This was one of the old country’s worst cases of a serial killer that seemed to be unstoppable.
The Essex police were receiving really bad press about the serial killer’s ability to avoid their attempts to get hold of even one witness, let alone capture him. The papers had labelled him the Epping Butcher. After the third female victim, the local community was on edge, with women not venturing out at all at night, unless it was absolutely essential. With a further woman falling prey to the killer, more and more newspapers around the country were giving headlines to the case of the Epping Butcher. They all used the title, and unbeknownst to them, and anybody else as it happened, this was something that enraged the killer to the point where he felt that he had to do something about it. He thought long and hard about it. He knew it would be the end of his career, his killing spree, but enough was enough!
He walked into the nearest police station, both to complain and to put matters right. He explained that he wasn’t an Epping butcher at all, that he was, in fact, a Waltham Abbey Roof Tiler.
Unhappily, they didn’t believe him and threw him out for wasting police time.