Colin Frederick Campbell (born 16 September 1947) is a British double murderer who in the early 1980s abducted two separate and unrelated women in West London and killed them in sexually motivated attacks.
In 2013, 32 years after the event, Campbell was convicted of the high-profile unsolved murder of 17-year-old Claire Woolterton after a DNA match was found to him.
[3] In December 1984, Campbell abducted 29-year-old Deirdre Sainsbury in his car as she hitchhiked along the South Circular Road in Roehampton in west London, before killing her and dumping her body on Denham golf course.
[1] The judge said that while the conclusion was that he had killed with diminished responsibility, Campbell still constituted a danger to the public and ordered him to return to prison, with release only being possible through the parole process.
[5][1] By this time, Campbell had been downgraded to a Category D prison while serving his sentence for Sainsbury's killing, and was being openly allowed out into the public on licence for five days every month in preparation for a possible release.
[5] On the evening of Thursday 27 August 1981, she had left her work at an amusement arcade in west London to walk home, but never arrived.
[6] Later in the day Woolterton's parents realised that their daughter had not returned home the previous night, and saw a news broadcast reporting that a girl's body had been found in Windsor.
[1][3] Since Campbell had already been convicted of the very similar murder of Deirdre Sainsbury only three years later in 1984, lead detective Beirne said that he "immediately knew who he was" when the match was revealed to him.
[5] The police had noted the large number of similarities between the murders at the time and believed they were linked, but they had little concrete evidence against Campbell.
[5] However, the forensic scientists said that the type and location of the evidence meant that this was not a possibility, since the DNA found could not have come from the minimal contact Campbell described.
[4][1] "Colin Campbell is a dangerous individual who cut short the lives of two young women in their primes and has never accepted any responsibility for his actions."
It is also unlikely that Dr Fenwick and Professor Fenton would have been able to support such a defence, given the content of Dr Fenwick’s report dated 5th November 2013 in which he said that if you were found to have killed Claire Woolterton "the fact that he had committed two similar crimes would significantly weaken the possibility that the factors that we determined about his epilepsy at Broadmoor Hospital could have played the central role that was suggested in the case of the Deirdre Sainsbury killing.