It has been nearly 60 years since a serial killer nicknamed ‘Jack The Stripper’ claimed the life of his sixth and final victim.
One of the UK’s most chilling unsolved serial killer cases, he murdered six sex workers during a two-year spree in the 1960s, stripping them of their clothes and dumping their bodies across the leafy suburbs of West London.
Now, with increasing evidence pointing towards just one suspect, one of the victims’ children has made an urgent plea for the Metropolitan Police to reinvestigate the cold case.
Frank, the son of Frances Brown, who was found dead and stripped naked in a Kensington car park on November 25 1964, can’t remember a time in which his mother’s murder did not dominate his life.
Just six months old when she was killed, he feels the victims’ families have been robbed of justice.
Frank told : ‘I’ve always wanted to know the truth, but it’s been kept silent for years and it’s only in recent years that conversations around the case have opened up.
‘For most of my life, I just accepted the police line and carried on with my life, it was almost easier that way.
‘But now, I would like to see the case looked at by the Met Police again. The families deserve it.’
Frank’s mother was one of five other sex workers who were mysteriously killed in a series of unsolved West London murders during the 1960s. Frances had previously given evidence at the trial of Stephen Ward during the 1963 Profumo Affair.
Led by Scotland Yard chief superintendent John Du Rose, who had the nickname ‘five day John’ due to his perceived ability to solve murders in just five days, the murder case eventually went cold.
For Frank, however, the identity of his mother’s killer is glaringly obvious.
He said: ‘In my opinion, Harold Jones was the Hammersmith murderer. In my mind, I am 100 per cent convinced.’
Harold Jones of Abertillery, Wales, was convicted for murdering two young girls in the 1920s. At just 15 years old, he killed Freda Burnell, eight, before being acquitted due to limited evidence.
Just two months later, he lured 11-year-old Florence Little to his parents’ home before he hit her over the head with a peace of wood, slit her throat and then hid her body in the attic.
After pleading guilty and being sent to Wandsworth Prison where he admitted to killing Freda, Jones was released in 1941 aged 35. He later died of cancer in 1971.
Jones’ involvement in the Stripper case was scrutinised in a 2019 BBC documentary Dark Son: The Hunt For A Serial Killer’, led by David Wilson, a criminology professor at Birmingham City University, alongside an investigative team.
Undertaking a 15-month investigation, Wilson described the murders as ‘the biggest unsolved serial murder case in British criminal history with a killer who’s even more prolific than Jack the Ripper’.
Both him and his team concluded that there were a great number of similarities between Harold Jones and the profile of Jack the Stripper. Jones was also found to have been living locally under the name of Harry Stevens, with links to an industrial estate where police believed the bodies had been kept before being discarded in the Thames.
It was this mountain of circumstantial evidence that encouraged them to seek a cold case review from the Metropolitan Police, with Jones as the prime suspect.
However, five years on, and the families are still no closer to having confirmation of who was behind the sordid killings.
Jack the Stripper’s first murder victim is often believed to have been 30-year-old Hannah Tailford who was found dead by the River Thames in Hammersmith in February 1964.
Then, just slightly further up the riverbank in Chiswick, Irene Lockwood, who had been pregnant at the time, was found washed up completely naked on April 8th.
A mere 16 days later, Scottish-born Helen Barthelemy was found dead in an alleyway in Brentford.
In July, Mary Fleming’s body was discovered outside a garage forecourt in Chiswick.
The body of Frances Brown, Frank’s mother, was discovered in a Kensington car park in November. Brown had last been seen alive by a fellow sex worker getting into a clients car in October.
Frank, who has since returned to the ‘unsettling’ scene of where his mother’s body was found, said that prior to her death she had noticed an increased police presence on the streets.
Frank added: ‘The person that murdered these women still got in there, picked them up and murdered them right under the police’s feet. It’s astonishing.’
The corpse of the final victim, Bridget O’Hara, was found near a storage shed behind the Heron Trading Estate, Acton, in February 1965 after being declared missing since January. Both Barthelemy and O’Hara’s bodies were found with flecks of industrial paint, while O’Hara’s body also showed signs of being stored in a warm environment.
Two earlier murders of women working as prostitutes have also been linked by some investigators to the Stripper. Elizabeth Figg was found dead on 17 June 1959 by police officers who were undertaking a routine patrol in Duke’s Meadows, Chiswick, nearby to the River Thames. At the time, it was known as a lovers’ lane, with prostitutes frequenting the area.
Gwynneth Rees’ body was also discovered on 8 November 1963 on Townmead Road, Mortlake, in a household refuse disposal site. She was found entirely naked except for one single stocking.
Neil Wilkins, an Abertillery historian and author who has done extensive research into the case and tipped off Professor Wilson about the Harold Jones connection, said it is ‘a real shame’ for the families that the case has not been reinvestigated.
Mr Wilkins said: ‘The bottom line is, in my opinion, if these murder victims had been police officers, solicitors or doctors, they would have reopened it straight away.
‘It’s all just too much of a coincidence, it’s just unbelievable. If this was now, the police would have had him.’
Mr Wilkins, who is currently trying to investigate further where Jones was working at the time of the murders, said he would even be willing to put his house on sale to offer a £50,000 reward for information.
He added: ‘These family members would love to have closure, but I feel like they are never going to have it. It would mean so much to them after all of these years if they could get answers. As far as I’m aware, the majority of them are convinced that Harold Jones did it.’
Jones’ daughter, who anonymously spoke in the 2019 documentary and was completely unaware of her father’s past, described him as ‘an unassuming family man’ who kept a ‘terribly dark secret’ until his death.
Jones is not the first suspect to have been put forward in the Jack the Stripper case.
Other disproven suspects include security guard Mungo Ireland who worked on the Heron Trading Estate where Bridget O’Hara was found, but was later proven to have been in Scotland at the time of the killing.
Another key suspect was Caretaker Kennith Archibald who admitted to killing Irene Lockwood to police on 27 April 1964. However, he was charged but then later acquitted at the Old Bailey after retracting the confession.
Police also explored a former detective who held a grudge against police as a possible prime suspect, but this was later disproven.
One former crime reporter even claimed that ex-boxing champion Freddie Mills could have been responsible for the brutal murders. Michael Litchfield claimed that Mills, who died aged 46 in 1965, admitted his guilt to the Scotland Yard detective, and fellow Freemason, who was in charge of the investigation.
A spokesperson from the Metropolitan Police said: ‘While no unsolved murder investigation is closed, there are currently no active lines of enquiry in relation to these murders.
‘If anyone has fresh information that they believe could assist police, they are asked to call 101 or make contact via our website.’