A murder of a Playboy Bunny remains unsolved nearly 50 years later – and now a sensational new theory has emerged.
Eve Stratford, a bunny girl at the notorious Playboy Club in London’s Park Lane was found dead in her East London flat in 1975. A number of suspects, including her rocker boyfriend Tony Priest were questioned and ruled out.
Police investigated the possibility that Eve had been targeted because, shortly before her death, she had appeared topless on the cover of Mayfair magazine.
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Alongside a number of full-frontal pictures inside, the 21-year-old was quoted as saying that she liked to be dominated in bed but that she didn’t like to be “whipped or tied up”. Her killer had tied her up with her own underwear before slashing her throat repeatedly with a knife.
One detective investigating the case said that Eve's Leyton flat was one of the most horrific murder scenes they had ever seen. Eve’s death was tentatively linked to a number of other murders, including that of Lynne Weedon – where DNA evidence conclusively showed they had been raped by the same attacker shortly before their deaths.
Lynne Weedon had been murdered six months after Eve's death. The 16-year-old's skull had been fractured with a blunt object before she was raped and left for dead on the grounds of an electricity substation. She died in hospital a few days after she was found, without ever regaining consciousness.
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Chris Clark, former police intelligence officer turned author told investigative reporter Marcel Theroux of a sensational theory linking the murders to Peter Sutcliffe. He explained: “There were so many murders of unaccompanied women in the 1970s. I condensed them and I looked at Peter Sutcliffe – he seemed to be the common denominator.
Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted of 13 sexually-motivated murders, with a further seven attacks on women. But Chris Clark believes there are many more victims. “My research has found another 40 murders and attacks,” he said.
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He’s not alone in thinking that the feared Ripper could have been involved in the London murders. One bunny girl had even contacted the police to tell them about her suspicion that Sutcliffe was involved.
While the crimes of which Sutcliffe was convicted were centred around the Leeds and Bradford areas, Chris says it’s very possible that the killer could have committed crimes in other regions.
Sutcliffe’s girlfriend Sonia, later to become his wife, had a sister who lived in Alperton, West London, at the time of the murders. Family get-togethers put Sutcliffe in London at around the times of both Eva’s and Lynne Weedon’s deaths.
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And, while the Ripper murders were typically the kind of blow to the head that killed Lynne Weedon, in some cases he had also slashed his victims’ throats, in the same way that Eva was mutilated.
But there is a problem with Chris’s theory: the DNA evidence that ties Lynne’s and Eva’s murders together. A sample of Sutcliffe’s DNA is on file in the National DNA database, and it would seem likely that any similarity would have been flagged up.
But he's undeterred, saying that DNA evidence has been botched before. He says that Sutcliffe's involvement in the unsolved murder of hitchhiker Barbara Mayo was wrongly ruled out because of unreliable DNA evidence.
He said: "It became quite clear to me that Barbara's clothing had been taken out of it's bag, cleaned and handled by a number of people before being worn by a woman for the reconstruction, this was then replaced in its bag for a further 26 years before Derbyshire Police tested it."
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