Body found in the woods

Police have confirmed that on August 23, 2008, a body was recovered from woods near West Dean in the Vale of Glamorgan and that another person has been taken to the hospital, where they are reported to be in a stable condition. No identities have been revealed.

IS THIS THE WORK OF A SERIAL KILLER?

Police have revealed the identity of the dead body discovered in the woods near West Dean as that of Arabella Cooper, aged eighteen. It is believed her sixteen-year-old sister was discovered unconscious nearby. Officers have not yet revealed if they are treating the death as suspicious, but after the murders of seventeen-year-old Nicole Wallace and nineteen-year-old Annie Weston, and with Rachel Wells still missing, fears are growing that a serial killer is preying on the teenage girls of this area.

COOPER DEATH “A TRAGIC ACCIDENT”

An inquest has ruled the death of Arabella Cooper a tragic accident, stating that the embankment was unsafe due to an earlier storm and that, under the influence of alcohol, the girls fell. Arabella Cooper’s death was caused by a “fatal head injury” from rocks at the base of the embankment. Evidence shows that the severe storm that heralded the end of a three-week heatwave caused part of the embankment to give way, causing the girl’s fall.

I keep all these newspaper reports in a box under my bed. I’ve carried this box everywhere I’ve lived in the last ten years. Dad doesn’t know. He never knew I pulled the papers out of the bin after he threw them away without showing them to me. He never knew I carefully cut out each story and put it in a box. He never knew I’d lie awake at night crying over the things I overheard in the village said about my sister, all those gossips whispering in hushed voices about Bella being a troublemaker, some drunken hell-raiser.

I took the box to the police station once. Dad doesn’t know that, either. I tracked down the detective who’d questioned me in my hospital room, and a week after the inquest ruled Bella’s death an accident, I waved in front of him the stories that talked about a serial killer and screamed at him to do something, to find out the truth. Because, awful though the idea would be, I wanted to stop all that gleeful gossip, I wanted there to be some other explanation than a drunken accident in the woods.

I remember the pity on his face. He picked up all those newspaper cuttings from the floor after I’d let them drop and he smoothed them all out before putting them back in the box carefully and neatly. He was kind, I remember, but kind in the way you are to a distraught child, or a doddery old woman who’s forgotten where she lives.