British Army corporals were dragged from their cars and beaten to death on the streets of the UK. A black teenager was murdered by a gang of racist thugs as he waited for a bus. A teenage girl was snatched from her bedroom and left to die in a drainage shaft. These are some of the chilling murders that shocked the country over the decades due to their brutality and cruelty.
Corporals Killings
Army corporals Derek Wood and David Howes were hauled from their car by a mob, stripped, and shot dead by the IRA in a sickening killing captured by TV cameras in 1988. An Army helicopter, hovering overhead to monitor the event, was powerless to intervene. The pair, who were not in uniform, were attacked when they took a wrong turn and found themselves in the middle of an IRA funeral cortege in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. An angry crowd surrounded the car and smashed the windows. Wood fired a shot in the air, which briefly scattered the crowd, but it surged back and they were eventually dragged out. They were taken to Casement Park, where they were tortured and killed. Their bodies were later found in an alley.
Stephen Lawrence
Stephen was just 18 when he was murdered by a gang of racist thugs as he waited for a bus in London in 1993. He was chased by six attackers who bundled him to the ground and stabbed him. Only two of his killers have ever been brought to justice after a bungled investigation, which exposed institutional racism within the Met Police. It also led to the partial revocation of the rule against people being tried twice for the same crime.
Soham Murders
The disappearance of school pals Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman gripped the country in the summer of 2002. A photograph of the inseparable pair smiling in matching Manchester United shirts was on every newspaper front page and TV news bulletin. But the nation was shocked when two bodies were discovered 17 miles away from their hometown of Soham, Cambridgeshire, in a drainage ditch close to Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk. Their school caretaker Ian Huntley was jailed for life for their murder. Shockingly, it emerged he was known to have taken a sexual interest in young girls and had been accused of sexual assaults in Grimsby, where he had lived before moving south. Huntley was battered to death at HMP Frankland earlier this year.
Jill Dando
The beloved Crimewatch presenter was just 37 when she was shot dead outside her home in Fulham, south west London, in April 1999. She was engaged to Alan Farthing and the pair were due to get married that September. Tragically, she had left his house to return to her own home, which she was in the process of selling, the morning of her death. Barry George – a man with a history of stalking women and sexual offences – was convicted of the crime in 2001, but later acquitted. No one else has since been charged over the killing, but a host of theories have been put forward by amateur sleuths, ranging from a professional hit order by a Serbian warlord to a jilted lover or a deranged fan, but the truth remains unknown 27 years on.
Lesley Whittle
Heiress Lesley Whittle, 17, was kidnapped from her own bedroom in her family's rural home by a notorious career criminal known as the Black Panther in 1975. Her kidnapper Donald Neilson had left a £50,000 ransom demand on top of a box of Turkish Delight. She was stripped naked, tied up in a drainage shaft 65 miles away from her home and left teetering on a narrow ledge 54 feet below ground level with a wire noose around her neck and wearing a hood while bungling Neilson went to try to collect the ransom. In March, after several failed attempts to deliver the ransom, Lesley's emaciated body was found in the shaft. She is believed to have either fallen to her death or been pushed by Neilson just days after her disappearance in January. The shock had stopped her heart.
