Remembering The Murder Of Diane Sindall

Murdered because she was a woman.

I remember the day vividly. It was September 1986, I had just returned to high school after the summer holidays, and we had been called into the main hall for a special assembly.

We all knew what it was going to be about. A young woman had been found battered, raped, and murdered during the summer just opposite the shopping center we all hung out on weekends. The perpetrator was still unknown and would not be caught for months.

Diane Sindall was the victim. She was a florist who also had a part-time job as a barmaid in a local pub. Her battered corpse had been found the following morning by a woman walking her dog in a stone-walled alleyway adjacent to a busy main road. Her injuries were catastrophic. She had been beaten with a crowbar, her clothes ripped off and, to our horror, her nipples had been bitten off.

She was just 21 years old.

I was 13 at the time and thought she was a properly grown woman. But she wasn’t, she was very young. It transpired her florist van had run out of petrol while she was driving home from her shift in the pub, so she had walked back along the main road in the direction of the 24-hour garage.

She never made it there.

Incredibly, even though the horrific incident had occurred right next to one of the busiest roads in the town, no one had witnessed it.

The following day though, dog walkers disturbed a man burning clothes on Bidston Hill, a local nature spot. He ran away but the walkers managed to get a good enough look to later identify him. They put the fire out to preserve what was left and the clothes were later confirmed as those of Diane’s.

We were told there was a Bogeyman out there, a Predator. He was dubbed ‘The Wolfman’ almost like he was a creature from the underworld that had escaped for a short period, and after the kill had gone back to his own world.

As none of us had ever seen a ‘Wolfman’ walking the streets around us we naively thought we were relatively safe.

I honestly think now if it had been explained to me this was just a regular man; the type I walk past on the street every day; a man just like my…

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