Just before midnight on Friday August 1st 1986 Diane Sindall, a 21 year old florist, ran out of petrol on a Birkenhead roundabout. She got out of her car and went to look for a 24 hour petrol station. She was no more than 500 yards from her car when she was struck on the head with a blunt instrument, dragged into an alleyway, stripped half-naked and sexually assaulted.
The following afternoon, Saturday August 2nd 1986, her battered and grossly mutilated body was found. The cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage following multiple blows to the head. The mutilations included apparent bite marks to her breasts. The crime was obviously sexually motivated, and samples of semen, heavily diluted with rainwater, were taken from the outside of her body.
It was a particularly horrific murder and it caused fear and outrage well beyond Merseyside. Only 5 years earlier Peter Sutcliffe – The Yorkshire Ripper – had been convicted of the serial murders of thirteen women, all of whom had been mutilated after being attacked with blunt instruments. Continue reading “Peter Sullivan: wrongly gaoled for 38 years by junk science and a complacent justice system”