Today’s story comes from the picturesque village of Ascott-under-Wychwood, nestled about 5 miles south of Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds, roughly 75 miles north-west of London. This area could easily be described as quintessential Middle England, with its rolling hills and charming cottages.
Chipping Norton, of course, is probably most famous these days for Jeremy Clarkson’s pub, Diddly Squat, as well as being the former home of ex-Prime Minister David Cameron. And for music fans, it’s also where the late Who drummer, Keith Moon, once lived.
When we pick up todays story in the summer of 1995 thirty year old Vikki Thompson lived in the village with her husband Jonathan, two young children Matthew and Jenny and the family dog, Daisy. Daisy was a lovely collie and couldn’t have been more loved by the family and Vikki walked her twice a day, every single day.
At about 4pm on 12 August, Vikki and Daisy headed out for the second walk of the day. It was a beautiful summers afternoon as they headed out on their usual route, in the pretty countryside and woodland near their home.
Vikki’s husband knew that something must be wrong when Daisy arrived home without his wife about half an hour after Vikki had left their home. In this pre-mobile world of course there was no way to track where Vikki could be. He immediately went out to search for her and in the small community word quickly spread that Vikki was missing and other local formed search parties to look for Vicki. The tracks and footpaths where she worked were remote and often deserted so it was unlikely someone would stumble upon her if she had fallen on suffered another type of injury. Being mid-summer, the grass and plants were high so she may have potentially lying seriously injured out of immediate sight. After almost three hours Jonathan called the police to report his wife as missing.
And then at 7.15pm saw some object across a field from the pathway near the railway embankment. On further investigation, they realised that they had found Vikki. She was still alive but clearly seriously injured by being hit with what appeared to be the rocks that surrounded her. Whoever had attacked Vikki had also attempted to hide the body with the rocks but hadn’t it seemed made much of a really serious attempt to prevent Vikki’s body from being spotted. Maybe they had dragged Vikki over a fence from the main path to this spot in an attempt to make it look like she had been hit by a train.
Minutes later her husband Jonathan was at the scene and barely able to comprehend what had happened, it was immediately clear to him that there was a lot of blood on Vikki and on the grass where she lay. Due to the severity of her injuries the air ambulance was summoned and in the moments before it arrived Vikki was still conscious and she was able to speak, though not in any coherent fashion. “She was not able to say what had happened to her, nor was she able to say who was responsible for the attack. In John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, medical experts tried to stabilise Vikki who had received three heavy blows to the back of the head and two to her face which resulted in skull fractures and a severe brain injury. Tragically, although Vikki was in very good health, her injuries were too serious for her to survive and the life support machine was turned off in hospital six days later.
Meanwhile, back in the village locals were in a state of shock. That old cliché again, but when interviewed in the media so many said how this sort of stuff just doesn’t happen in a place like this. But it had and now many in the village were concerned. Was it someone in the village who had carried out this dreadful attack or was it a stranger. Even without the benefit – or otherwise – of a local Facebook group, locals gossiped about who could potentially have been responsible.
And another group very interested in finding out who was responsible was the police. In a media appeal, detectives warned with regret that their advice was for women not to go out alone and for all women to be observant until they had apprehended the killer. Behind the scenes detectives were stumped about just what could have been the motive for the attack. Vikki had been a lone female. Was it a robbery, a sexual assault? Her walk talk her off the beaten track so to be there you would have had to have had some knowledge of the area which meant it was unlikely to have been a stranger to the area. They found some footprints in pathways nearby – although the area was very remote but there was clear evidence of people being there. And so along with the locals they scoured the area for anything unusual.
The finger of suspicion so often initially focusses on the partner of the victim, but they very quickly eliminated her husband from the enquiry. They were quickly satisfied that Vikki didn’t appear to be having an affair or leaving any other secret life. And their investigation revealed that Vikki hadn’t been sexually assaulted so just who would have attacked Vikki and why? Community intelligence was going to be vital and there were witnesses who came forward to police with their accounts. A farmer and three local residents heard screams, lasting up to 45 seconds and coming from near where Vikki’s body was found. And other people came forward to say they had seen a local man in the vicinity of where Vikki had been found. This man was 20 year old Mark Weston who lived with his parents in the village. Weston had left school at 15 with no qualifications and worked in a variety of jobs around the area, and was currently an odd-job man. He had a reputation of being a bit of a troublemaker and a bit aggressive in his nature. Many in the village were wary of him, but murder? Some thought he was the obvious person in the village to be responsible but others felt he was a bit misunderstood and certainly not someone capable of committing a terrible crime like this. After all, he had no criminal record for violence, just three counts of obtaining property by deception in 1992 and theft in July 1995.
And then police made a discovery which immediately seemed highly significant. The found a bag containing women’s underwear near where Vikki was murdered and the underwear was stained with semen. When the results came back from the forensic lab the semen was a match to the dna of Mark Weston. Detectives believed that he had been in the remote pathways masturbating whilst watching any women walk past. They thought that Vikki had probably seen him do this and confronted him which lead to him attacking her. They were certain they had found their man and on 13 September he was arrested on suspicion of murdering Vikki.
Weston was not at all impressed with being arrested, making it clear he had nothing to do with Vikki’s murder and telling officers he was gardening that afternoon. His attitude during interviews was one of mild aggression and indignation claiming that this was just a personal vendetta against him and he had only been arrested because it was the easy option for the police. But he then changed his story to say he was in the area where Vikki was attacked as he had popped out on his bike to repay some money he owed to villagers, but none of them were in and so able to substantiate his story. And then when he was confronted about the bag of underwear stained with his dna he changed the story once again. This time he said that he had been in that region the day before Vikki was killed, masturbating with the underwear. Detectives didn’t believe him and he was charged with Vikki’s murder in February 1996 with his trial beginning in November.
Detectives were certain that Weston had killed Vikki, but as we all know, just because someone is guilty does not mean they will be found guilty in court. And in this case they were aware that all the evidence was circumstantial. Despite the ferocity of the attack there was none of Vikki’s blood to be found on any of his clothing. Detectives were certain that this was because he had burnt the clothes he was wearing on that day. Nowadays, with the advances in forensics, dna might still have been found, but back in 1996 it was still early days for forensics.
But if detectives were concerned that the case was not as strong as it could have been before the trial, they were even less confident when the judge ruled the evidence inadmissible because there was no proven link between the underwear and Vikki. So just like that a huge part of the prosecution case had now disappeared.
They jury heard the evidence for three weeks and some of what they heard was shocking – so much so that one juror actually collapsed when shown pictures of Vikki and her injuries. Weston stuck to a really simple line of defence which that he wasn’t there and so couldn’t have killed Vikki. With no real compelling evidence suggesting otherwise, the jury only took 50 minutes to find him not guilty of murder and mark Weston returned to his home in the village a free man.
Maybe an indication of how weak the case had been was when the jury foreman later wrote to Weston urging him to sue the police for wrongful arrest. The foreman told him: “I hope you are all getting on well now and hope you go ahead and get big compensation from the police as they had no evidence of any sort whatsoever.” The police made it clear they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the crime. And in the village there was still a sense of fear – if Weston hadn’t been guilty of killing Vikki, then whoever was responsible could still be out there and could strike again.
Back home West was happy to speak to the press about what he had gone through. He was bitter that he felt he had been stitched up for a crime he hadn’t committed and he now was back at home ready to resume his life.
But Weston intended to take revenge on those who had not believed his innocence. The first person he targeted was the village policeman, PC Bob Salmon, who was his next door neighbour in the village. Two years after his acquittal Weston was back in court where he admitted four counts of harassment after making threatening phone calls to Pc Bob Salmon, who had bugged the Weston’s house for three months as part of the original investigation. Magistrates heard Weston made dozens of silent calls between June and September 1997 to the policeman, his wife and their teenage daughters. He was given a two-year conditional discharge and a restraining order.
But it wasn’t just the policeman who was targeted. In April 1999 Weston was given a two-year probation order after admitting another harassment charge. The person he had gone for this time was another neighbour, Lucy, who had given evidence against for him at the trial telling how they saw Weston in the garden of his home next door on the day of the attack. Magistrates were told Weston pushed notes through the neighbours door, shone torches into her house and made more silent phone calls. He also put posters up around the village saying ‘Lucy is a grass’ and ‘Lucy is a police informer – don’t trust her’. Lucy later said: “It was as if he couldn’t let me out of his sight. “I still don’t know if it was love or hate but it became an obsession. It came across as a sort of anger towards me over something that I’d said or done, but I hadn’t a clue what it was.” One of the notes pushed through their door said: “You make me sick. You even think I did the Vikki murder.” Lucy, who had young daughters, finally went to the police after one very scary night when Weston pushed a string of increasingly strange notes through her door, flashed a powerful torch through the windows, and hammered on the doors.
By 2001, Weston was 26 and working as a barman in a local pub when he met 15 year old Helen Rusher, who was waitressing there at the time. Helen was seeing someone else at the time, but Weston really turned on the charm. He also had a bit of money and started buying her meals and buying top-up vouchers for her mobile phone. Maybe less charming was that he would text her up to 200 times a night, but he eventually got what he wanted and persuaded Helen to split up with her boyfriend and they became a couple. But Helen quickly realised that the nice side of Weston she had initially seen had been a façade and he quickly became controlling and violent towards her. He had a terrible temper and this was exacerbated when he had been drinking vodka – and he drank vodka a lot. Helen was living a nightmare.
Helen was soon pregnant and in May 2003 on her 17th birthday she gave birth. Fatherhood didn’t change Weston and one evening when Helen wanted to buy nappies when he wanted to buy vodka, he really lost it and tried to strange Helen pushing her head into their baby who she was cuddling. The baby was screaming but luckily Helen survived the incident. Later that night when Weston was aslepp she left the house with her baby. But in the weeks that followed she would get nasty and threatening texts from Weston using a variety of different phone numbers, saying how he could get a group of men together from London who would killer her. One text simply said: “I killed her you know, I’ll do the same to yo
Then in 2005, the so-called “double jeopardy” rule, which stopped people being arrested for the same crime twice, was removed for serious offences in England and Wales. This rule was removed partly to address the issue of new evidence coming to light in cases such as the Stephen Lawrence murder and also due to the increased effectiveness of forensic evidence, such as DNA sampling. Like many other police forces, Thames Valley Police established a major crime review team following this to identify any cases that could benefit from the change in the law. And the same year, detectives reopened the Vikki Thompson murder case. Detective Superintendent Barrie Halliday explained how Thames Valley Police had set up a team of eight detectives to review all the county’s unsolved murders over the past 50 years and rapes over the past 27 years. He told how the team is still deciding which murder cases they will tackle first, but the Vikki’s case is one being actively investigated and her husband Jonathan had been informed, saying: “We want justice for Vikki’s children, her husband, and her mother. He also said that certain forensic items had also been examined. Finally, he told how hoped that the passing of time may have changed how anyone who suspected they knew who had killed Vikki would behave saying: “Times change, people’s circumstances change, so do their positions and their loyalties. We would urge anyone to come forward, because information is always important. Whatever they may have said at a particular time, there may have been a very good reason why they did not tell us something.”
The forensic evidence referred to was absolutely key to the investigation. If you recall, detectives believed that Weston had burnt his clothes, but the police still had his boots he was wearing. These had been tested before the original trial and nothing had been found on them. But on reopening the case and re-examining Weston’s boots, he boots were re-examined by two scientists in 2008 using microscopes and halogen lamps not available in 1995, and tiny amounts of Vikki’s blood were found in the seams of both boots. For the blood to have been found in the seams, this meant that the blood had been deposited on the footwear when wet.
The key here is when wet, so this meant that Weston would have had to be standing close to Vikki for the wet blood to soak into the crevices of his boots, and he could not argue that it was dry blood that had later found its way on to his shoes. This placed him firmly at the scene, destroying his previous defence that he wasn’t there and didn’t know Vikki. Describing the difference in the analysis of the boots, Alison Levitt, the principal legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), said: “It’s not that techniques are different, but methods of examination have moved on. “Looking for blood stains of this kind is really, really difficult. It’s a black boot with irregular surfaces and looking for blood stains involves a combination of the naked eye, a microscope where you can, and dabbing areas with a reactive agent. “I think it’s accepted by everybody it’s almost as much an art as it is a science.” Describing how the new blood evidence was revealed, Pete Beirne, the head of Thames Valley Police’s Major Crime Review Team, said: “We got it in three phone calls. “The first one said ‘we’ve found blood’. A week or two later, ‘it’s female blood’, and then a week or two after that, ‘it’s Vikki Thompson’s blood’ and it was euphoria.”
The irony was of course that after the first trial Mark Weston did have the right to ask for his boots back. Was it lucky that the police still had the boots? Officers would argue not – justice came back to haunt him. This categorically put him at the scene.
Weston was arrested again at his home in Ascott-under-Wychwood on 21 October 2009. To say he was surprised to see police officers at his door again over the murder about Vikki’s murder is an understatement. The same attitude of indignation he had displayed before was on display as he told them they couldn’t arrest him. But he was handcuffed and taken away to be questioned further about Vikki’s murder.
In 2010 Mark Weston, then 35, became the first to face a second murder trial following the change in the double jeopardy law. If you are interested in the detailed legal process that was gone through to bring the case back to court, you can find all the details in my sources at the bottom of this blog. This includes the consideration that in a small community where people will talk there is the potential of contamination of witness evidence. There is also an attempt from Weston’s legal team to suggest that the wet blood may have been transferred to his boots by a rock used to attack Vikki which rolled into the river, and the transfer occurred when he was fishing in the river the evening that Vikki was attacked. I know, right. But the new evidence was deemed compelling and Weston faced the charge of murder for a second time at Reading Crown Court.
He pleaded not guilty to murder and his defence was the same as before, what he didn’t know Vikki and wasn’t at the scene when she was attacked. But this time the judge had allowed as evidence the plastic bag found near the murder scene containing two bras stained with bodily fluid which matched Weston’s DNA. And crucially Vikki’s blood on his boots categorically placed him at the scene of the crime.
At the end of the two week trial, the tension was palpable in the court room as the jury returned to announce that in a unanimous verdict, Weston was guilty of murder. The jury of seven men and five women had taken just under four hours to reach their decision. There were gasps and sobs from the public gallery but Weston, dressed in a white shirt and blue and black tie, showed no emotion as the verdict was returned. Sentencing Weston to a minimum of 13 years in prison, the judge told him: “. I accept that there is no evidence of this crime having been pre-meditated but that fact is balanced out by the brutal and prolonged nature of the attack once it began. It seems that the reason why you attacked her was that she observed you masturbating. You attacked her in the lane, dragged her across a field and finished her off in a railway embankment. It has taken 15 years for justice to catch up with you, but it has done so at last today.”
Vikki’s husband Jonathan, flanked by their children said after the hearing:
So, justice has been done in the court but, ultimately, there is no justice in death. Mark Weston will be looked after in prison, Vikki is never coming back. The death of a loved one, be it a wife, mother, daughter or sister – and Vikki was all of those – torments those who are left and it is worse when it is in such horrendous circumstances as this. When Mark Weston killed my wife and the mother of our two children he took a part of me and them that will never come back. We have to live with that. We have had to since Vikki died and we will have to for the rest of our lives.”
Vikki was the perfect wife and mother and should have been able to see Matthew and Jenny turn into the fine young adults they are today. At least now they know that truth and justice have finally been seen.”
So what do you make of this story?
I have watched, listened and read a number of interviews with police officers, lawyers and other law enforcement specialists involved in this case. And what struck me in particular is how personal this case was for them, this wasn’t just a job. They knew that Jonathan Thompson and Vikki’s wider family and friends had put tremendous trust in them and they didn’t want to let them down by not securing a conviction for Weston after all the pain they had gone through. I think it is easy for us to forget this sometimes.
And thank goodness for the change in the double jeopardy law went through which has led to so many families seeing justice for loved ones. Some which have really stuck with me and I have covered on this podcast include the oldest double jeopardy case of Dennis McGrory who in June 1975 at 28 years old was tried for the rape and murder of 15 year old Jacqueline Montgomery at her home in north London, where she was found by her Dad. She had suffered a terrible assault with fatal stab wounds and blunt-force trauma to her face, and had been strangled with the flex of an iron. McGrory was acquitted. In 2019, the Crown Prosecution Service re-investigated the case and advances in dna technology led to 75 year old McGrory being convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The jury heard how McGrory had been “wild with rage” when he attacked Jacqueline as he tried to track down his ex-partner Josie Montgomery, who was the victim’s aunt. He had threatened to rape Jacqui in the past and, on that dreadful day he “made good” on those words, jurors were told.
Speaking outside court, Jacqui’s sister Kathy Montgomery told reporters she was relieved that McGrory was finally in prison saying: “She suffered, that girl… she didn’t deserve what she got, but he deserved what he got just now.” When asked how she felt about the fact he had been free for decades she said: “Soul-destroying. Soul-destroying, knowing I could do nothing to get near him. We all knew he’d done it since day one.”
And of course, the first conviction of someone under the change in law which was William Dunlop who was finally convicted of the murder of Julie Hogg. You may recall how Dunlop strangled 22-year-old mum Julie Hogg at a house in County Durham in 1989. He hid her mutilated body behind a bath panel where it lay undiscovered for month until her mum Ann found her. Dunlop was tried twice for her murder in 1991 but on both occasions jurors failed to arrive at a verdict. While he was spending time behind bars for another offence, he confessed to killing Julie and boasted about getting away with murder because of the double jeopardy laws in place at the time. Julie’s mum Ann, was sickened by how Dunlop evaded justice and campaigned hard to change the double jeopardy laws and in October 2006 Dunlop was eventually sent to prison for Julies murder. She is now fighting another battle for her daughter as she fights Dunlops attempt to be released on parole with the hearing scheduled for December this year.
We end today, as always, by thinking of Vikki’s family and friends. Thirty years have now passed since Vikki was attacked on that dreadful afternoon. A day when she was enjoying a normal Saturday afternoon walking the dog and enjoying spending time with her family. The killer is now behind bars as we have heard, but this doesn’t bring Vikki back.
This story was released as episode 412 of the UK True Crime podcast. The sources for research are below:
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5b46f2212c94e0775e7f2709
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/dec/13/loner-convicted-murder-double-jeopardy
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/8736631.thompson-murder-blood-boot-trapped-killer/
THOMPSON MURDER: Harassment campaign followed acquittal | Oxford Mail
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-11982681
https://www.channel4.com/news/man-guilty-in-second-trial-of-1995-murder
https://www.murderuk.com/mark-weston.html
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/law-change-praised-as-killer-jailed-6546507.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXBPTvmJVOo