When the murder trail goes cold

Few people will ever have heard about the deaths of David Ombler and Janet Henderson - Britain's two oldest unsolved murders. Mr Ombler, a market trader from Hull, was found battered to death on his kitchen floor on 30 May 1914, the victim of a vicious attack involving a fire poker and pair of tongs.As for Janet Henderson, of Perthshire, Tayside Police have never discovered who was responsible for her untimely death in Forgandenny almost 150 years ago.

Detectives never close the files of unsolved homicides. They simply keep hoping that one day they will find the killer.

Research by the BBC's Freedom of Information team, has revealed that there are officially 1,143 unsolved killings on police records in the UK.

Six of the 50 forces that provided information said they did not have any unsolved killings, which were more than a year old. Only two forces - the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Gwent police - failed to provide any figures. London's Metropolitan Police had the largest number, at 341. But its response to the BBC's request only goes back as far as 1996 - three years after the still open inquiry into the killing of teenager Stephen Lawrence.

So what does 1,143 unsolved killings mean?

According to the latest figures, there were 651 homicides (murder, manslaughter and infanticide) in England and Wales in the year to November 2009. That may sound a lot - but it is far lower than the murder rate in the US. Between 2008 and 2009, 92% of these deaths were detected in England and Wales - meaning someone was either convicted or charged and later cleared. Detection rates are higher only for crimes where someone has to be caught in the act, such as possession of drugs and soliciting.

So why is the homicide detection rate so high?

While the death of Janet Henderson in 1866 remains unsolved, the Dundee Advertiser's graphic report of the killing at the time (see internet links) shines a light on what confronts police at a murder scene... and how they go about trying to solve it. The Advertiser reports a pretty gruesome tale of the 50-year-old's bludgeoned remains being found on the kitchen floor. It sets out in grim detail the position of her body, where traces of her blood were found and remarks that the house had a confused and disordered appearance, as if it has been ransacked for plunder.

This description is more than a reporter getting carried away. For a detective, it's the foundations of what's known as the victimology - the picture that a murder squad builds of the relationship between the deceased, the location and the suspects who come into view. Will O'Reilly recently retired from the Metropolitan Police after a career as one of the capital's leading murder squad detectives.

He was the senior investigating officer leading the hunt for the killer of a five-year-old African boy whom detectives called Adam - the boy whose torso was recovered from the Thames in 2001. The former detective chief inspector says investigators begin with the assumption that there is no such as thing as a stranger murder.

In most murders, the assailant is known to the victim, he says That's the starting point in the victimology - what puts them there at that time. And when you can answer that, you have a clue.

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