UNSOLVED MYSTERIES: The dark story of Manchester’s Angel of the Meadow

In 2010, the decaying remains of a woman was unearthed wrapped up in some carpet, in an affluent area in Manchester’s city centre.

And to this very day, both her identity and the culprit behind her murder remain unsolved.

It was a group of builders who were unfortunate enough to discover the body in the January of 2010 as they worked on the new £100m Co-op headquarters, located in the historic Angel Meadow.

One of the workmen first spotted a skull, which lead them to discover the full corpse, which had been wrapped up in an old piece of carpet.

Admittedly, finding a body in this area wouldn’t have been a headline-worthy matter back in the day, considering Angel Meadow was once upon a time one of the biggest slums in the city – with historian Frederich Engels describing it as ‘hell upon Earth’.

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It is also believed that, throughout the Victorian era, around 40,000 bodies were buried in mass graveyards in Angel Meadows.

However, once the body was analysed it became apparent that it hadn’t been buried in the slums all those hundreds of years ago but, instead, had died much more recently.

The victim’s body was found still partially clothed in a blue jumper, black stiletto shoes and a very distinctive 1970s style green pinafore dress, with detectives later concluding she had died between the years of 1975 and 1988.

And while the woman’s death was initially believed not to be suspicious, a postmortem concluded she had suffered a fractured jaw, neck, collarbone and nose shortly before her death, with detectives concluding she had been murdered.

The police later estimated that the woman had been aged between eighteen and thirty-five at the time of her death, had been between 5ft 1in and 5ft 7in in height and had been missing her upper right premolar, something they say would have been noticeable when she smiled.

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A piece of Guinness memorabilia was also discovered nearby, and the carpet she was covered in appeared to have been cut to fit a Ford Cortina, with a hole for the gear stick.

But this was as far as the police got because, all these years later, the mystery of both the woman’s murder and her identify remain unsolved.

In a bid to identify the woman – known formally as Jane Doe – police made several international enquiries and even spoke to families in Tanzania, Texas and Holland.

They used state-of-the-art technology to reconstruct her face based on the analysis of her skull, with the graphic being revealed on a 2011 episode of CrimeWatch.

However, while the reconstruction resulted in a few leads concerning missing women around Manchester, her dental records did not match up and the police were once again left with a cold case.

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Though there is one person who claims to recognise the woman; Alec Whittle, seventy-two, previously told the Manchester Evening News that he is convinced the murdered woman is a barmaid he spoke to decades previously in a pub in Longsight.

Whittle claims that the woman – whose name he didn’t get – had showed him bruises on her face and neck, before confiding that she had no relatives in the UK.

He said: “She showed me all these injuries down her face and shoulder. She said she had no relatives here. I wanted to help her, I wanted to take her home to my parents house, but she refused and said she couldn’t.

“This would have been the 1970s after I came out of the Army and before I met my wife. We were talking and I said nobody had a right to do that to her. Then this bloke came up and she told me to ‘shush’ and sit down.”

He also remembers seeing a pinafore dress similar to that found on the body hung up by the bar.

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He recalled: “When the report came out there was a body found rolled in a coloured carpet with injuries to her face and neck, and there was a beer mat with her and a pinafore dress, it just sounded right.”

Sadly, Whittle’s hunch never found its feet, and the ‘Angel of the Meadow’ was eventually laid to rest in an unmarked grave, five years after her remains were discovered.

Head of GMP’s Cold Case Unit, Martin Bottomley, said on the ten year anniversary of the woman’s discovery: “Sadly there have been no significant developments over the years but we will never give up hope that one day we’ll be able to identify her and find out what happened.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that someone out there knows who she is and what happened to her and I would encourage them to get in touch with police – it’s never too late to come forward.”

Anyone with information should call police on 0161 856 5978 or 101. Reports can also be made via the independent charity Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.