Her body was found in Bedgebury Forest, near Hawkhurst, Kent, in late October, 1979 and 21 years later a retired lorry driver was acquitted of murdering her.
The prosecutions case at Maidstone Crown Court in June, 2000, was that a man, by then 75, picked up the unknown woman, who may have been a hitch-hiker or a prostitute, at Spitalfields Market in central London in the evening of Friday, October 19th. He made a delivery to Keighley in Yorkshire before bringing her back down to the south of England next morning.
He was alleged to have driven her to the forest and bludgeoned her to death with a wooden stake.
He admitted giving a woman a lift and accepted that she may have been the dead woman, but said he dropped her in south London on the morning of October 20th. Defence witnesses said they saw a woman matching the description of the victim in the forest on October 21st, the day after the murder was alleged to have taken place.
The mans trial, two decades after the event, came about when a re-investigation used new forensic techniques in a bid to find DNA evidence linking him to the crime. But after a four-week hearing the jury unanimously found him not guilty.