On the afternoon of June 29, 1964, a warm and sunny day in southern England, a twelve-year-old boy named Michael Shap was train-spotting with friends near Basingstoke. When the 3:25 from Southampton pulled out of the station, he visited the toilet compartment at the end of his carriage. Opening the door, he found the body of a teenage girl lying on the floor, covered in blood. He ran back into the carriage, shouting in terror.

Another passenger pulled the emergency cord, the driver slammed on the air brakes, and the train screeched to a halt. Michael jumped down onto the tracks and ran back to the station to raise the alarm. Police evacuated the passengers and shunted the train into a siding. The girl’s body was taken to Hackwood Road Hospital in Basingstoke, where the noted pathologist Dr.

Keith Simpson conducted the post-mortem. She had been struck on the left side of her head by a heavy object, and her throat had been cut with a seven-inch gash made by a jagged-edged green glass bottle, fragments of which were found in the carriage. Marks around her mouth suggested a hand had been clamped over it to stifle her screams. She had not been sexually assaulted.

The cause of death was shock and blood loss. Her papers identified her as Ivon Laker, a fifteen-year-old girl born in 1949 in Vettel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, where her father, Sergeant Peter Laker of the RAF, was stationed. Her mother, Urella, was a local German woman. Ivon had recently returned to Britain to attend the Convent of the Nativity boarding school in Maidenhead.

She had spent the weekend with her paternal grandparents at Barton-on-Sea near Southampton and was returning to school. Her grandfather, Major Cyril Laker, had taken the last photograph of her alive in his garden before seeing her onto the 3:25 train. It now fell to him to identify her remains. Detective Superintendent Walter Jones of Hampshire CID took charge with a command of fifty officers.

He called it a frenzied, brutal attack, motiveless as far as anyone knew. Illness soon forced him to hand the investigation to Superintendent Dennis Padwick. Ivon had been found still wearing her wristwatch, and her purse, containing money, had not been touched. Robbery seemed unlikely as a motive.

Examination of the carriage showed she had sat by a window on the right-hand side, halfway down the carriage, with her blue beret and possessions beside her. Her grandfather confirmed her position. Police reasoned that if the attacker was right-handed, he had either sat in front of her and swung the bottle, or walked down the gangway and struck her on the left side of her head. The blow shattered the bottle and rendered her unconscious, and then she was dragged face-down to the toilet compartment, where she was killed with the jagged edge of the broken bottle.

The bottle itself was missing, as were her beret and shoes. The next day, her shoes and beret were found ten miles south of Basingstoke, along with the remnants of a sherry bottle, though the bottleneck and label were never recovered. The base of the bottle bore a code that identified it as a Quer Cream Sherry bottle. On the train, police also found a brown paper bag with a reinforced base, the kind wine merchants supplied for carrying a bottle.

Inside were a lettuce and cucumber roll wrapped in greaseproof paper labeled Midland Dairy made Farmhouse bread, and four biscuits in a red packet. No one claimed the bag, and police concluded it belonged to the killer. Sixty passengers had traveled on the train at some stage of its journey, but the three carriages had no connecting corridors, meaning no one could move between them. A railway porter named Nigel Gulliver told police that when the train departed Winchester at 3:58 p.

m. , Ivon was still alive. He had noticed a young girl in a gray school blazer and beret in the seat where she was known to have been sitting. She was alone, but a man boarded her carriage at Winchester.

When the train arrived at Micheldever at 4:08 p. m. , three women and a boy got off, but no man did. That left Ivon and the man alone in the middle carriage.

At 4:22 p. m. , the train arrived at Basingstoke, and a young man got off in a hurry. Fourteen minutes later, Michael Shap discovered the body.

Ivon had been killed sometime between departing Winchester and arriving at Basingstoke, a window of just twenty-four minutes. Several people had seen a young man on the tracks near Basingstoke acting suspiciously around half past four, suggesting the killer had left the train and made his way from the station along the tracks. Police took nearly a thousand statements but found no solid leads. On July 2, a twenty-seven-year-old man was arrested after crashing a stolen car into a telegraph pole near Basingstoke.

He had been drinking, and after the crash he asked a woman to drive him to Farnborough, claiming he needed to make a telephone call. He did not return. Police arrested him for theft of the car and driving without insurance. The offenses were unrelated to the murder, but the man was known to police as an habitual offender, so he was held in custody overnight to appear before magistrates the next morning.

Shortly before he was due in court on July 3, a police constable entered his cell and found him sobbing with his head in his hands. He said, “I’m worried. I was on the train the girl was murdered on, and I saw a man drag her along the corridor to the toilet. ”

The man was Derek Pi.

Born in Liverpool on May 30, 1937, he had been working as a farm laborer near Basingstoke until recently losing his job. He was married to a woman named Irene Rodgers, and they had three children. Pi had a long record of theft, arson, and violence. He told detectives a curious story.

On the day of the murder, he had seen a solicitor in the morning, visited the Basingstoke labor exchange seeking work, and gone to a pub in Church Street at lunchtime. He said he boarded the wrong train and ended up at Reading, then traveled to Winchester, where he visited a Royal Marines recruitment office. He caught the train to Basingstoke at 3:58 p. m.

, the same train Ivon was on. When he boarded the middle carriage, he said he saw a man and a young girl halfway down the carriage. He went to the toilet, and as he returned, the man passed him with the girl leaning into him, her head down, the man’s arm around her shoulders. The man was around thirty, about five foot nine, clean-shaven with dark hair, wearing a white shirt, tie, and dark jacket and trousers.

Pi asked what was wrong with the girl, and the man said she was sick. The man reached for the toilet door, and Pi held it open for him before sitting down again. A few minutes later, the man returned without the girl and said she was okay. Pi asked if there was anything he could do, and the man told him to mind his own business.

Pi said he then noticed pieces of glass on the floor and seat, and fearing a child might hurt itself, he picked up a couple of pieces and threw them out of the window. A search of Pi’s clothes found a shard of green glass in the right-hand jacket pocket of a dark pinstriped suit. It was less than half a millimeter long. He could not account for it other than that he regularly drank sherry from green bottles.

A forensic specialist said the glass might have come from the sherry bottle used in the murder, possibly from its neck. A search of Pi’s house found other empty sherry bottles, including a Quer Cream Sherry bottle identical to the murder weapon. The railway porter who saw a man board the train at Winchester identified Derek Pi as possibly that man. Several people had seen a young man exit the train at Basingstoke, but none could positively identify Pi.

Inquiries at local pubs and off-licenses revealed that the landlord of The Grapes public house in Basingstoke had sold a bottle of Quer Sherry to a man around 1:00 p. m. on the day of the murder, the same time Pi claimed to be in another pub. The landlord could not describe the buyer nor pick Pi out of a lineup, but he remembered the sherry was paid for with a ten-shilling note.

Detectives noted that no one had mentioned the price or the ten-shilling note to Pi, yet when asked whether he had bought sherry at The Grapes that day, Pi replied, “I had no money. Where would I get ten shillings from for that? ”

At 6:00 p. m.

on July 7, Derek Pi was charged with the murder of Ivon Laker. He said, “I never touched the girl. I had nothing at all to do with this, nothing whatsoever. I would never bring shame on my wife and family.

”

The trial opened at Winchester on November 23, 1964, before Mr. Justice Stratfield, with Jeremy Hutchinson QC for the Crown and David Croom-Johnson for the defense. Hutchinson told the jury the prosecution did not suggest any motive for the crime, but that did not mean it was motiveless. He described how Ivon had been attacked in her seat, knocked unconscious with the sherry bottle, then dragged to the lavatory and her throat cut.

It was a horrible, unpleasant murder, perpetrated in broad daylight on an ordinary summer’s afternoon on an ordinary train. Several witnesses identified Pi as having boarded the train at Winchester. The forensic officer said the glass fragment in his pocket matched others found at the scene. Numerous witnesses described a man near the tracks acting suspiciously, but none could identify Pi, and one witness denied the man he saw resembled him.

Pi took the stand and was examined for three hours without faltering. He stuck to his story. He said he had learned of the murder the next morning in the Daily Mirror. The judge asked why he had not realized he was on the same train.

Pi replied that he did not usually read about murder cases. The defense argued that none of the evidence connected Pi to the crime. His fingerprints were not found in the toilet. There was no evidence he bought the sherry bottle.

The Quer bottle found at his home had been purchased a week earlier. The judge’s direction to the jury was favorable to Pi. He criticized the prosecution’s “fanciful ideas” and said, “It may well be you will come to the conclusion there are not many men who have been put through an interrogation to the extent that Derek Pi has, and he has stuck to his story right from the beginning right through to the very end. It may well be that that story is true, and if you think that story is true, though there may be some points which do not appeal to you, then that means the prosecution has failed.

”

The jury of nine men and three women retired for six and a half hours. On December 1, they returned a verdict of not guilty. Pi visibly relaxed in the dock, and his wife and mother collapsed with relief. He did not walk free.

He had been committed for trial on other unrelated charges, which had been heard in closed court to avoid prejudicing the murder trial. In January 1965, it became known there were ten outstanding charges against him: arson, theft, and wounding his wife in an attack. He was alleged to have torched four barns in North Hampshire and set fire to furniture in a Basingstoke house. In March 1965, he was convicted of torching a barn, setting fire to furniture, and breaking and entering to steal a camera.

He admitted to further offenses of stealing a radio and a car and a briefcase, and was sentenced to eighteen months in jail. His wife Irene sobbed, “I shall wait for him. ” The charge of wounding his wife never came to court, likely because she would not cooperate. After his release in 1966, Pi continued committing crimes.

In August 1967, he was charged with stealing a car and breaking into a bungalow, where he had also slashed a woman’s underclothes and stolen two typewriters, alcohol, and cash. In court, he claimed he had borrowed the car from a man he met in a pub whose name he did not know. This time the jury did not believe him, and he received a thirty-month sentence. His barrister, Rose Heilbron QC, asked that he receive treatment for a drinking problem, which she called the root cause of all his difficulties.

He was back in court in 1970, receiving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for stealing from a fish and chip shop where he worked. Derek Pi got away with more than murder. Had he been convicted, he might well have been the last man hanged in Britain. The last executions had occurred on August 13, 1964, when Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen were hanged for murder.

In early 1965, the death penalty was suspended in Britain and abolished in 1969. The evidence against Pi was substantial. He had boarded the train at Winchester, the only person known to have shared the carriage with Ivon. He was a violent man with a drinking problem, angry that day after losing his job and visiting the labor exchange with no success.

He had bought and consumed a bottle of sherry, his preferred drink. The sliver of glass in his pocket came from an identical bottle. His claim of a phantom other man, seen only by him, was implausible. Yet the lack of fingerprints and the inability of witnesses to positively identify him created enough reasonable doubt for the jury.

Pi died in Bolton on November 6, 1981, at the age of forty-four. His wife divorced him and remarried, and he remarried too and moved north. The police files on the murder of Ivon Laker and the evidence against Derek Pi will not be opened until 2064, one hundred years after the event.

Weighing the probabilities of what is known now, it is highly likely that Derek Pi got away with murder.