Babes in the Wood murders (Epping Forest)
The April 1970 Metropolitan Police circular distributed in the manhunt to locate Blatchford and Hanlon | |
| Date | 31 March 1970 |
|---|---|
| Location | Epping Forest, Essex, England, UK 51°39′25″N 0°00′14″E / 51.657°N 0.004°E (approximate) |
| Cause | Strangulation |
| Motive | Child sexual abuse Rape |
| Inquest | Open verdict (1970) Murder (1998) |
| Convicted | Ronald Jebson |
| Charges | Murder |
| Sentence | Life imprisonment |
The Babes in the Wood murders are the murders of two children which occurred in a copse in Sewardstone, Essex on 31 March 1970. The victims, Susan Muriel Blatchford (age 11) and Gary John Hanlon (age 12), were lured from an unknown location close to their north London homes into a copse on the outskirts of Epping Forest, where they were raped and murdered by known paedophile Ronald Jebson. Their bodies were discovered on 17 June, 78 days after the two were reported missing by their parents.
The case remained unsolved for almost thirty years until 61-year-old Jebson, serving a life sentence for the 1974 murder of an eight-year-old girl named Rosemary Papper, confessed to their rape and murder in 1998. He was convicted of both murders in May 2000. Jebson subsequently died in prison in 2015.
Blatchford and Hanlon became known as the "Babes in the Wood" due to the location of their murders and the subsequent discovery of their bodies. They also became known by this epithet as the coroner was unable to determine if they died of exposure or foul play at the initial inquest into their deaths, leaving an initial possibility the children had died by misadventure.