They called 22-year-old Florence Weatherall the “prettiest woman in Linby,” in Nottinghamshire. She was married and had just given birth to twins when she set out on Friday, February 2nd, 1951, to go shopping in Mansfield, leaving the babies with her mother. Her naked body was found in a ditch in Bestwood three weeks later, her clothes folded beside her, and it was clear that it was dumped there before rigor mortis set in.

Florence had a record. At 14 she was described as “promiscuous.” She was sent to a remand home, ran away, and traced to London. At 19 she was bound over at the Old Bailey for fraud, a condition being that she returned to her mother’s home.

All the known men in her previous life were eliminated from the murder inquiry; even so, she must have gone voluntarily with her killer. One hypothesis is that physically run down after the birth of twins, she was accidentally strangled during sexual intercourse in a hold which would not normally have troubled her.