Chapters (22)
Devon and Cornwall Police are appealing for information from anyone who may have been in the area in the early hours of Sunday, 22 June.
They say they are not treating the incident as a murder inquiry.
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From the Plymouth Daily Herald, 22 June 1986
Teenagers drown in freak river crossing accident
George Perry, 18, and Paul Samuels, 19, died after falling into the Sully River in Rutmoor National Park on Saturday.
Two teenage boys have drowned while attempting to cross Rutmoor National Park’s Sully River.
The bodies of the two boys were found by hikers a mile down the river from the place they attempted to make their crossing on the afternoon of Saturday, 21 June.
It is understood that the boys had tried to use fallen branches to cross the river at a narrow point at the base of Stallion Tor. Police say one of their packs was recovered from the bank next to the makeshift crossing.
‘That river is fast, a lot faster than most people realise,’ said Inspector Daniel Rodgers. ‘It’s likely that one of the boys fell in and the other went in after to try to rescue him, and the current swept them away. It’s a real tragedy.’
Perry and Samuels were out camping in Rutmoor – a place they were familiar with after completing the 13 Peaks Challenge there together while at school at Plymouth Comprehensive – for a long weekend.
‘I don’t understand how it could have happened,’ Perry’s father Roger told the Daily Herald. ‘Both of them knew the terrain well; they’d been all over that moor while they were at school training for their 13 Peaks event.
‘I just don’t understand why they would have tried to make such a dangerous crossing in the first place. They were taught about the dangers at school, they would have known what was safe and what wasn’t.’
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From the Yeovil Daily Post, 6 April 1998
Yeovil’s ‘cat serial killer’ strikes again: decapitated Persian is latest victim in series of bizarre pet murders
The decapitated body of a 2-year-old Persian cat was left on its owner ’ s doorstep in what local animal safety officers are calling ‘ a depraved and deliberate act of violence calculated to cause distress ’ .
The killing is the latest in a string of brutal cat murders that has left Yeovil residents locking their pets up indoors to keep them from wandering the streets at night.
72-year-old Mr Terry Patrick, the owner of the Persian and Yeovil resident for over 40 years, said he was ‘devastated’.
‘I opened the front door in the morning to let Jonesy in – I’d been meaning to put a cat flap in but he normally likes to wander at night and I hadn’t gotten round to it yet – and when I walked out onto the front step I seen him lying there in front of me.’