
Now, this poor woman was so ashamed.
She just didn't feel able to go to the police.
And indeed it took several years
before she was prepared to report what happened to her.
Well, there are still echoes of that today, aren't there,
where victims of sexual assault
are afraid to come forward and, you know,
from feeling ashamed or for fear of not being believed.
And these are issues that the Me Too movement
is trying to address.
Listen to this article that I found
which highlights the attitude to sexual crimes in the 1960s.
This is about Rita, but the article goes on to say,
"Some reported incidents are really only trumped-up excuses
"by girls wishing
"to explain away embarrassing circumstances."
That's truly, truly shocking.
And, get this, women are foolhardy
if they walk along dark lanes at night, unaccompanied.
So, all blaming women and the victims.
I cannot stand that kind of victim blaming approach
to criminology.
-It's awful. -And trivialising the crimes.
If we think about all of that, though,
in relation to Rita's case, you can, in a way,
see these sorts of attitudes playing out.
Rita's life was coldly disposed of by her killer,
all because he wanted sexual gratification.
-[eerie music] -[birds chirping]
But the question is, can we unmask Rita's killer
as being the same person who committed the string
of sexual attacks in the local area?
I want to profile these attacks
to see if they are connected to Rita.
So I'm gonna meet a local journalist
to see if he might be able to help me.
Hi.
[car rumbling]
Sam, there were a number of attacks in the weeks and months
after Rita was murdered
around RAF Halton that have
similar characteristics to each other.
Yes, there's multiple press reports.
And Little Tring, where we're driving to at the moment,
was the second in the sequence of attacks
after Rita's murder, was it?
Janet X, as she was known.
She was a student nurse at West Hertfordshire Hospital
and she was visiting a friend who lived in Little Tring.
[David] How far away is Little Tring from Halton?
It's about four miles.
[David] So this is very close to the camp?
Correct.
And we're just approaching the location now.
[gravel crunching]
[traffic whooshing]
So Janet X was walking down this road
when she suddenly become aware
of a man walking in front of her
and he's turned around and asked her for the time.
She immediately recognised that she was in danger
and she started to run, but he's grabbed her.
He's hit her with a cosh
and ultimately dragged her into the field.
Is she unconscious and he's pulling her into the field?
Yeah, she said that she lost consciousness
and he dragged her about 300 yards into the field.
[eerie music]
[David] Do we have any indication
about how bad her injuries were?
No, but, I mean, the police described it
as a very brutal attack
and they said that he must've thought she was dead.
[eerie music]
Well, there are similarities, aren't there,
to the murder of Rita?
The age of the victims.
What happens to the victims.
This perpetrator clearly left Janet X for dead,
according to what you've told me.
And, of course, the timeline is very interesting.
It's within a matter of a few weeks after the murder of Rita
and it's only four miles away from RAF Halton.
I've also heard from another woman
who was attacked around this time,
and she was pretty convinced
that the person who attacked her had also killed Rita.
Do you know, you're giving me a lot to think about.
Do we know if the victim from here, Janet X,
gave a physical description to the police?
[Sam] She actually gave a description.
[eerie music]
So this is the photo fit from Janet X's description?
Correct.
And this also matches the description
of the man who attacked the girl in Wingrave.
[David] So this might be the face of Rita's killer.
[suspenseful music]
[Emilia] Trilby man.
[David] Let's run through what we know about his MO.
We know he has access to a car.
We know that he knows the local area,
and that he uses a ruse to get girls into the car.
He asks them for the time
or he says that he's got medical supplies.
That, to me, suggests that he has a level of confidence
and he even looks confident, the way he dresses.
And, of course, no one has ever been caught
for these attacks or for Rita's murder.
And, of course, we know that he uses a level of violence
because he used a cosh in the Little Tring rape
and he attempted to throttle Linda.
But I still have a problem here.
If this is a sequence of attacks,
then after Rita's murder,
they've deescalated in their severity,
and, in my experience, that rarely happens.
If you think about what happens to Rita
and then what happens to Linda.
In Linda's assault, after the assault finishes,
he takes her to her home.
Now that's a very different MO
from the one that we've been discussing.
And even in the Little Tring rape, he achieves coitus,
but he doesn't kill that victim.
But he left her for dead, didn't he?
So he thought that he'd killed her.
Yeah, but he's been with a victim
who's actually died, Rita,
and therefore he knows the difference
between killing someone and leaving them for dead.
So I have real problems here.
I'm convinced Trilby man did not kill Rita
because the MOs are just too different.
[suspenseful music]
So frustrating, isn't it,
not being able to pinpoint the name
of viable suspects.
Well, with the passage of time
and such limited avenues of research, we can't.
But what we can do is, using 21st-century technology,
begin to understand how and why she was killed.
[melancholy music]
[traffic whooshing]
[suspenseful music]
We need to look at the murder using
the latest medical technology
to see if that offers any new information on Rita's death.
So I've asked a leading pathologist
and an anatomy lecturer to help us.
Siobhan has set up the digital anatomy table
with all the marks that Simpson describes.
It's absolutely incredible.
This is a real way of piercing through some
of the myth that we've inherited in relation
to what happened to poor Rita.
David, you've had the opportunity,
for the first time in 50 years, to really look at this case
from a pathologist's point of view.
What have you discovered?
[melancholy music]
The description given by the autopsy report
by Keith Simpson is quite limited,
so I suspect he sanitised it for the jury inquest,
so not all the details are there.
But, I mean, he gave the cause of death
and he specifically talked about the mark around the neck
and he described a ligature mark.
He describes it being at the front of the neck,
so what he's basically saying is
that the strangulation was probably from behind
Your revelation that she's strangled
from behind didn't really emerge at the inquest.
She was strangled from behind.
Yeah.
That's with her own knickers.
The thing that struck me is,
if he had intended to do it,
he might've brought something to use for strangulation
like a rope or use his own belt or a tie,
but it's quite specific, isn't it, to use her knickers?
It's odd.
I mean, it is odd.
It does imply that that her knickers were already off,
unfortunately, before she was strangled.
The pathologist also talks about bruising on the knees,
will, knee bruising is sort of collapsing forwards,
and then bruising on the toes.
Now, toe bruising tends to suggest
that she's probably dug her feet into the ground
while she's being strangled
which would support strangulation from behind.
Because if you're being strangled from the front,
you then get injuries on the back of the heels
'cause they sort of kick on the ground.
And the weird thing is,
there isn't much talk about other injuries.
You've got just one area of bruising on the left arm.
There's no evidence from the pathology, is there,
of a tremendous fight being put up by her?
Not in the pathology given at the inquest, no.
There's no vegetation marks.
Would the vegetation marks be from running away?
Yes.
Yeah, running away through-
And you'd see scratches on her legs or...
Yup. Yup.
I think one of the police officers talks about,
in the inquest, dense undergrowth.
So we assume there's lots of bracken,
lots of sharp bits of vegetation
which would scratch the leg.
So you'd expect to see that.
So it implies that there isn't much of a struggle.
[David] And does it also imply she's likely
to have known her murderer?
That is the implication, yes.
This fact that's revealed that she's virgo intacta,
can we take that as read
that she was still a virgin when she died?
I don't think we can.
I think there might be a degree of massaging the evidence
for the family at the inquest.
One of the problems is you can actually have penetrative sex
and not actually tear the hymen.
It said in the inquest
that she was a very quiet, unassuming individual.
Maybe she went along with it
because she was a timid individual.
The knickers being off and her being strangled
with her own knickers implies that it was going too far,
is how I've seen things.
This isn't what I was expecting.
It's now going too far.
I'm leaving.
It implies a degree of consent
at the start of the process.
I get the impression of this being a young man,
inexperienced, didn't set out
to do what he eventually did,
which is why he's having to use Rita's own underwear
to strangle her.
And I certainly didn't get the impression
that we're dealing with a putative serial killer.
I didn't get the impression that this is the, you know,
this is somebody who is a psychopath,
which is, I believe the word-
[Emilia] What that the coroner said, yeah.
That the coroner used.
I just get the impression
of a dreadful five minutes of madness.
[suspenseful music]
What emerges is a very different profile of the perpetrator
from some of the things that have previously been suggested.
It becomes obvious now, doesn't it,
that Rita knew the person who killed her?
[melancholy music]
In my life as a criminologist,
because there's a body
because there's a DNA profile,
that would normally be game over.
We'd catch the person.
This is much more complex.
[melancholy music]
We're back at Rowborough Copse
where Rita's body was found
and where we began this investigation.
53 years ago, the inquest said that Rita was murdered
by persons unknown.
Are we any further forwards?
Have we taken our civilian investigation
as far as we can, do you think?
Yeah, and I think we've made a little progress.
We can now establish a motive
that Rita was killed after a sexual encounter
that went horribly wrong.
And we can say that, in all probability,
she knew the person who killed her.
Seven out of 10 women who are murdered
are murdered by someone that they know.
And when it comes to narrowing down suspects,
I think we're back to looking at someone who did this coming
from the camp and that Rita knew who it was that killed her
and that culprit has never been caught.
But everyone that knew Rita says
that she was an unassuming and trusting person.
So we just don't know what she submitted herself to.
She may have been scared or coerced,
and this was the 60s and women were expected
to be more compliant.
They didn't have the voice that they do now.
And for that, it seems that, sadly,
Rita paid the ultimate price
In relation to solving who killed Rita Ellis,
that's a mystery that still eludes us.
-[melancholy music] -[birds chirping]
[suspenseful music]
[woman singing in foreign language]