The Hair Ribbon

On 7 July 1946, eleven-year-old Sheila Martin was last seen playing on a swing behind her home in Fawkham Green, Kent. Her body was found in the woods before midnight. She had been strangled with her own hair ribbon. The coroner called it a diabolical assault. Nobody was ever charged.Kent Police interviewed every man, woman, and child within a three-mile radius. Thousands of motorcycle racing spectators had descended on Brands Hatch that afternoon, half a mile from where her body lay. The crowd gave whoever did it somewhere to disappear into. The investigation ran out of road.Ten days earlier, twelve-year-old Muriel Drinkwater had been murdered in woodland near her home in South Wales, 250 miles away. Both girls. Both woods. Both within half a mile of home. Both sexually assaulted. In 2009, South Wales Police formally requested Sheila Martin's case file from Kent to examine whether the same man killed them both.The official police file sits at the National Archives. Closed until 1 January 2045. The stated reasons include health and safety and third-party personal information. After nearly eighty years, someone in that file is still considered worth protecting.Sheila Martin was eleven years old. Her killer has never been named.