Murder on Ice: The Bizarre Killing of Anne Noblett

The murder of a young person whose life had hardly begun is, of course, a particularly tragic crime.  However, relatively few of them are as purely weird as the following case--a case which, while unsolved, is still, to my mind, one where there’s the potential to identify the culprit.

Anne Noblett, who hailed from the English village of Wheathampstead, led a fairly privileged life.  Her father, Hugh Noblett, was a farmer and company director who was prosperous enough to send his teenage daughter to spend four years at a posh Swiss finishing school.  The 17-year-old Anne returned home early in 1957, with the goal of pursuing a career as a children’s nurse.  She was described as a shy, quiet, home-loving girl who seemed perfectly content with life.

On the evening of December 30, 1957, Anne was heading home after attending a dance class.  She got off her bus at about 6 p.m. and began walking to the family farm.  Home was only about a quarter-mile from the main road, but there were no other homes nearby, and her route through Marshalls Heath Lane was unlit and lonely.  Still, it’s doubtful Anne felt she could possibly be in any danger.  This sense of complacency probably lasted until that moment, somewhere along this narrow road, when she met her murderer.

When Anne failed to arrive home at the expected time, her parents began to worry.  At nine p.m., Hugh Noblett phoned all Anne’s friends, and when he learned that none of them knew where she was, he contacted police.

The following morning, law enforcement, as well as volunteers, began searching the Marshalls Heath area.  When they failed to find a trace of the missing girl, Detective Inspector Leonard Elwell of the Hertfordshire CID was brought in.  It was an incredibly extensive investigation.  Some 1,300 soldiers and civilians continued to scour the area.  Newsreels highlighting the girl’s disappearance were played in local movie theaters.  A house-to-house search was conducted.  Over 2,000 people gave statements to police.  And at the end of it all, nobody was one bit closer to knowing what had happened to Anne.

Ironically, after all these valiant efforts, Anne’s fate was discovered entirely by accident.  On January 31, 1958, a RAF serviceman and his brother were walking their dog through Rose Grove Woods on the outskirts of Whitwell, a tiny village about five miles from Wheathampstead.  In a clearing, they noticed someone they initially assumed was sleeping.  When they realized the girl was not napping, but very dead, they rushed back to the village to notify authorities that Anne Noblett had finally been found.

Anne was lying on her back, fully clothed--she was even still wearing her eyeglasses.  Her hands were folded neatly across her chest.  Next to Anne was her purse, which had nothing missing.  Oddest of all, coins had been scattered over and around her.  

The first thing that struck investigators was that the body showed none of the signs of decomposition expected in someone who had been dead a month.  The initial assumption, of course, was that the girl had been confined somewhere and very recently killed.  The spot where her body was found puzzled police.  It was not easily accessible by car, so the murderer must have carried the corpse for at least 300 yards or so.  And Anne had been a solidly-built girl, weighing some 150 pounds.  For whatever reason, her murderer had put himself to a lot of trouble to leave her in that particular location.

It was only when the pathologist, Professor Francis Camps, examined Anne’s corpse that it was revealed just how strange her murder had been.  Anne had been strangled, and the stomach contents established that she had died on the same evening she vanished.   Camps attributed the lack of decomposition to the body being stored for some time at very cold temperatures, such as you would find in a freezer.  Camps also noted that the girl had been sexually assaulted.  From the clumsy way her clothes had been buttoned, it seemed clear that she had been stripped naked, after which the body was frozen for some time, and then re-dressed before being left in the woods.

Naturally, the first thing Inspector Elwell did was have every large freezer in and around Whitwell investigated.  Unfortunately, nothing was found to link any individual to the girl’s murder.  As far as I have been able to tell, investigators were unable to even come up with plausible suspects.  To date, the identity of the man who committed this extraordinarily creepy killing remains unknown.

This is one of those crime cases that on the face of it, should have been solved.  It was clearly a planned killing, committed by someone familiar with the area, and who very possibly knew Anne.  The murderer was someone with access to a large freezer, and who had the comforting assurance that no one would take any inconvenient peeks into its contents.  That must have narrowed the list of suspects down considerably, but the police were apparently completely unable to find anyone who checked all those boxes.  One can only conclude that some evildoers truly have the devil’s own luck.

There is a supernatural sequel to this dreadful mystery.  People frequenting Marshalls Heath Lane began seeing what they swore was the ghost of the murdered girl.  In 1974, the employees of a plant hire company operating near Anne’s old home began noticing some very uncanny things.  Doors would open and shut on their own.  One worker, who was completely alone at the time, got the unmistakable sense that someone was brushing against him.  A local cat who liked to hang out around the buildings was often seen arching his back and hissing at…nothing, as far as anyone could tell.

One evening, a worker saw a teenage girl standing by a storage shed.  When he called to the girl and began walking towards her, she vanished.  He had not gotten close enough to the girl to be able to describe her appearance very well, but another employee, Alfred Spink, (who had participated in the search for Anne those many years ago,) was convinced it was poor Anne Noblett, unhappily haunting the area where her young, promising life had so brutally ended.

About 20 years ago, a group of spiritualists held a seance using a Ouija board in Marshalls Heath Lane.  Allegedly, they were contacted by Anne’s ghost, who gave them the identity of her killer--a man who was at that time still alive, and residing in the nearby village of Whipsnade.

Did these ghost-hunting detectives "solve" Anne's murder?  Or were they merely chasing a supernatural red-herring?

[Note: On the evening of January 5, 1958, 19-year-old Mary Kriek got off a bus only a very short distance from the Eight Ash Green, Colchester, farm where she worked as a domestic servant.  Her dead body was found in a ditch the next day.  Naturally, there was speculation that she was murdered by the same person who killed Anne Noblett, but no actual evidence was found to link the two cases.  Kriek's murder is also unsolved.]