Fresh inquest to be held over death of student in Sussex who vanished in 1980
In 2000, following a second police investigation, it was found Jessie Earl was murdered
Last updated 15th Dec 2021
A fresh inquest will take place into the death of an art student who vanished more than 40 years ago after her parents criticised a police investigation as "woefully inadequate".
The body of 22-year-old Jessie Earl was found in undergrowth at Beachy Head near Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1989, nine years after she disappeared from her bedsit in the resort.
A 1989 inquest into her death recorded an open verdict, but her now elderly parents John and Valerie Earl spent years trying to overturn its finding, believing their daughter was murdered.
In 2000, following a second police investigation dubbed Operation Silk, Sussex Police concluded that Ms Earl was murdered.
After a High Court hearing in London on Tuesday, Lord Justice Warby, sitting with Mr Justice Saini and His Honour Judge Teague QC - the chief coroner for England and Wales - said they had concluded that there should be an order quashing the original inquest and directing a fresh one is held.
He said the judges will hand down their reasons in a written judgment at a later date.
Lord Justice Warby said they would not make an order for the exhumation of Ms Earl's remains so DNA profiling can be done to compare against police national databases, leaving this issue for a new coroner.
Stephen Kamlish QC, representing Ms Earl's parents, who joined Tuesday's hearing via video-link, said their daughter's case "should have resulted in the verdict of unlawful killing" in 1989 and this was the "only possible" explanation from evidence available to the police and coroner.
He told the court that the senior investigating officer handling her case "instructed his officers not to treat this case as one of homicidal murder", claiming the inquiry was "twisted away... from the truth".
He claimed "lines of inquiry which could and were likely to lead to the truth were deliberately not followed", that the police investigation was "woefully inadequate" and that there was "a search for the truth that was undermined from within".
After the discovery of Ms Earl's body, the police investigation was "shut down" after four weeks, with 103 lines of inquiry left uncompleted, Mr Kamlish said.
He said this was part of the "deliberate and strategic nature of this inquiry not wanting to conclude that homicide was the most likely reason for Jessie's death".
Mr Kamlish highlighted evidence that before she disappeared Ms Earl was "nervous" about the possibility of a "middle-aged man" she had met while out walking later "knocking on her door".
He argued the "first thing a competent police officer directing an investigation" would do would be to "identify that person".
"This man would certainly have been somebody of interest," he said, adding that not classing a crime as homicide meant "a large number of inquiries do not get undertaken".
Mr Kamlish said it was "extraordinary" that a pathologist was not present at the 1989 inquest and said her GP was missing from a list of witnesses.
He claimed that on the inquest form there was a "deliberate avoidance" of a mention in relation to homicide "as if it was a taboo subject".
He said the record of inquest "misses out all the salient features" in the case, such as the knotted bra found by Ms Earl's naked body that a knot expert said could have been used to restrain her.
He added: "It's a disgrace both to the family and to the public that the coroner didn't take the trouble to paint a true short and relevant picture of Jessie's happy go lucky life".
Mr Kamlish pointed Ms Earl was "a very innocent person" that wrote hundreds of pages of journals showing she was someone "full of love of nature" who wrote "joyful" poetry.
He said an open verdict left the possibility that Jessie was to blame for her own death, arguing in written submissions that the coroner should have ruled out the likelihood of suicide.
Also in written submissions, Mr Kamlish said fresh evidence would justify the ordering of a new inquest, including obtaining DNA from her remains - which was not used by police in 1989 - and comparing it on a national database.
He said a report from a behavioural crime analyst, referred to in the Operation Silk report, concluded that "there was a high probability that Jessie was strangled by her own clothing".
Mr Kamlish noted in written arguments that convicted serial killer Peter Tobin, was "suspected of having been at large in the Eastbourne area during the 1980s" and "is known to have targeted female strangers and stripped and tied up his victims".
He said a DNA profile from Ms Earl's parents was compared to unidentified DNA in relation to operation Anagram investigating Tobin, but this produced no matches.
But he said advice from a forensic scientist made it "implicit" that efforts to run "inferred DNA" across operation Anagram and the missing persons data base "were inconclusive and potentially flawed due to risks of an inaccurate profiled being used".
Mr Kamlish concluded that by not originally treating Ms Earl's death as murder the police were "doing the public a great disservice" with the case provoking a "sense of injustice" and "sense of public outrage".
George Thomas, representing the Chief Constable of Sussex Police, an interested party in the case, said they remained formally "neutral" over the application for a fresh inquest, adding in written submissions that Ms Earl's murder case remains open but with no active lines of inquiry.
He acknowledged that the 1989 investigation was "flawed" because it "appeared to discount the possibility of Jessie had been murdered" but said the chief constable refuted Mr Kamlish's allegations that police had deliberately not followed lines or inquiry, or that it was strategically misdirected, as "unjustified".