Died 1979 | ||
Sally Ann McGrath, aged 22, who lived with her parents in Towler Street, Peterborough, England, was last seen in Cathedral Square, Peterborough at 2.45pm on 11 July 1979, after telling friends at The Bull Hotel she was heading to the unemployment office on Church Street.
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1970s investigation
Her disappearance sparked a huge investigation into the 1980s with over 3,000 people interviewed during the investigation by a murder squad based at Peterborough’s Thorpe Wood police station, who took 10,000 statements. No arrests were made at the time. On 1 March 1980, her badly decomposed body was found by gamekeeper Keith Dickenson while hunting rabbits. The corpse was partly hidden in dense woodland known as Wild Boar Spinney near Castor and Ailsworth about 3 miles north-west of Peterborough city centre. A post-mortem found her body had been there for between three and six months and she had suffered two head fractures and a broken nose. A police search of the area found no new clues.
2011 developments
On 9 October 2011, 59-year-old Paul Taylor was charged with murdering her. Taylor, of Valentine Close, Fareham, Hampshire, was also been charged with three counts of rape, a sexual assault and an indecent assault in 1979. He appeared before Peterborough Magistrates' Court on 10 October 2011. The arrest followed a cold case review into the death of Miss McGrath and seven other linked sex offences, codenamed Operation Highfields, which started in 2009. On 4 December 2012 Paul Taylor was convicted of her murder along with other charges of rape, attempted rape and a serious sexual assault. He was sentenced on 5 December 2012 and received life imprisonment with a minimum term of 18 years.