Police say a Southeast Asian woman found dead in the Yorkshire Dales almost 15 years ago may have been a “Thai bride” murdered by her English husband.
In a case that has “baffled investigators for years”, the woman was discovered by a group of walkers lying in a mountain stream on 20 September 2004, says The Daily Telegraph.
She was “wearing just a pair of socks, green Marks & Spencer jeans and had a broken bra hanging off her left arm”, reports the newspaper.
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Investigators were unable to identify her or explain “how she ended up half-naked at Sell Gill Holes caves near Yorkshire’s famous Three Peaks”, the Telegraph adds.
Detectives had “favoured an explanation for her death that ruled out anything suspicious”, says the BBC. The initial theory was that she might have suffered from hypothermia and might have experienced “paradoxical undressing” - when someone freezing to death takes off their clothes because they feel hot as a result of nerve damage.
In 2007, a coroner recorded an open verdict and the mystery woman was buried in Horton in Ribblesdale, after the parish council stepped in to organise her funeral when no one came forward to identify her.
“It’s an incredibly sad story. Everyone in the village was so upset at the thought of this young lady just being left all by herself,” said Sheila Millman, who was council chair at the time.
“We felt a responsibility for her, like she belonged to us and we wanted to make sure she had a final resting place should her family ever get traced.”
The BBC reports that despite extensive inquiries, North Yorkshire Police “has so far failed to answer the two most important questions: who is this woman and how did she die?”
However, the force’s cold-case unit decided to take another look at the case in 2016, “and came up with rather different conclusions from the original investigating team”, the news site adds.
Investigators are now “working on the hypothesis that she was dead when she was driven to the scene and could have been killed at home”, reports The Yorkshire Post.
Stable isotope analysis, which was not available in 2004, was used to find out where the woman was living before her death. Scientists studied the levels of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen in samples of her hair, teeth and bones, which confirmed that she grew up in Southeast Asia.
But a cutting of her hair showed isotopes found in only a few places in Britain. Based on the findings from the hair sample, experts believe “she spent the last two years of her life in a rural community in north Lancashire or south Cumbria”, says the Telegraph.
The wedding ring she was wearing has also been traced to Bangkok, leading police to believe she married an Englishman in Thailand and then came to live in the UK.
According to lead investigator Detective chief inspector Adam Harland, one theory based on the new evidence is that she may have been killed by her husband, who then dumped her body in the Dales.
Harland told the BBC: “The term Thai bride does not necessarily mean the woman comes from Thailand but that she is a lady who has taken up a relationship with a white gentleman and has come back to live in the UK in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
“The fact that no one has reported her missing suggests the relationship has broken down and her disappearance was because she’s ‘gone back home’. In this case, her partner had a natural excuse to explain her absence and for that reason I think, for now, he’s got away with it.”
