Murder of Patsy Morris

Two days later, on the evening of 18 June, Morris's body was found by a police dog handler face down in a copse on nearby Hounslow Heath, close to her home.[7][6][8][5] She was variously described as being fully-clothed[8] or half-naked.[5] She had been found ten yards from a path through one of the small woods.[5] She had been strangled with a ligature.[2][8] For an unknown reason, police found that she had been wearing two pairs of knickers that day.[5] Her knickers and her tights had been pulled down over her ankles.[5] A second pair of tights with one leg missing was tied around her leg and wound upwards until it was knotted four times around her neck, as a form of ligature.[5] An identical pair of one-legged tights was also wrapped three times around both her wrists in front of her body and then over her breasts.[5]

There was no signs of sexual assault, but her knickers being pulled down and her clothing being organised in the way it was suggested a sexual motive to the killing.[9][8] The evidence suggested the perpetrator had found sexual stimulation without penetration.[10]

In 2007, Morris's murder was one of a number of cases linked in the press to newly discovered Scottish serial killer Peter Tobin, who was found to have killed three women between 1991 and 2006.[14] After hearing of the discovery of two women's bodies buried at Tobin's former Margate home, George Morris said that something inside him "clicked" and that he believed Tobin had also murdered his daughter.[8][15] Her case was reviewed as part of an investigation into other potential victims of Tobin, named Operation Anagram, but Morris's family heard no more from the police and the investigation was wound down in 2011, having found no evidence that conclusively linked Tobin to any other murders.[8][16]

In February 2008, police revealed they were investigating a possible confession to the murder made by Levi Bellfield, an Isleworth-born killer who lived nearby at the time and who had just been convicted of two murders and an attempted murder. The attacks had been committed between 2003 and 2004 in the vicinity of the Morris murder site.[12][17] Bellfield was alleged to have made the confession to a cellmate while on remand.[12][2] It was then revealed that Bellfield had attended Feltham Comprehensive with Morris, and that he was her childhood boyfriend.[2][12][18] Morris's family told the press that they had not known they had known each other, and her sister stated: "We did not know him. It was a shock when we found out they knew each other. Friends told us about it. It is horrendous."[8][19] In 2011, Bellfield was further convicted of the murder of another schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, who he had abducted and raped in 2002.[17]

Bellfield would have been 12 years old at the time of Morris's murder, which occurred a year before he received his first conviction, for burglary, aged 13.[17] He was known to have repeatedly played truant while at school and was known to often frequent Hounslow Heath when he should have been at school.[4] He was known to have not attended school the day of the murder.[4] Former partners of Bellfield recounted that he had a hatred of blonde women and targeted them for attacks, and it was noted that Morris was herself blonde.[20][17] Some claimed that Morris's death could have been the start of Bellfield's violent obsession with blondes.[20]

After it was revealed that Bellfield was being investigated by police for his daughter's murder, George Morris stated that he was certain that the teenage boy who had given him a death threat in a call at the time was Bellfield, saying: "He's a local man, which is why it could be him. And it's terrifying to think that someone of twelve or thirteen could have done it".[3]

In 2015, crime writers Chris Clark and Tim Tate published a book alleging links between a number of unsolved murders and the infamous "Yorkshire Ripper" serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.[23] In the book, the authors claimed that Morris could have been a victim of Sutcliffe, since he was known to have been house-sitting nearby in Alperton with his brother at the time, and both were regularly cruising and picking up women in their car for sex.[24] Clark and Tate claimed that Morris was found half-naked and that her clothing had been arranged in a typical Yorkshire Ripper-like fashion, with her clothes pushed upwards over the top half of her body.[5] Her body was allegedly also posed in the same fashion as his known victims.[9] Police have apparently never investigated links to Sutcliffe.[10]