[1] Local man David Burgess was found guilty of two murders in 1967—for which he was handed down two life sentences—and was given a 27-year sentence for the third in 2012 after new forensic evidence brought a conviction.
[2][3] Yolande Waddington was seventeen years old and had just begun working for the Jagger family at Oakwood Farm, Clay Lane, Beenham, as a live-in nanny to their young daughter.
Waddington was born in Maidstone in Kent and lived with her family in Newbury in Berkshire, about 9 miles (14 km) from Beenham, before moving to Oakwood Farm.
[4] When it was noticed the following morning that Waddington had failed to return to Oakwood Farm, the Jagger family telephoned her boyfriend who told them he had no idea where she was.
On 30 October, two farm labourers found bloodstained clothing beneath hay bales in a cow shed on Clay Lane.
A search around the cow shed for the murder weapon was assisted by US airmen with mine detectors based at nearby USAF Greenham Common.
Over 200 men were tested and the samples were examined by forensic scientist Margaret Pereira at Scotland Yard, but no match to Waddington's killer was found.
Williams's body was found at 22:45, about 100 yards (91 m) from Wigmore's; she was lying face down in a pool of water and had been covered with leaves and twigs.
Burgess worked as a dumper driver at the gravel pits and, after supposedly checking the snares, he returned to the office between ten and twenty minutes later.
During the trial, he tried to pin the blame on a man called "MacNab" from Reading who he claimed he had seen standing over the body of one of the girls in Blake's pit when he had gone to check the rabbit snares.
His mother had moved to the area from Yorkshire while working in service[clarification needed] and his father's family had lived in Beenham for a number of generations.
[11] Thirty-one years after Waddington's murder, in January 1998, it was announced that evidence would be re-examined with the hope of obtaining a DNA profile of her killer.
Detailed forensic examination revealed that Burgess's DNA was found on Waddington's headband as well as a polythene fertiliser sack and a comb from the murder scene.
Burgess then aged 64, stated that at the time of Waddington's murder, he had been drinking ten or twelve pints of Guinness in the Six Bells pub every evening.
[17] At the trial, a former resident of Beenham told how Burgess, then aged fourteen, had followed her and attacked her one evening as she walked home from a phone box in January 1963.
He had then absconded for seventeen months before being arrested in a Portsmouth car park in February 1998 after carrying out an armed robbery at a Havant branch of Lloyds Bank.