Original subtitles

Good morning. I'd like to first of all welcome you to the Playboy Club

here in London, and I hope you're all very, very successful.

WOMAN: Give us a big smile and then turn around once.

MAN: If you're not chosen today, don't be too unhappy

because you're all very beautiful,

and we get lots of lovely girls coming in here

who are not accepted because they don't have "bunny" image.

WOMAN 1: OK, give us a big smile. WOMAN 2: No, she looks too dozy.

Then turn and face in that direction.

You like dozy-looking birds? Thank you very much.

You see the girls coming in their day clothes, they look fantastic.

Once you get them into a bikini it's a complete change,

it's a completely different thing.

MARCEL THEROUX: During the 1970s, London's Playboy Club

revelled in its image as a fantasy world for men,

but in 1975 a brutal murder brought it unwanted attention.

'A 21-year-old Bunny Girl at London's Playboy Club

'was savagely murdered in her Leytonstone flat.'

The killing was the first in a series of four

that some detectives believed may have been linked,

and the work of one man.

To my mind I'm looking for a brutal,

callous killer, who could well strike again.

To this day, the perpetrator's identity remains a mystery.

Was there a serial killer on the streets of London

who'd never been caught?

It became an obsession.

You want to grab on to something.

Some bastard has got away with it. That's my anger.

His crimes left tragedy in their wake.

Lynne means so much to me, I love her more than anyone.

Oh, sorry, that's...

But as time passes and memories fade,

this might be the last chance to find answers.

Somebody's out there, somebody knows something.

What was his name?

Hi, there, Maida Vale, please.

My name is Marcel Theroux, I'm a writer and a journalist.

I stumbled across these crimes while researching a book on 1970s London.

It was the city of my childhood, a weird mix of shabbiness and glamour.

It beggared belief that an unknown serial killer

might have been walking its streets.

I wanted to know what the police had done to catch him.

The story began at the Playboy Club.

'This is the temple where the faithful and a few cynics

'gather to pay homage to the good life,

'the Playboy Club in Park Lane.'

It offered fine dining, gambling,

and drinks served by glamorous hostesses

dressed as sexy bunny rabbits.

'These are the high priestesses of the Playboy Club, the bunnies.

'Bobbing, beaming, bosomy.'

It was the jewel in the crown of a global empire

run by the American entrepreneur Hugh Hefner.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel that your customers come

to basically look at the bunnies?

The bunnies, of course, are the most popular aspect of the club,

but I think it's the total sense of being the Playboy Club

that makes it popular.

Born overseas to a British father and German mother,

Eve Stratford moved to London aged 19 in 1972.

She had dreams of stardom, but ahead of her lay tragedy.

Her brutal murder in 1975 was headline news,

and remains unsolved to this day.

'The team investigating Eve's death called it The Bunny Girl Murder

'as though the Playboy Club itself held the secret to the case.

'But did it?'

We're on our way to see Barbara Haigh, she was a Bunny Girl

from the early 70s to when the Playboy Club closed in the 80s.

Thank you.

'Barbara's the gatekeeper to the history of the Playboy Club,

'so if you want to know what was going on,

'Barbara's your first port of call.'

Mwah. I'm going to do, I'm a bit French, so I do both.

Oh, is that what it is?

Tell me about this photo here on our right.

So... That's you. Yes.

And, I don't know who, who are you with?

Oh, come on, don't you recognise him? You're old enough, surely.

Hang on... I'm old enough to need these.

Go on, tell me. It's David Frost.

Yeah, I thought, I was going to say David Frost.

SIR David Frost, before he was a Sir.

It was Sammy Davis's birthday party,

so there was a lot of other people there, well-known people,

but obviously they didn't photograph them with me in them.

That's the only reason we kept that one. That's great.

My costumes.

They're all falling apart.

That is an original Bunny Girl costume? Yeah, yeah.

Because I had my own boobs, they, they cut the cups out.

What's it like going to work in so little,

wearing such a small uniform?

Everybody tries to make out it's something sordid or grim.

No, nothing was to be exposed, but enhanced.

How did you feel wearing it? Great.

Once you'd put on your tail and your ears,

I'm your Bunny Barbara. LAUGHS

VOICEOVER: Now I'm going to show you what a Bunny looks like.

Claudine is young, she's fresh, she has a pleasant personality,

she has a fabulous figure, and she works like a Trojan.

In 1973, Eve Stratford joined the Playboy Club

and was christened Bunny Ava.

I was on the camera, I was Camera Bunny at the time,

and she used to come to see me because she was very much,

"I'm a Bunny and I would like to be in Playboy Magazine".

What was she like in your interactions when she was posing

for you and you were... Very girly, very young,

very naive, and, you know... GASPS

..you know, stars are in her eyes.

That's lovely. That's her at the top?

Yeah. With John Conteh? Yeah.

There she is with Eric Morecambe.

It must have been a thrill, you rubbing shoulders with this...

Yeah. Well, look at them, you know.

Celebrities of the... They're not showing anything.

No, they, no they are demure. They show less than a bloody bikini.

So a Bunny Girl, essentially, was a kind of hostess

who was trained to serve drinks and be elegant and super efficient?

Yes, but not touched.

The idea that took hold that there was something sleazy about it

or that the Bunnies were available for sex

or that there was prostitution going on.

What do you say to that? No, it wasn't.

I certainly didn't earn my living on my back.

You couldn't give out your surname, you couldn't give out your address,

you couldn't give out your phone number,

and you weren't tempted

because if you did get caught, you'd lose your job.

In spite of all these safeguards, someone had targeted Eve.

When did you last see Bunny Ava alive?

It was round about Valentine's Day in '75,

cos she's in a photo shoot.

That's our little Ava there.

Yeah, don't want to be macabre, but it is a month later she's dead,

it's, it is an awful... Absolutely.

When did you hear the news of her death?

What did you feel at that point? When you... Rather sick.

Really quite sick, that somebody could be so cruel

as to murder...

a kid like that...

..for no reason.

She would never have done anything to provoke that sort of murder.

She's only a kid,

and there's nobody left to defend her.

Her parents are dead, her whole bloody family's dead.

There's no-one but us old boilers

who were around in 1975 who can protect her.

What is it that you want to protect, what are you protecting her from?

Well, these people who are trying to make out

that she was doing something untoward

to, to get murdered.

And, and the anger comes that some bastard has got away with it.

That's my anger.

Eve was part of a generation

enjoying the freedoms inspired by the 1960s.

'At the time of her murder,

'Eve was living with her boyfriend Tony Priest,

'the lead singer in a rock band called Vineyard.'

When I first became interested in this case,

I spent ages tracking Tony down.

'He'd never been interviewed.

'I found out that after Eve's death he'd started a new life abroad.'

# Livin' on low notes

# It ain't easy... #

MARCEL THEROUX: I brought some things to take you to another era...

Photos, no, I'd love to see them, yeah, sure.

..to take you back to the 1970s and see what we've got.

The glory days of 1975. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's... Yeah, that was,

that was in Warrington, and that was for her 21st.

28th of December 1974.

That's Big Bert, her father, Eve, of course, and me.

And I like this one, because it's au natural.

Rock star on the rise, beautiful young woman,

it's a new era, you've got freedoms

that your parents could never have imagined.

Her expression there, that, that was very much Eve.

She was laughing about something.

She was just very bubbly, and always very friendly, and always laughing.

Yeah, just a, just a really nice girl.

What did you see your future at this point with Eve?

We were planning, we were planning to run...

to go to Gretna Green and get, get married, actually.

'Eve Stratford, a 21-year-old Bunny Girl at London's Playboy Club,

'was savagely murdered in her Leytonstone flat.

'She was wearing a brown full-length coat over blue denim slacks

'and a brown felt hat, and the hat brim was probably pulled down

'as it was a horrible snowy day.'

TONY PRIEST: I came home from work, usual time, walked up the...

the steps at the side,

let myself in.

I remember saying, "Hey, babe, I'm home".

And just silence, you know, and I'm thinking "that's funny".

Didn't think, walked up the stairs, straight ahead was the bedroom...

..and I walked into our bedroom and, and found Eve.

The... the penny didn't fall first,

I mean, she was laying face down with her head turned to the side.

I thought, are you out of it?

I got down on one knee and moved her,

moved her hair back to see her face...

..and then I suddenly realised

I was kneeling in a... in a pool of blood.

And then... then the penny dropped.

And then I looked at her and I thought, "Fuck, you're dead".

Tied up, with her throat cut.

There's, there's no...

I, I can't describe it. It's just like, um...

..you're just confused.

Horror, you know.

I mean, I don't... I can't imagine the terror she must have been in,

you know.

That's one of the things which was apparent,

that, Christ, this must have been bloody terrifying, you know.

You were saying that she was such a soft person.

She was so sweet.

She just absolutely didn't deserve that.

How? Who? Who the hell did this?

OVER RADIO: Yes, sir, there isn't, he's got nowhere to run,

the vicinity is so calm...

MARCEL THEROUX: Hours after finding his girlfriend dead,

Tony was in a police cell being treated as a suspect.

Semen had been recovered from Eve's body.

Police assumed it belonged to her killer.

For the first however long you were the prime suspect,

everyone will be wondering, were you somehow involved in Eve's murder?

I mean I quite understand that they thought I was involved

because the husband and the boyfriend

are always the first suspects. You know, with something like that,

they take, they take you and they take you down the police station.

And I remember being in a cell and I spent the night in the cell,

but of course, the police don't know anything,

I mean you're... you're... you're a suspect.

It's up to me to tell my story...

and then I've had to go and give...

give blood, because obviously they had semen samples

and my blood didn't match the semen sample

so it was obviously it wasn't me.

I knew I had no guilt.

I just want to go back in '75, who are you thinking about,

any suspects?

At the time I was frantically looking for, for, for something to,

to grab onto because the police didn't seem to be going anywhere,

you know. I mean, who that was and why and how,

that's all conjecture, you know.

Then I started thinking.

This Arab in the Playboy Club, err,

who Eve had quite a bit of contact with...

Eve had talked about him.

There was no, there was no secret, I don't think she was... she was,

she was doing anything with him.

Um...

yeah, he was sort of in the picture,

so, you know, you're just thinking, well, what about him? You know.

I think he was called Ali, I don't know.

I can't remember exactly who this guy was. Yeah.

This is a new, sort of a new line as far as I'm concerned.

It seems like an important lead.

'However, pursuing this lead would get me nowhere. There was no Ali.

'It would be a while before I understood

'that Tony had misremembered this man's name.'

'I know from research that police investigated

'a number of Middle Eastern men who frequented the Playboy Club.

'At the time, the club was the most successful casino in Europe,

'awash with money from the Middle East.'

'70s VOICEOVER: With the pound sinking

and petrodollars flooding the British investment markets,

there are Arabian nights and days bringing prosperity

to almost every sector of the economy.

The flip side of the prosperity was resentment and prejudice

towards the rich outsiders.

I would come to discover that these attitudes had even affected the way

Eve's death had been investigated.

WOMAN: 'Last Tuesday, the day she died,

'Eve left a train at Leytonstone tube station

'at 3:45 in the afternoon.

'That's the last time she was definitely seen alive.

'She either walked, caught a bus or was given a lift

'to her flat three quarters of a mile away in Lyndhurst Drive.'

'In the days before DNA or CCTV,

'the police investigation was labour intensive.'

'A squad of 40 officers took statements from 400 people

'and fingerprinted 250.'

'There was an abundance of theories, a stalker, a jealous lover,

'someone who'd encountered Eve at the Playboy Club,

'perhaps a client from the Middle East.'

'But time passed and no-one was ever charged.

'Even now, Eve's case is still open.

'The Metropolitan Police is tight-lipped about its details,

'but after a long search

'I've found someone from the original investigation who'll talk.'

'Derek Carruthers was the first detective to attend the murder.

'His job was to catalogue the evidence on the day Eve died.'

I don't recall. You don't recall that?

No, there being a gap at this side.

'A confidential source gave me the crime scene photos.

'I've brought them to help jog his memory.'

So this is... Yeah, Lyndhurst Drive.

The top part of the building up here is the apartment where Eve was.

Just to the left here was the stairway

going up between the building, that led towards the second floor.

The door was open, I went in,

there was no signs of forceful entry,

no sign of a struggle.

That's the bedroom. The scene.

The first thing that...

I saw that stuck in my memory was Eve lying on the floor.

I could see the extent of the injuries on her neck,

throat...

..almost decapitated.

I'd never seen anything as horrific as this

in any of the other murders I'd been to.

Horrific.

What kind of suspect did you imagine you were looking for?

Because it was half past four, five o'clock in the afternoon...

DOOR SHUTS

..maybe somebody known to her, or a local followed her from the tube.

So your hunch at that time was

that it was possibly a local person who...

I did feel that at the time, yeah.

POLICE RADIO CHATTER

There were lots of different names come up.

But as the exhibits officer, I wasn't directly involved

in interviewing any of them.

What were the key exhibits at the scene of the Eve Stratford murder?

The murder weapon was never found and it was obviously a substantial,

very sharp knife.

The most important thing he left, as far as I'm concerned now,

is the... the semen.

Your belief was that the semen belonged to Eve's killer?

Oh, I do absolutely, yeah, no doubt about it.

Nobody at that time, obviously, even knew

that DNA was going to be coming a few years later.

I left the Met in 1977...

..and it wasn't until the mid-80s

then that when I became aware

of the advances in forensic science and DNA.

I decided to write to the Met

and suggest that they have a look at the exhibits

because I knew, amongst the exhibits, there was semen.

In 1997 the Metropolitan Police wrote to Derek

to say they were unable to get a DNA profile from the samples.

Something's out there.

Somebody knows something at this stage.

Eve did modelling assignments

and one of them was for the cover of a piece of pulp fiction,

and it's a book called The Revenger.

It's always struck me as a creepy footnote to Eve's murder,

it's very gratuitous soft porn that wouldn't be on a book cover today...

..but what's strange and a bit unsettling about it is

that in the photograph on the cover,

Eve is being attacked from behind by a man

and you realise that Eve's death scene was

possibly not dissimilar from what's depicted in the photograph.

In spite of all their work,

the detectives on the Eve Stratford case

were unable to identify the murderer,

but their hunt gained new impetus four years later.

In 1979, 29-year-old Lynda Farrow was found murdered

in circumstances eerily similar to Eve's.

She'd been a croupier at a casino which, like the Playboy Club,

was in London's West End.

She'd had her throat cut in her own home,

just four miles from where Eve was killed.

It was enough to persuade detectives that her and Eve's murders

might be linked.

The murder of a Playboy Bunny and a West End croupier

led detectives to wonder whether the murderer was the same man,

someone in London's glittering demimonde

who might have known both women.

Several years ago when I first started looking into these crimes,

I tracked down Lynda Farrow's mother, Gladys.

You really got a sense of someone whose life had been defined

by one event, and that event was the murder of her daughter,

and the injustice of it and the agony of it

continued to torture her.

She was still hopeful that someone would be able to give her

any kind of closure, and I think that's why she spoke to me.

'Gladys Hayes died in 2021.

'Shortly before her death she invited me to her house

'so she could tell me about her daughter's murder.

'Gladys had fought until her dying day to get justice for Lynda.'

The way Gladys described the moment of Lynda's death

was almost as if she was there herself.

'At the time of her murder, Lynda, the mother of two young children,

'was pregnant.'

'I found that interview quite harrowing.

'She had a slight stammer, which became particularly strong

'when she was emotional.'

The further I go on this journey,

the more baffled I get, to be honest.

From the moment of Lynda Farrow's murder in 1979,

people were connecting her death with that of Eve Stratford.

but I know that there's also a possibility

that the crimes are unconnected.

Every serial killer I've worked with starts with a sexual fantasy.

Professor David Wilson is an eminent criminologist.

He studied the cases of Eve Stratford and Lynda Farrow.

We become obsessed with the stories of the mass, the spree,

and the serial killer.

..to want to take another person's life.

Thank you so much and I'll see you next week.

It looked like an older student in my room.

..one of your mature students. Nice to meet you. Good to see you.

How are you doing? Yeah. Shall we? Yeah.

So, Marcel, where are you in all this?

Well, there's been lots of conjecture by the police

over the years that the two murders are connected,

so I want to look at that more deeply with you

and see if there's reason to believe

that the same man committed both murders.

Well, I suppose it's perfectly legitimate

to have connected them initially, you know, these are two women,

very young, attractive women working in the West End in nightclubs,

both killed in roughly similar ways, so

it is feasible that there is a connection

and I can understand why the police initially did that.

Linking murders is a real science

that we would now think through very carefully and differently

from how it was thought through in the 1970s,

but cold cases can become hot again.

Well, at minimum, that's what I hope.

'I've brought along the crime scene photos

'I've brought along

'for both Eve and Lynda's murders.

'I hoped Professor Wilson would be able to say from them

'whether the two crimes were truly connected,

'as the police at the time had believed.'

They do look similar.

To me they look like sisters, almost, in that picture.

This first crime scene photograph taken of Lynda's murder

shows us her house.

Lynda got out of the car, bringing in groceries,

and she gets to the front door...

she hears the phone ringing...

she puts the groceries down to answer the phone,

left the door open

and I think that was used as an opportunity

for the killer to get into the house.

We're dealing with the throat being cut, here is the picture

of the knife that kills her, and that knife belongs to the kitchen.

He doesn't bring the knife to the crime scene,

there's no evidence of any sexual activity,

there are defensive wounds.

Where are the defensive wounds?

On her hands and on her cheek, as if she was hit.

From the moment that Lynda Farrow is murdered,

detectives are drawing parallels between her death

and that of Eve Stratford four years earlier.

They were both murdered from behind,

had their throats cut by a left-handed individual,

and in their mind, there are overwhelmingly strong reasons

for investigating the two women's murders together?

Yeah, I perfectly understand why, from the time,

these scenes would be connected,

but these are very different victims

and very different crime scenes that I think are motivated,

in Eve's case, by sexual sadism.

We have that through the binding of the arms and the legs,

we have that from the sexual activity

that we know has taken place,

and in Lynda's case, for me, I get a sense of an argument.

There are bruises at the back of her head,

she has a black eye on the right side,

so this is a real struggle that we've got here,

that builds out of control.

'Professor Wilson has suggested that the two murders aren't linked

'and that Lynda Farrow was killed

'after an argument that got out of control.

'That chimes with some of what her mother Gladys claimed

'in my recorded interview with her,

'that Lynda's estranged husband Paul was somehow involved.'

'Paul and Lynda had been together since she was a teenager

'and had two children, but their marriage wasn't a happy one.'

The big background to this relationship is that,

according to Gladys, from the very beginning, it's abusive.

And then she eventually plucks up courage to leave him. Yeah.

And she meets somebody else, in fact.

Lynda takes the kids, but doesn't tell Paul her new address.

'Lynda had become a successful croupier

'and was carrying her new partner's child.

'Meanwhile, Paul had lost his family and his job at the casino.'

Lynda's the major breadwinner. Yeah.

Paul is diabetic, he's losing his eyesight... Yeah.

..he's unable to earn his own living.

'According to Gladys' this gave Paul multiple motives

'for wanting Lynda dead,

'but there was a bombshell in Gladys' interview.

'She believed that her daughter had met Eve Stratford's killer

'and died because he feared she would reveal his name.'

Lynda and Paul used to socialise with this group of people

and... you need to pay attention because it's extraordinary.

Someone in the circle of Paul Farrow's acquaintances

is responsible for the murder of Eve Stratford.

This is the mo... according to Gladys,

this is the motive for Eve Stratford's murder.

'You're talking about Eve Stratford?'

'The Bunny Girl?' 'Yeah, that's it, yes, yes.'

'What was his name?'

'Yeah.'

It's an amazing theory is the idea

that Lynda is privy to this information,

but then when she leaves Paul and she puts herself outside

the circle of trust, she makes herself a target.

They are worried about her

revealing the information she has to the Eve Stratford murder.

What is your honest view of Gladys' analysis or her detective work?

I think her detective work is of a mother

who is desperate to get justice for her daughter.

What I picked up from the tapes was that there was

a piece of information that she'd got from the newspapers over there,

a piece of information that she had picked up from somebody

who mentioned something to her from over there,

almost like a magpie picking shiny bits of information

and constructing a coherent whole.

Yeah, that's, I mean I think that... the thing about Gladys,

the thing that's so tantalising about Gladys's theory

is that it wraps up everything.

It solves everything. It's too neat, that's my fear.

'I've spent a long time looking into Gladys's theories

'and I've learned that police cleared Paul Farrow,

'Lynda's estranged husband, of any involvement'

in her murder, and he died in 1981,

and they also cleared his associates.

As for this guy who Gladys puts at the centre of both murders,

this ex-policeman who killed Eve Stratford

on the orders of a mysterious Arab client,

there's just... there's just not a shred of evidence to support that.

'This ex-policeman did know both Lynda and Paul Farrow,'

he employed them at a casino,

and he was questioned in 1979,

but cleared of any involvement in Lynda's murder

'and for the past 50 years he's lived out of the country.'

'With Paul Farrow now dead, this former policeman who befriended him

'seems like the best chance I have of finding Lynda's killer.'

MARCEL THEROUX: 'The former policeman was my best hope

'of finding out who killed Lynda Farrow,

'but he was proving hard to reach.'

'Welcome to voicemail service.'

'In the meantime, I'd achieved a promising breakthrough.

'Our team had managed to get hold of Eve Stratford's coroner's report.'

'It contained witness statements from people who knew Eve.'

The coroner's report in the Eve Stratford case

is an amazing document,

and it raises so many things that I hadn't thought about.

It revealed that at the time of her death,

Eve was no longer working at the Playboy Club.

I learned she'd been suspended for posing nude in Mayfair,

a rival magazine.

Stand on this leg.

'Trish Murphy was the woman who had the job of telling Eve

'that she was suspended

'when news came out that she'd posed for this rival publication,

'and I think that's a useful lead.

'There might be something there.'

Do you remember when you saw it for the first time?

Yes, somebody came into the club

waving the magazine that she was in.

Who was that person?

As far as I remember, it was Abdul,

Abdul Khawaja that came in waving the magazine around.

Who was Abdul Khawaja?

Well, he was there every day,

he was some kind of a "Mr Fix-It" for rich Arabs.

He was trying to show that he had connections with the girls.

Why would he be waving the magazine around?

Well, because he was showing off the pictures.

He wasn't a nice character, and he did like to show off.

So you'd taken the copy off Abdul?

Somebody else brought it up, the day manager.

As soon as we saw the magazine we got Ava off the floor.

And you bring her into the Bunny Mother's office? Yes.

What unfolds in there?

Well, we showed her the magazine

and she wasn't expecting it to come out for another few days.

She started looking at it and she got very, very upset.

They were more revealing than she expected them to be

and she started crying.

I felt very sorry for her. Poor little girl.

This is the ones that she got upset about,

she said, "I didn't sit like that,

"he was still taking pictures as I was moving."

But you had to then also be the...

I don't want to say bad cop, but you had a...

Well, we said, you know,

we'll suspend you for three months and see what happens.

And that's the last I saw of her, really.

Do you remember when you heard the news about her murder?

Yes, I just came in to work, and the police were there

and they called people up for interviews.

Did you get a sense of what their initial lines of enquiry were?

Well, Abdul was, was the suspect. Abdul Khawaja. Yes.

Did they speculate about what his motive might have been?

I don't, I don't know. And what was he like to you?

In the early days, he didn't speak very good English

and you feel a bit sorry for him, that's how he started.

He ended up being somebody probably a bit sinister,

he obviously had his own agenda.

I don't know, I think it's probably down to him that Playboy closed.

I don't know. It was my theory at the time.

'Playboy's troubles all began earlier this year

'when the police raided the Park Lane Casino.

'Playboy's best clients had been Arabs.

'According to the auditors' report,

'in the space of only one year, 30 punters, mostly Arabs,

'lost more than £20 million.

'They were the club's major source of income.

'Several of them were introduced by one mysterious individual,

'Abdul Khawaja.

'The police and the gaming board's objection specifically cite

'Playboy's failure to control Khawaja's activities,

'and allege that he gamed dishonestly, loaned money to patrons

'and was active in procuring women for immoral purposes

'for those frequenting the casino.'

'I knew him and liked him and I used to play backgammon with him

'here in London at my apartment, and I won a lot of money off him.'

'Abdul Khawaja was close to the most powerful man in the Playboy Club,

'but who was he really?'

'And what was his link to Eve Stratford?'

So this is tabloid coverage about Abdul Khawaja.

Seems to have made himself indispensable,

he's called a court jester of the Playboy Club.

He manages to get a 16-year-old Arab Sheikh membership

to the Playboy Club

and this guy then goes on to lose £3 million at the gambling tables.

A bodyguard tells the newspapers that Abdul Khawaja is a pimp.

'Abdul Khawaja denied all of these allegations

'that were made against him...

'but he was censured by the Gaming Board in 1981

'who called him the 'unacceptable face of the Playboy Club.'

'The coverage of Abdul's wrongdoings was, I think,

'fuelled by anti-Arab prejudice,

'but he did bring the Playboy Club into disrepute.

'It lost its gambling licence in 1981.

'What's interesting is that these reports also connect Abdul and Eve.'

'It's very hard to sort out what's undoubtedly true

'from tabloid fantasy...'

'..in some of these articles.

'It's a brew of fact, salacious gossip

'and, not for the first time in history,'

the newspaper articles are trying to make the most

of whatever revelations they've latched on.

It seems like Eve and he had...

I don't know what kind of relationship it was, but the fact

that he's this dodgy character

with odd connections to people in the club,

this makes him a person of enormous interest to the investigation.

'I now feel certain that Abdul was the Middle Eastern man

'who Tony called "Ali"

'and he was clearly a police suspect in Eve's murder.

'Abdul always maintained his innocence,

'but suspicion hung over him for decades, even after his death.'

I know, during the initial part of the investigation,

and even subsequently,

there's been a lot of talk about Abdul Khawaja

and his potential involvement in Eve's murder.

I think the groundwork was laid by the police.

They were completely, utterly, 100% sure that he did it.

I remember them, I remember Penny on the switchboard ringing me upstairs

and saying, "Serena, the police are here,

"they want to speak to you about Bunny Ava." I said, "OK",

and I remember the tall man, him being very firm, very firm,

"We'll get him, Serena, we know it's Abdul and we will get him."

And I remember saying, "How can you be so sure?"

"Oh, we... we just know it's him."

They'd built this foundation to support their case it was Abdul,

but they seemed to not be able to actually...

put him at the scene.

You know, there was no EVIDENCE.

He was labelled the murderer of Bunny Ava, Eve Stratford,

and there it stuck until his death...

until after his death, they exonerated him through DNA.

In later years, his son was able to prove

that it was not his father that killed Bunny Ava,

it was not Abdul Khawaja,

and they had to apologise to the family.

I mean, Abdul was collateral damage,

but let's not forget we do not know who murdered Bunny Ava.

'Did racism fuel assumptions about Abdul's guilt

'and lead the investigation astray?

'Who knows?

'But what's certain is that Abdul, Eve and Lynda

'inhabited the same nocturnal world,

'one where millions were at stake at gambling tables

'and there were dark motives and dirty tricks.'

'The idea that both women were murdered by one man

'who inhabited the glamorous world of London's West End

'was so tantalising that detectives were unable to let go of it

'for decades.

'Then, in the early noughties,

'technology delivered a double breakthrough

'that would turn the case on its head.

'The very same DNA evidence that exonerated Abdul Khawaja

'and proved he wasn't the man who wielded the knife,

'linked Eve Stratford's murder to another horrific crime,

'the murder of a schoolgirl in West London.'

29 years after the crime's committed you have a DNA match.

Yeah, yeah, but it's not an individual,

it's matched another crime scene.

MAN: It's really a response to the puritan ethic

that exists in America

and I guess that we share with England.

INTERVIEWER: Response against the puritan ethic?

Yes, yes, an attack on what I feel are the negative aspects

of the anti-sexual and anti-play

and pleasure aspects of our tradition.

Forgive me, but aren't you introducing

a kind of sociological aspect

to something which is perhaps refined striptease?

Or is this unkind?

Well, it's unkind only because it... is rather inaccurate.

MARCEL THEROUX: London's Playboy Club

was the embodiment of Hugh Hefner's fantasy,

a celebration of sex and glamour.

But in 1975,

it was rocked by the brutal murder

of a Playboy Bunny called Eve Stratford.

'It was a murder which led to an unfairly lurid speculation,

'but Scotland Yard were much more interested

'in hard facts than speculation.'

In 1979, Lynda Farrow, a croupier in a West End casino,

died in apparently similar circumstances.

Some police were convinced the murderer was the same man.

I've come to question the links between those killings.

So, for me, these are very different victims

and very different crime scenes.

But digging deeper, I would unearth other tragedies.

She got attacked very brutally over her head...

..and then raped.

And as I hunted for a potential serial killer,

I would stumble across a different offender,

whose crimes struck at the heart of public trust in policing.

If there's one thing that's more terrifying

than the idea of a predator,

it's a predator in a policeman's uniform.

By 2023, I'd already spent years looking into this story.

One of the most promising leads I had

was the name of a former Metropolitan Police officer.

He had known Lynda Farrow, the croupier murdered in 1979,

and her husband, Paul.

He had been ruled out as a suspect,

but Lynda's mother, Gladys, had given me his name

and told me to speak to him.

GLADYS:

I'm going to call him Policeman A.

He now lived in the Far East.

And by the way, there might be 20 minutes of bollocks

where we talk about food, OK? I think that's the...

WOMAN: Let me compromise, though, now.

Well, why don't I just call him from this and see if he picks up?

MAN: Yeah, all right. WOMAN: All right.

PHONE BEEPS

PHONE BEEPS

PHONE BEEPS

'Welcome to voicemail service. Please record your message.'

God, this is so frustrating.

I spent four hours calling repeatedly,

going straight to voicemail, didn't get a dicky bird.

Look, I think it's positive. He's... He's gonna speak to us.

We just have to be really patient.

Back in the 1970s, detectives had no knowledge of DNA,

but today, evidence that was gathered decades ago

can reveal the identity of a killer.

I wanted to know if modern forensic science

might hold the answer to Lynda Farrow's murder.

You worked on the Lynda Farrow murder case, right?

When the case was reviewed in the noughties?

'Yeah, that's right.

'As I recall, I believe it was as a result of Lyn Farrow's,

'I think, at the time, elderly mother.

'I certainly remember that there was quite a lot of weight given

'to Paul Farrow, Lyn Farrow's ex-husband.

'And obviously, he was of significant interest

'to the original inquiry,

'but there was a lot of circumstantial evidence,

'but nothing they could really sort of hang their hat on

'to arrest and charge him.'

The original investigation

ruled Paul Farrow out as a suspect in 1979.

He was never charged with the murder of his estranged wife, Lynda.

'I think he subsequently did die in the intervening years,

'so, obviously, that was a line of inquiry that wasn't open to us.

'So, I'm willing to go and find the original exhibits.

'The primary exhibit in this case really would have been the knife.

'Because, obviously, let's remember

'that from the time of the murder in the late '70s

'to the time we got the case,

'there had been huge advancements in forensic science.

'So there would have been a possibility

'of finding, perhaps, some DNA on the knife.

'And, unfortunately, we could never find the exhibits, despite, well,

'strenuous efforts to find them, which was very, very frustrating.'

What should have happened to the exhibits?

'I mean, that was before my time, in the late '70s,

'but all the exhibits would be gathered, recorded,

'carefully sealed,

'taken to a storage facility, of which there were several.

'So, what actually happened to them, I've really got no idea.

'It's a distinct possibility

'that they could well have been disposed of.'

Kind of puts the kibosh on there ever being DNA evidence

from the Lynda Farrow case that might provide a link

with the murder of Eve Stratford, the former Playboy Bunny.

I mean, the kind of story ends there.

'Yeah, it does, unfortunately.

'I mean, I do remember,

'and this was really through conversations

'from colleagues involved in the sort of Eve Stratford inquiry,

'I think there was some outstanding DNA in the Eve Stratford case,

'so I can't really comment on what sort of happened afterwards.

'But I do always remember thinking that I thought the leads at best

'were sort of fairly thin.'

Incredibly, key evidence from the Lynda Farrow crime scene

had been lost.

There was no way of using DNA

to determine whether her murder was linked to Eve's.

But DNA that turned up from another source

took the Eve Stratford case in an astonishing new direction.

Hi, Martin. Marcel. Have a seat. Hello, Marcel.

'In 2006, former detective Martin Lee

'was given the job of looking at a number of cold cases.'

What is the murder review team?

Any murder that wasn't resolved within a stipulated time period

would be reviewed by an independent eye.

So, I was allocated a number of those

and did some reviews of some investigations,

which is when I had the conversation

with the nice Chief Inspector at Colindale.

When I explained to him that we looked at old cases

and were looking for new evidence, DNA, new forensics, and so on,

he kind of latched onto that and said,

"I remember a case of Lynne Weedon,

"who was murdered all those years ago."

This was the 3rd of September, 1975.

She was a 16-year-old girl at the time.

She'd been out with friends

towards the end of the school summer holidays

and was on her way home.

And she walked down the alleyway

and was struck on the head with something hard,

blunt instrument, as we all say.

She was then thrown over the fencing around an electricity substation,

where she was sexually assaulted, raped, and left there.

She was found the following morning.

She was still alive at that point,

but she was taken to hospital and sadly died about a week later,

without regaining consciousness.

And he said, "I've always thought that that should be reinvestigated."

I was conscious of the fact that there were, at the time,

a lot of forensic samples

that had been taken, sealed, securely stored.

So away it went for DNA testing,

and I got a phone call sometime later

from a very, very excited member of the Forensic Science Service

to say, "You won't believe this. We've got a confirmed DNA hit."

I mean, underline that,

29 years after the crime's committed,

you have a DNA match. Yeah, yeah.

But it's not an individual.

It's matched another crime scene,

which was Eve Stratford,

who was a bunny girl who'd been murdered

six months earlier, in March '75, in East London.

I just couldn't comprehend that the two were the same

because they were so dissimilar.

So, in your mind, the only person who was at both crime scenes

was the murderer. Was the murderer, yeah.

But what we were then conscious of

was if we had Lynne Weedon in West London in September,

Eve Stratford in East London the previous March,

how many others were there?

But we would never know that

because way back in the '70s, DNA wasn't taken from anybody.

So we started talking about

the potential for other unsolved murders

to have been committed by the same person.

MARCEL THEROUX: The DNA link

between the murders of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon

was absolutely baffling.

The two victims seemed to inhabit different worlds.

Eve was an aspiring model

who rubbed shoulders with celebrities.

Lynne Weedon was a 16-year-old schoolgirl

who had gone out with friends to a pub in the suburbs

one Wednesday evening in 1975...

..and never come home.

What are... Tell me what we're looking at here?

What's this?

This is my diary that I...

from 1975,

and I wrote in it every single night.

I wondered if you could read me the entries for September 4th.

"As from last night at 11:30,

"I cannot write as I wish to.

"Lynne...

"..my one and only true friend...

"was brutally attacked... and raped.

"There was little idea of the person, or people..."

SHE INHALES "..who did this.

"Lynne has been in West Middlesex Hospital since Wednesday

"and is critically ill...

"with severe brain damage.

"I know myself so deep down she will die.

"She will die, but I cannot accept it.

"Lynne means so much to me. I love her more than anyone."

Oh, sorry, that's...

Lynne, she was a very brainy girl.

She was very good at the languages, especially French and German,

so she was gonna go to college

and then become a bilingual secretary.

Looking back, it's quite a few years,

but she had a...

a sort of a wicked sense of humour, even then.

But... I did love Lynne,

and she loved me.

We just got on so well.

She... I just...

She was a great girl, an absolute great girl.

Do you remember this September the 3rd, 1975...

From what I've read,

Lynne came to your house by bus.

Mm-hm. Do you remember that?

I would imagine we would probably have got ready.

Done our hair a bit, maybe some make-up.

Erm, as I can remember,

we got the bus back...

and then we met at The Elm Tree pub...

with the boys...

and then just being in the pub.

I can remember sometimes Lynne and I would go there,

and we'd have no money...

..but the boys would rally around and buy us half a pint of whatever

and that would just last us all night.

We weren't getting drunk or anything.

We would just meet up and just sit there and chat

and have good fun.

Maybe, probably a game of pool or something.

You'd spend a couple of hours in the pub.

It was just like a normal night.

Nothing... Nothing different happened that night.

And I remember when we left...

it was just that usual, "Bye, speak to you tomorrow,"

or, "See you tomorrow."

Lynne went her way with the boys...

and I got the bus to come home.

And then the next morning, had my mum coming up to my bedroom

to see if Lynne was with me.

And I said, "No, she didn't stay.

"Why? What's happened?"

And she said, "Oh, Lynne's mum's on the phone.

"Lynne didn't go home last night."

What had happened to Lynne?

She got attacked very brutally over her head...

..and then raped...

..and then when she was found, her pants were down her throat.

I didn't know that.

I remember going up to the hospital to see her,

and Lynne... er, was in a coma.

That was the last time I saw her alive

until we got the news that she'd passed away.

To lose your special friend...

I've never had a special friend since.

Sorry, I can't stop the tears now.

Why Lynne? Did he mean to?

Was it just a random attack?

Did he know Lynne? Did I know Ly...? Did I know him?

Did any of us know him?

Talking to Rosemary, the main thing that you feel is...

..how, more than 40 years after Lynne Weedon's death,

she's carrying so much pain about the death of her best friend.

I'd always thought of the Lynne Weedon attack

as an anomaly.

But then hearing that detail about the panties

makes me think...

this was a sexual predator...

perhaps of precisely the kind...

who killed Eve Stratford.

RECORDING: 'I see you are still having no luck catching me.

'You are no nearer catching me now...

'than four years ago when I started.'

REPORTER: The voice of the man the police believe

is the Yorkshire Ripper,

taunting them with their failure to catch him.

The Ripper has butchered and mutilated 12 women.

The Yorkshire Ripper doesn't know his victims,

all he asks is that they are women, and they are alone.

I think he will kill again and possibly again and again.

Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper,

was one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.

Between 1975 and 1981,

he terrorised communities in the north of England,

often carrying a hammer to attack lone women.

As I looked into the murders of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon

I discovered that many people had come to wonder

if Peter Sutcliffe was the killer.

'One ex-bunny girl had even contacted the police

'to tell them of her suspicions.

'It seemed an outlandish theory...

'..but it turned out that it had been put forward

'by a former police intelligence officer in a book.'

I remember Peter Sutcliffe from my childhood

as the Yorkshire Ripper.

He was this terrifying figure

who murdered women in the late 1970s,

but in Yorkshire.

So how can he possibly be connected to a series of murders

that happened in London?

There were so many unsolved murders of unaccompanied women

in the 1970s,

and I condensed them, and I looked at Peter Sutcliffe,

and he seemed to be the common denominator.

How many more murders do you think...

..he ought to be considered in relation to?

My research has found 40.

That includes... 40.

Yes, that includes murders and attacks.

This is a shockingly high number,

way more than the 13 murders and seven attempted murders

that Sutcliffe was found guilty of.

REPORTER: In the last four years,

a succession of bodies have been brought into the mortuaries,

four in Leeds, three in Bradford,

two in Halifax, two in Manchester, one in Preston.

And as the murders continued,

the clamour to call in Scotland Yard also grew.

In 1975 is when Lynne Weedon is attacked. Yes.

And what is it about the attack on Lynne

that bears the hallmarks of a Yorkshire Ripper attack?

The blunt-force instrument to the back of the head

which smashed Lynne's skull...

..which Peter Sutcliffe used on a couple of occasions

within the same timeline.

Basically, in early August,

Olive Smelt left a pub in Halifax.

Sutcliffe followed her down a snicket

and bashed her on the back of the head.

But the crucial thing is,

Lynne Weedon was hundreds of miles south

from where those prior attacks took place.

Well, the... Sonia, his future wife,

had an elder sister who lived in Alperton, near Wembley.

This was early September.

Peter Sutcliffe and Sonia travelled down to Alperton.

Eventually, they all flew off from Heathrow

to go to Czechoslovakia

and other eastern-European countries.

This was the same week as Lynne's attack in West London.

Just to be clear, so you're saying that

in the week of Lynne Weedon's death,

the Yorkshire Ripper is in London,

six miles away from where Lynne Weedon is murdered?

Yes.

But what about the Eve Stratford murder?

Do you think that Peter Sutcliffe is a plausible suspect

for the murder of Eve?

Well, on the 22nd of March,

Sonia's sister, living in Alperton,

is getting married in the Wembley area.

The family would have come down from Bradford in preparation

and is staying at the location because, you know,

you're talking about 200 or 300 miles travel on road.

And four days earlier,

Eve Stratford is murdered in Leyton,

and in the MO of the Eve Stratford murder,

which was... involved rape and a knife attack,

that Eve had her throat cut...

were those... are those acts

that could plausibly have been committed by Peter Sutcliffe?

In the acknowledged Yorkshire Ripper series,

you have Emily Jackson and Irene Richardson

both had their throats slashed as well as other mutilation.

There's a link between Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon

that we know from the DNA that was gathered,

then presumably, he would have been ruled out using his DNA?

This was a freedom of information request.

I asked whether a sample of Peter Sutcliffe,

also known as the Yorkshire Ripper,

has been obtained and is searchable in the national DNA database,

and the Home Office came back and said

a DNA sample for Peter Sutcliffe was obtained

and is currently held and searchable in the national DNA database.

They did a buccal mouth swab, which they've done for all life prisoners,

but Sutcliffe was a non-secretor.

So although you leave a DNA sample with fingerprint or whatever,

because of the moisture, in a case of a non-secretor,

although there's a bar code there,

it doesn't actually go back to anyone

unless you take blood from the... from the suspect.

Sutcliffe was an evil predator,

but blaming him for Lynne and Eve's murders

somehow bothers me.

It's too neat.

Everything that seems to connect him to the crimes is pure supposition.

Chris Clark claims that because Sutcliffe's blood type

didn't show up in his semen or saliva,

he can't be ruled out as the killer through DNA.

But how true is this?

I needed to talk to an expert.

One of the reasons I wanted to get in touch

was that I was speaking to a former policeman.

His argument is that as the Yorkshire Ripper was a non-secretor,

there would have been no useable evidence

to connect him to the crime scenes.

Does it make any difference

if the person is a secretor or a non-secretor

in terms of getting DNA?

Professor Syndercombe Court has helped me understand

that being a non-secretor

has no bearing on the quality of the DNA evidence.

We know Peter Sutcliffe's DNA is on the national database,

as is the DNA of Eve and Lynne's killer.

If there was a match,

the police computer would have made it,

and since it wasn't Sutcliffe, who was it?

MARCEL THEROUX: I've come to question the apparent link

between the murders of the ex-bunny girl Eve Stratford

and the West End croupier Lynda Farrow.

Despite certain similarities, there are key differences

that suggest they were not killed by the same man,

and yet Eve Stratford's murder was connected by DNA

to another unsolved crime,

the rape and murder of 16-year-old Lynne Weedon in 1975.

And I was about to learn of another potential victim.

REPORTER: The 12.20 from Hammersmith pulled into Osterley tube station.

Elizabeth Parravicini had been to see Casanova

at a West End cinema with friends.

She left the station alone.

Elizabeth Parravicini was slim, blonde and very attractive.

She was half a mile from her parents' home,

a walk that normally took her about ten minutes.

She set off along the Great West Road,

a busy, well-lit dual carriageway.

After 100 yards, she turned into leafy suburban Thornbury Road,

into Church Road, and finally, into Osterley Road,

where her parents live.

It was now nearly half past midnight.

It was dark, and the roads were empty.

She was a girl of impeccable background

walking through a respectable, middle-class part of town.

She was alone, or so she thought.

This is the... the murder scene,

the sad murder scene of Elizabeth Parravicini,

and she was struck over the head with a blunt object

believed to be metallic,

and it is thought that the suspect

actually threw her over the wall to carry out his offences.

And what happened is her dad, George, the next morning,

retracted her steps,

and then it was in fact he that found his own daughter murdered.

Police have combed the shrubbery,

the whole area has been searched and searched again,

but still, seven days after,

no trace of the murder weapon or the murderer has been found.

Police are intrigued by the fact that this murder

was almost a carbon copy of another brutal murder

which took place in the same area just two years ago.

On September the 4th, 1975, a 16-year-old student, Lynne Weedon,

was attacked and raped 50 yards from her home,

and the two murders took place within a mile of each other.

What did you think of the investigation

into the murder of Elizabeth Parravicini?

Chris Draycott, the Detective Chief Superintendent

in charge of the enquiry, actually linked the two.

As a detective, I look at those two, it's virtually identical, the MO.

They were both attacked from behind

and both attacked with a blunt instrument.

Lynne Weedon was raped, was Elizabeth Parravicini?

No, she wasn't raped, I think that was certainly the intention.

I remember from looking through the case papers that I would...

it would appear that he had problems removing her lower clothing.

If Eve Stratford is DNA-linked to Lynne Weedon

and the MO of Lynne Weedon and Elizabeth Parravicini

is so similar... Yeah.

..then we're looking at an individual

who's responsible for all these murders?

Very much so, yes.

What sort of picture do you personally have of the murderer?

What sort of person are you looking for?

To my mind, I'm looking for a brutal, callous killer

who could well strike again.

Now, it was a particularly brutal attack, wasn't it? It was.

Might he have been disturbed, do you think?

After the initial shock of seeing the links

between these two unsolved murders,

what strikes you about the case file?

I mean, when I picked it up, it was many, many years later,

it was to assess any possible lines of enquiry,

so I decided that I was gonna read all the witness depositions.

And halfway through this huge bundle,

I found a statement from one of the...

well, my best friend, who hitherto had been on the original enquiry.

So you're saying your friend was at the heart

of both of the original investigations,

gathering evidence? Yeah.

Yeah, really the right person on the ground

to be able to get a detailed overview

as to what I had in front of me.

My colleague, who had been a Detective Sergeant,

revealed to me who he thought was responsible.

This particular individual entered the police service in the '80s,

was someone that I'd served with at a police station

and someone that I knew reasonably well.

This was a serving Metropolitan Police officer.

Wow. That's a bombshell.

We'll call this man Policeman B.

How did his name come into the picture?

In the early 1980s,

this man was convicted of serious indecent assault,

sexually-motivated burglaries and theft.

So all of this were ringing serious alarm bells.

How far did this person live at the time

from the sites of the Parravicini and Lynne Weedon murders?

Very close.

He would have been able to walk to both sites

within about half an hour from his home address.

Was he looked at in the original investigations

of Lynne Weedon and Elizabeth Parravicini?

I can't recall him being a suspect.

The fellow we're talking about clearly left a bad impression

on you and your former colleagues,

but there's no evidence that suggests he's a murderer.

No.

The trouble is, unless you've got some more compelling evidence,

you've got nothing.

Policeman B had been routinely questioned in 1977

in relation to the murder of Elizabeth Parravicini

and ruled out.

Police at the time took the unusual step of publicly stating

that he was never considered a suspect in this case,

or that of Lynne Weedon.

They cleared him conclusively of any involvement in both cases,

but my research into these murders

showed that this man had been found guilty

of a shocking but unrelated crime.

'It started with an investigation into a seemingly trivial theft,

'but revealed him to be a sexual predator.

'Simon Addy was the man who first arrested him.'

In 1982, I was a Detective Sergeant at Brentford Police Station,

in charge of the small CID office there.

The telephone rang, and it was a woman

who said she was the headmistress of the Green School for Girls.

At this school, the sixth form girls have a common room,

and they all clubbed together and bought

what was then a very expensive radio cassette player,

and this had gone missing.

And one of the girls told her later

that a policeman had been seen leaving the school premises

carrying a radio cassette player.

She told me what his name was and that he was welcome on the premises

because he was helping the girls with their skiing techniques.

I decided I would have to go and knock on his door

because there could be an innocent explanation,

but, you know, being a detective,

you always think the worst about people, so...

I told him what the allegation was,

he said, "It's my radio cassette player."

So I go upstairs to his bedroom, he hands me the radio cassette player,

and it is the same radio cassette player

that was stolen from the Green School for Girls.

So I arrested him, cautioned him

and then told him I would be searching his room.

We, first of all, found a police radio,

which at the time, only covered police station area you would be in.

As it turned out, he had taken this radio from Brentford Police Station,

so it would cover Chiswick and Brentford area,

the area in which he lived.

The PC we're talking about

worked out of Kensington Police Station? Correct.

What was your reaction when you were seeing this?

I said, "Why have you got this police radio here?"

And he said, "I borrowed it."

So we continued the search, and then most interestingly,

I found a police inspector's tunic with two pips on each shoulder.

Policeman B was only a constable.

There was no reason for him to have the uniform of a senior officer.

Well, why would anyone want to have a police inspector's uniform?

I did wonder whether he was putting this uniform on at night,

with the police radio, sort of prowling around,

seeing who he could come across.

Whatever his motive for having these items,

Policeman B had perpetrated terrible crimes.

"A young policeman who wore a black mask

"and brandished a terrible knife

"during a savage sex attack on a 34-year-old Hanworth housewife.

"The attacker put his arm round the woman's neck

"and held a 12-inch knife at her throat.

"He threatened to kill her, forced her to lie on the ground,

"removed her clothing and indecently assaulted her.

"The woman, who broke down and wept as she gave evidence,

"said, 'I kept saying, Please do not hurt me.

" 'Put the knife away, and I'll do anything that you like.' "

The victim of his crime worked in a West End nightclub,

and that's how he came across her.

He put her licence plate into a police computer

and used that to find her address.

And he was also sneaking into the bedrooms of schoolgirls

and stealing their underwear,

and then he would subsequently call them up

and terrorise them over the phone,

telling them that he'd moved their underwear around.

He got sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison.

That seems an astonishingly short sentence for such a serious crime.

Today, the Metropolitan Police is reeling from a series of scandals

that have destroyed the public's trust in it.

REPORTER: Sarah Everard was, the judge said, simply walking home.

REPORTER: Wayne Couzens, a policeman,

also a kidnapper, rapist and murderer.

REPORTER: For the two decades David Carrick wore a police uniform,

he was attacking and abusing women when he was off duty.

Policeman B's offending shows that the Met's problem

with serving police officers carrying out sexual offences

and preying on women is nothing new.

A man who was supposed to protect the vulnerable

was exploiting his position to abuse them.

If there's one thing that's more terrifying

than the idea of a predator,

it's a predator in a policeman's uniform.

MARCEL THEROUX: I feel like I've taken this

about as far as I can go on my own.

I've still got so many unanswered questions

that I think probably only the police are able to answer,

so I'm gonna write to the Met.

I really wanna know if these four murders

are definitively linked by them,

if they are investigating them together.

I really wanna know about the strength of the DNA link

between Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon

because so many aspects of the two crimes seem anomalous.

As I was writing to the Met,

my producer, Mel, finally tracked down the man

who Gladys Hayes always suspected

of being involved in her daughter Lynda's murder.

The man who I've called Policeman A was cleared in 1979,

many years after leaving the force, of any involvement in the crime.

Mel spoke to him on the phone,

and he agreed we could use the recording.

MEL:

MEL:

POLICEMAN A:

MEL:

POLICEMAN A:

MEL:

POLICEMAN A:

Policeman A said that Lynda's death

was as much of a mystery to him as it was to us.

But then there was a development.

This man revealed to Mel that the Met

were sending two detectives to the Far East to speak to him.

A couple of months later, Mel spoke to Policeman A again.

He confirmed that detectives had been to his home,

interviewed him and taken his DNA and fingerprints.

Policeman A told us that according to the detectives he'd spoken to,

he is not a suspect in the murder of Lynda Farrow,

and he'd been cleared of any involvement in the case.

I don't know why detectives went to talk to this man,

but I did receive a response from the Met

in which they confirmed that he'd been eliminated from their enquiries

and divulged some other significant new information.

'I shared it with someone who'd helped me on my journey

'and had a lot of experience dealing with police bureaucracy.'

I've sent you a copy of the... Yeah.

..of the letter I got from the Met.

So, the fact that they engaged with this to this extent is significant?

Yeah, because they're clearly recognising

that what's being done has been serious and with a serious intent.

This is what the Met said in response to my questions...

That "Detective Chief Inspector Geoff Grogan

"of the Specialist Crime Command is leading the investigation

"into the murders of Eve Stratford in Leyton

"and Lynne Weedon in Hounslow in 1975.

"As this is a live investigation,

"it would be inappropriate to provide a running commentary,

"and the Met does not identify any person who may or may not be

"subject to an investigation."

And I suppose that was what heartened me about the Met response,

is that they say that this is a live investigation.

Yeah, oh, they're... they're still actively considering leads

and that they're still trying to trace,

interview and eliminate people

who might be of interest to their investigation.

"To date, how many DNA tests have now been done

"on the Weedon Stratford cases?"

"To date, we have obtained more than 200 voluntary samples,

"and work continues."

200 is a significant number,

so that's the piece of new information

that's in the public domain.

Then this was the kind of key one for me,

I wanted to know if the murders of Lynda Farrow, Eve Stratford,

Lynne Weedon and Elizabeth Parravicini are linked.

They say, "Lynne and Eve are linked.

"There is no evidence to link the murders of Eve and Lynne

"to any other historic murder case, but we retain an open mind.

"We are aware of reporting around Lynda Farrow in particular,

"and while there are some similarities with Eve's case,

"there is no evidence to link them at this time."

Instead of a single serial killer

who was committing horrific crimes,

it seems like there were multiple men

capable of homicides against women.

And getting away with it.

So that's three perpetrators that have, frankly, got away with it,

and that for me was pretty depressing,

but nonetheless, real.

What are you gonna take away from what you've discovered?

Well, I never felt that I would solve it on my own,

but I thought there were still enough people alive

who might remember things,

who might remember names, who might have key pieces of evidence,

who might shine a light in a certain direction.

That through that, I might scare up something

that would move the story along.

And I still... I think that's still the case,

I think this even going out, people watching it

might scare up more information.

And that's a good ending, isn't it?

If we shone a light onto a case that needed some attention.

As I came towards the end of my investigation,

I got some sad news from Amsterdam.

Eve Stratford's former boyfriend Tony Priest,

who'd been ill for a long time,

had decided to end his own life with voluntary euthanasia.

He never lived to see Eve's killer face justice.

It's been a very sad journey, actually,

and I think I... I embarked on it with kind of intellectual curiosity

and a fascination for returning to the London of my childhood,

and I was excited about the idea of solving a mystery

that had lasted decades.

But I've also encountered people

whose lives have been irreparably damaged by grief and loss.

When I think of Tony,

or Rosemary,

or Eve's fellow bunnies,

you realise there are multiple tragedies,

and the ripples from these murders go out for decades.

So, this is the grave of Eve Stratford, who died in 1975,

and the striking thing about this is that there's no headstone.

And it's a really dark footnote to this story,

that after she was buried in 1975,

vandals continually desecrated her grave,

and they broke her headstone, and they defaced it.

It's really upsetting actually,

that after her parents lost their daughter,

they had to put up with the repeated vandalism of her grave,

and her mum got telephone calls telling her she was gonna be next.

I mean, it's baffling, it's as baffling as anything in this story.

I suppose that there was still that misogyny

that in her life, Eve was an object of...

presented herself as an object of desire,

but she was also an object of male hatred and fear.

And that continued after her death,

that people objected to her either being a bunny girl

or appearing in Mayfair Magazine,

and it's really sick, actually, and pointless.

It... It reminds you that women in this story

were women who men were attracted to,

but who men also wanted to destroy.

'Sadly, without forensic evidence, identifying the men

'who murdered Lynda Farrow and Elizabeth Parravicini

'will be difficult,

'but I remain hopeful that Eve and Lynne's killer

'will eventually be brought to justice.'

When you think about it, Eve was laid to rest in 1975.

31 years later, DNA yields a breakthrough in the case

that links it to the murder of Lynne Weedon.

I can't help thinking that someone knows something,

and science will yield a clue, and the DNA is out there,

and one of these days, we'll know more about this case than we do now.