1972 child killer faces investigations over two earlier murders

Detectives are dusting down the files on a police force`s oldest unsolved murder with a child killer being questioned as part of a new DNA-driven investigation. Rotherham teenager Anne Dunwell was raped and murdered on May 6, 1964. The 13-year-old was strangled with her own stockings and left naked at the foot of a manure heap after she went missing on her way home to Whiston from visiting her grandparents. Now South Yorkshire Police (SYP) is conducting a review of Anne`s case, reanalysing DNA recovered in 2006 in the hope that new scientific techniques may reveal the killer. And Detective Chief Inspector Dave Stopford told The Times that convicted killer Peter Pickering, now 79, is being looked at as a possible suspect. “Peter Pickering is obviously of interest. He is potentially a serial killer,” said Det Chief Insp Stopford. “He does have links to South Yorkshire and the offences he’s committed are ones of a similar nature. I need to look through to see why he was ruled out by the previous investigation.” Pickering, dubbed the `Beast of Wombwell`, was jailed after raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl, Shirley Ann Boldy, in 1972. While still serving his sentence for Shirley`s murder, he was arrested and later bailed last year by the SYP investigating the brutal murder of another 14-year-old, Elsie Frost, in a railway underpass near Wakefield in October 1965. She was attacked from behind and stabbed in the back and head as she walked through a railway tunnel just off a canal towpath. The investigation into her murder froze but was relaunched in 2016 after investigating officers gathered new evidence of her tragic death. He was detained again on March 6 in Newbury, Berkshire and has since been bailed into “secure custody”, according to West Yorkshire Police (WYP). The force declined to elaborate on the terms of the bail. Detectives will now submit a file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for them to consider on the offences of kidnap, rape and murder. When Pickering was arrested for Shirley Boldy’s murder in 1972, he confessed, telling officers: “My mother is to blame for all this — she has possessed me. My mother would not let me have another woman and she always tried to destroy those I had.” Pickering said he was driving in his mother’s van when he spotted the girl walking home from school in Wombwell, near Barnsley. He grabbed her and tortured her for seven hours before killing her. The attack came just five months after he had been released from a nine-year prison sentence for sexual assaults on two other girls.