Latest Offenders Leicester

Description

A CHILD-killer and paedophile responsible for a New Forest murder has died at an old peoples home.

Albert Goozee, 86, was sentenced to death after his landlady and her 14-year-old daughter were found dead following a picnic near Cadnam more than 50 years ago.

The paranoid schizophrenic was saved from the hangmans noose when the Home Secretary intervened. He was sent to Broadmoor, but following his release in the 1970s, he was later convicted of other crimes including sexually assaulting girls aged 12 and 13.

Just last month it was revealed that Goozee was living in Cedar Court care home in Wigston, Leicestershire, where his dark past was not known.

A national newspaper claimed Goozee had been refusing food and lay in his bed clutching rosary beads. He is thought to have died on Wednesday.

Goozee, a fitters mate and former serviceman, had been lodging at the Alexandra Road, Parkstone, home of Thomas Leakey, his wife Lydia, 53, and daughter Norma before the killings.

On June 17, 1956, motorists discovered Goozee on a forest road with stab wounds, leaning over the bonnet of a car. A trail of blood led to the bodies of his landlady and her daughter.

In court prosecutors told jurors how Mrs Leakey, who was 20 years older than Goozee, had been his lover, and he had decided that the only way out was to kill her and her daughter.

In his defence, he claimed Norma had gone to pick bluebells. He claimed that on her return she had found him with Mrs Leakey and axed her mother, who went wild with a knife.

Jurors took less than four hours to convict him of murdering Norma and a second charge of murdering Mrs Leakey remained on file.

The double murders were depicted in the film Intimate Relations, starring Julie Walters and Rupert Graves, which caused a storm on its 1996 release.

Description

On 21 November 1983, 15-year-old Lynda Mann took a shortcut on her way home from babysitting instead of taking her normal route home. She did not return and her parents and neighbours spent the night searching for her. The next morning, she was found raped and strangled on a deserted footpath known locally as the Black Pad. Using forensic science techniques available at the time, police linked a semen sample taken from her body to a person with type A blood and an enzyme profile that matched only 10% of males. With no other leads or evidence, the case was left open.

On 31 July 1986, a second 15-year-old girl, Dawn Ashworth, left her home to visit a friend's house. Her parents expected her to return at 9:30 pm; when she failed to do so they called police to report her missing. Two days later, her body was found in a wooded area near a footpath called Ten Pound Lane. She had been beaten, savagely raped and strangled. The modus operandi matched that of the first attack, and semen samples revealed the same blood type.

An initial suspect was Richard Buckland, a local 17-year-old with learning difficulties who, while innocent of both crimes, revealed knowledge of Ashworth's body, and admitted to the Ashworth crime under questioning, denying the first murder.