Christine Markham, Jack the Ripper, and me
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May 1973 – See My Baby Jive was in the pop charts. I was 8. It was the month that I realized that the world was far from safe, courtesy of a girl I never met, who played truant on the wrong day. Her name was Christine Markham and, on the 21st of May, she vanished without a trace.
On the day she vanished, she must have passed with 500 yards of me, at school. And within a day, I was never quite the same again.
I remember the great house to house search, the largest ever undertaken in the UK at that time, passing through our home, and thousands of others. I remember the months of helicopters, looking, I now know, first for dying vegetation, then for lush, until 1975… I remember the suspicions of the adults being evinced in unguarded moments about her father, or the contractors from all over the county rebuilding the middle of town… And it changed me.
Later that year, Barlow and Watt Investigates: Jack the Ripper was screened (at least it is in that most unreliable of things, my memory) and it had the first showing of the Mary Jane Kelly Scene of Crime photo on television. And the world changed again. I began to become a generalist.
March 2011 – I’m 46 years old. Every 6 months or so, I look over the case of Christine Markham, to see if anything makes more sense now, although there are a couple of good suspects – one dead, one a serial murdering paedophile in prison.
I still periodically try and make sense of the Scene of Crime the last and most brutal of the Whitechapel murders. Driven by 1973, I’ve studied FBI profiling manuals, spent hours fiddling with high resolution scans. A claim to fame, albeit as a murder nerd, is that I photographically proved that the Mary Jane Kelly Scene of Crime wasn’t manipulated, beyond the removal of the window frame to allow the great coffin of a camera get its first shot. Thus the reverse view shot was of verifiable forensic value. That bit of analysis still pleases me. Last I heard, the image was still on the Casebook.org archive DVD. I still hold that, if you crack the visual acrostic of that Parisian Postcard from Hell, you’ll solve Jack. Probably not a name, but the type. His profession, fitness levels, age, etc.
Why write about what is at best an eccentric, and slightly sinister, hobby?
Today while trawling the web, I found something related to another missing child case. One I’ve followed since 2009, and the game was once more afoot.
Just over forty one years ago , as of time of writing, a boy called Steven Newing left home, and became another missing child. Five months earlier, a girl called April Fabb vanished into endless night. Looking at the pictures, they could have been related. If the same person didn’t kidnap them, then make use of the Norfolk/Suffolk rip tides, then I’d be surprised. He’s probably not the Markham abductor, but he is of the same type.
So, the moments of vicarious lost innocence in 1973 still cast a shadow over even the banalities of reading the internet, and has landed me a bookshelf that has cost a fortune and which would get me convicted very quickly if my wife ever vanishes. Those moments point at a Conradian heart of darkness in even the most civilized of places.
And somewhere, Christine Markham, Steven Newing and April Fabb all lie in unmarked graves… Jack, of course, moulders peacefully.
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I went to Crosby Infant school prior to moving down to the Berkeley Estate a couple of years prior to Christines disappearence. I was 10yrs old when it happened. The fear that spread through the town with mothers not allowing their children the freedom they had previously experienced. I remember well my mothers words, explaining to me her abduction as she likened it to an incident that had happened to me years before, myself being the victim of abuse by a stranger whie our family travelled back to the UK from Australia.
My lone sojourns to Crosby Ave to visit my Nan, going to the Old Showground to see Scunthorpe Utd with only a friend, my days of freedom to explore any and all areas of the town were instantly curtailed. Things eventually got back to some normality however like others have said, Christines abduction had a profound effect on shaping our lives forever.
In adult life I investigated various crime cases but those of child abuse and paedoplilia gave me the most pleasure when securing convictions.
God bless all the lost children…
I went to school with Christine – we were in the same year – and I swear, hardly a month goes by when I don’t revisit thoughts of those days. I am haunted, however by one thing…. One of the first images that the police issued, was a grainy, blown-up, black and white photograph of a young child aged about 3 or 4. I didn’t know who it was, even though I was in the playground with Christine in the days before she disappeared. Of course, I knew Christine’s first name but adding a surname and putting under this photograph did not help me recognise her. The photo we see now ( which was a family school photo) surfaced later, I think. But by then…….. So, I have been hunted by the fact that, if the colour photo had been circulated in the days immediately after Christine’s disappearance, maybe, just maybe, someone would have remembered seeing her.
It’s too late now. I hope there is closure to this one day – its not just relatives and close friends that were affected by this. It even shaped how I felt when my own son turned 9 (which was how old I was when all this happened) – irrational fear that, for that whole year, there was an increased chance that he would just disappear.
Let’s hope that something comes to light soon. I still think of the family. On the night of Christine’s 18 birthday, they stopped leaving a light on in the house in case she came home. A small thing but can you imagine actually having to make that decision. I’ve said enough – sorry to carry on a bit. Maybe I have more pent up emotion about his than I care to admit.
Thanks for reading……….
Read your article re Christine Markham and wondered if you could help a little. I am currently researching the Christine Markham case (purely out of my own curiosity) and live in Scunthorpe, however I wasn’t even born in 1973 so I don’t know what the area was like back then. According to news reports Christine’s home was on Robinson Road, I can find no Robinson Road in Scunthorpe and no mention of road name changes. Would you know anything about this? Trying to build a time line of sightings etc and struggling without knowing where her start point was. Also, which school did poor Christine attend? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
The author is on the road at the moment but will get back to you ASAP. Thanks for your patience.
Robinson road was changed to “Newborn avenue”
Thanks a lot for that information.
HELLO I’M MARRIED TO MELANIE MARKAM, CHRISTINE MARKAMS SISTER, MELANIE DID THE “WALK TO SCHOOL RECONSTRUTION” WEARING CLOTHES LIKE HER SISTER, SHE DIDNT REALISE THE HORROR THAT COULD HAVE BECOME OF HER SISTER, SHE FELT SPECIAL COZ OF ALL THE INTEREST SHOWN IN HER, SHE USED TO SIT ON THE COAL BUNKER WATCHING AND TALKING TO THE POLICEMAN WHILE THEY DUG UP THE GARDEN SEARCHING FOR CHRISTINES BODY NOT REALISING COZ OF HER AGE WHAT THEY WAS DOING.
Thanks for sharing with us….
Christine went to Henderson Avenue Primary school. There is a Robinson Close in that area now – but the council did a LOT of work on the housing in the area and maybe changed things a bit – from Robinson Road. When my mum and I saw Christine, on the morning she disappeared, she had just crossed Jackson Road and was near Donnington Gardens – mum noticed her for two reasons. She was going the wrong way – walking AWAY from school and, also, her dress was much longer than her coat – something that my mum had always been brought up not to have! Simple really.
Looking at the old maps, it looks like Robinson Close is what was Robinson Road.
No it isn’t Robinson Road is now known as Newborn Avenue.
MH that isn’t necessarily true. In my line of work I often find myself with unsolved crimes primarily because of the ineptness of some of the local police departments. In fact, I just finished a trial in which the person charged (my client) was found innocent by the jury) despite a live victim identifying him as the shooter. The problem with the testimony is that his testimony does not agree with the physical evidence in the case. He said he was sitting in the left rear seat of the car when he was shot through and through the neck which also went through the car window. However, there was no blood in the seat, on the door, floor, or on the seat in front of him where he was sitting. Also, the only window class broken was on the inside of the car and there was no glass noted on the out side of the car. He also said that all of the shots were fired inside of the car but there is no blood in the drivers seat and the driver was found on the out side of the car shot through the back. The victim in the passenger seat was shot in the passenger seat was shot in the head and was dead at the scene.
There were 4 expended nine millimeter casing inside the car and seven outside the car all matching the same gun but no projectiles found. The lead investigator stop investigating once he had our clients name. He took no forensics or trace evidence from the car or from the scene. No prints, no blood evidence, nothing.
Our client denied from day one that he was ever at the scene and the police could not place him at the scene except for the testimony of the live victim. The live victim said they had been to a music studio just before the shooting with the owner of the studio but the police failed to get the the studio or its owners name. The live victim also had been arrested for Robbery I since the shooting incident. It came down to the point where the jury just did not believe the police or the victim.
I was involved in the case for two years and my client had an alibi but it was weak because he was caring for a cousin who was under the care of a psychiatrist and could not keep times or places straight. He did say the client was with him but would have not withstood cross examination. It is a very good mystery but unfortunately the police have 0 information to follow up on.
What good is sitting all alone in your room, unless it it to analyse crime scene photos and reconstruct details on a skull!
Above are three adults whose memory of a single child abduction still haunts.
Sadly in America, Christine would be just another statistic, and quickly forgotten under the mountain of other abductions, murders, shootings, and rapes.
I’m from the UK and old enough to remember poor Christine’s abduction. I was a kid at the time too and I remember my mother yelling at me about staying close to the house. It was a terrible time.
Wasn’t Sherlock himself just an amateur? Do you play the violin?
I was living in England in 1973, a little older than 8, but I remember well the Christine Markham disappearance, tragedies involving kids tend to linger in the memory.
No musical instruments, but I used to sing – stage, some contemporary, operatic well enough to blag the Phantom of the Opera quasi operatic parts.
I spent a while as an unofficial rehearsal voice of choice in 6th form (I was never interested in performance, but was, in a wholly shallow way, drawn to girls who were… I was pretty, funny, I could hold a tune… there was little not to enjoy). There was a time I knew most of the male vocal parts in my range from The Thre’penny Opera by Weil, and, of course, that high school favourite, Cabaret…
You have stirred my curiosity my friend. I spent my entire adult life, minus a stint with Uncle Sam, in law enforcement. I spent many, many years as an investigator and today there are cases I couldn’t solve that haunt me. I understand where you are with this. Naturally, I am going to have to learn more. Do you need a Watson to your Holmes?
A decent ‘Watson’ is always welcome.
I’ve never been in LE, as you may gather, simply an interested amateur.
As something that may amuse, I did my first forensic reconstruction on a plastic skull, modelling clay and an copy of the 1906 ed. of Grey’s Anatomy on a plastic skull. I was 15 and a trial to my mother in so many, many ways. The woman should be in line for a sainthood.
I still have it. I’ll post it on FB for your entertainment