1979 murder of an Englishwoman
Teresa Elena De Simone (24 June 1957 – 5 December 1979) was murdered in Southampton, England, in 1979. Her murder led to one of the longest proven cases of a miscarriage of justice in English legal history. The murder occurred outside the "Tom Tackle" pub and was the subject of a three-year police investigation which resulted in the arrest of Sean Hodgson. Hodgson was convicted of the murder by a unanimous jury verdict in 1982 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving 27 years in prison he was exonerated and released in March 2009. DNA analysis of semen samples that had been preserved from the original crime scene showed that they could not have come from him.
As a result of Hodgson's appeal, Operation Iceberg was created by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) with the aim of using DNA evidence in pre-1990 rape or murder cases. This led to the review of 240 other convictions. The CCRC also requested that the Crown Prosecution Service identify and review similar murder cases from the time before DNA testing was available. In September 2009, on the basis of DNA evidence from his exhumed body, police named David Andrew Lace as the likely killer. Lace, who was 17 at the time of the murder, had confessed to police in 1983 that he had raped and killed De Simone, but officers refused to believe him. Lace committed suicide in December 1988.
On 27 October 2012, three years after his release, Sean Hodgson died from emphysema.
Murder.
On the evening of 4 December 1979, 22-year-old Teresa De Simone had been working as a part-time barmaid in the "Tom Tackle" public house (now called "The Mayflower Village" public house) in Commercial Road, Southampton. By day she was employed as a full-time clerk for the Southern Gas Board. She had been employed at the pub for less than a month, working two evenings each week, partly to widen her social circle and partly to supplement her income to pay for the Ford Escort car that she had bought three months previously. The pub was located centrally in the city, only 50 yards (46 metres) from the police station and law courts, and near the city's central train station and the "Gaumont Theatre" (now "The Mayflower"). When her shift at the "Tom Tackle" ended at 23:00 (11:00 p.m.) she went on to a night club in nearby London Road, in the company of her friend Jenni Savage. Although the discothèque was a relatively short distance from the public house, they travelled in Savage's car, leaving De Simone's Ford Escort in the pub car park.
While at the discothèque, De Simone and Savage were together throughout the evening, and De Simone did not consume any alcoholic drinks. They left the night club together, and Savage drove De Simone back to the "Tom Tackle" car park, arriving sometime between 00:30 and 01:00 (12:30 and 1:00 a.m.) on 5 December. Savage testified that she drove into the covered parking area and that they sat chatting for a while before De Simone made the short walk to her car, at which point Savage reversed out and drove away from the scene. Savage was the last witness to see De Simone before she was killed.
When De Simone's mother, Mary Sedotti, discovered she had not returned home by the morning, she expressed concern, and her husband Michael, Teresa's stepfather, drove to the pub where he observed De Simone's car still parked, but did not make any closer investigation. Shortly after 10:00, Anthony Pocock, the landlord of the "Tom Tackle", was expecting a commercial delivery to the premises, and believing De Simone had deliberately left the car overnight he decided to try to move it to allow the delivery through. Inside he discovered De Simone's partially clothed body on the back seat. He immediately called the police.
Police investigation.
Forensic investigation.
The pathologist arrived at the scene at 11:45. His report of the crime scene described "the deceased lying on her back, with her leg bent at the thigh and knee, with the knee resting against the back of the seat, and the left thigh running along the edge of the seat with the leg hanging over the edge. The body was naked from the waist down and her left breast was exposed. Part of a pair of tights was pulled down to the left ankle. The remainder of her underwear and the other part of her tights was found in the passenger well." The time of death was placed at between 01:00 and 02:00 (1:00 and 2:00 a.m.) 5 December. In a statement issued at the time, Detective Superintendent John Porter said: "It is 99% certain that the girl was murdered, attacked, chatted to or met by her killer in a matter of seconds after Jenni Savage left her. He could have been waiting, and seen Jenni leave. It is possible that he was actually sitting in Teresa's car, as we found the nearside [passenger] door unlocked."
The pathologist determined, based on the presence of "white frothy mucous" in the victim's mouth, that the cause of death was a "long, slow strangulation". Visible on De Simone's neck were "a series of multiple, roughly horizontal, linear, bruised abrasions on the front of the neck [which] matched the description of a [gold chain and crucifix] which the deceased had been said to be wearing that evening", indicating the possibility that this was used as the ligature and leading to the tabloid press dubbing the murderer the "Crucifix Killer". The chain was not present when the body was discovered and has never been recovered.
Semen was present in the vaginal canal, "in sufficient concentration to indicate that it had been present no more than three to four hours before death." As De Simone's movements for the entire evening previous to her death were known and documented, the semen could only have come from her assailant. Evidence of bruising and tearing of the genitalia demonstrated that the intercourse was non-consensual. A number of vaginal, anal, oral and control swabs were taken by the pathologist, and subsequent forensic examination demonstrated that the semen was produced by a male with the blood type "A" or "AB". Further swabs were taken from De Simone's clothing and the car.
The victim's leather handbag and personal belongings, including a diary, were found in multiple locations within the vicinity of the crime scene, although her car keys, Rotary wristwatch, two necklaces, three rings and a bracelet have never been recovered.
Suspects.
The investigation was headed by Detective Superintendent John Porter of Southampton Criminal Investigation Department (C.I.D.) In the 12 months after the murder, police "interviewed 30,000 people, took 2,500 statements and traced 500 people who were in the area on the night of the murder. At one point the list of possible suspects totalled 300 men." Despite De Simone's possessions being taken, police did not believe that robbery had been the motive; they were convinced that this was a red herring and that she was the victim of a "vicious rape by a brutal and merciless killer". Police received two anonymous letters, postmarked 12 and 27 December in Southampton which gave information regarding the location of the killer. The writer was never identified, and the eventual arrest of Hodgson led police to dismiss them as a hoax at the time of Hodgson's trial. Nine months after the murder, while Hodgson was already in custody for an unrelated offence, two anonymous telephone calls were made to the police in which the caller confessed to killing De Simone. Porter released a statement to the "Southern Daily Echo" at the time in which he said: "The calls came from a man who said that he had committed the murder. He gave the impression that he was under severe strain and was asking for help and advice. From the nature of his conversation we think there is a possibility that the calls could be genuine."
Arrest of Sean Hodgson.
Sean Hodgson (also known as Robert Graham Hodgson, originally from Tow Law, County Durham) first came to the attention of the police on 6 December 1979 when he was arrested in Southampton for an unrelated offence of theft from a vehicle, having arrived in the city two days previously. On 7 December he gave a statement to the police implicating another individual in the murder of De Simone, but police were able to eliminate this suspect from their enquiries as he was of blood type "O". On 9 December Hodgson was charged in relation to the theft and remanded in custody. He was interviewed by detectives on several occasions about De Simone's murder; however, as his whereabouts at the time of the murder could not be verified, and police knew he was of blood type "A", he was briefly investigated.
Hodgson grew up surrounded by a large family, and had been placed in a borstal at age 11. He was, nevertheless, described by one schoolmate as a "normal teenager", and his arrest shocked his home community. Prior to his arrest
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On 16 May 1980, he pleaded guilty at Southampton to theft and was granted conditional bail awaiting sentence. He was arrested again in London on 4 June and charged with further offences. On 14 July 1980 he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment. During this trial he confessed to "a large number of relatively minor offences", although it was found that he could not have committed all of them and some had actually been perpetrated during the period that he had been in custody.
On 11 December 1980, Hodgson asked to see a priest, Father Frank Moran, to whom he confessed that he was having nightmares and the face of a woman he had killed "kept coming back to him". He said that the murder had happened in Southampton the previous year and "that he was particularly troubled because this was around the anniversary of her death". He repeated the confession to a prison officer the following day, and subsequently wrote a note which stated: "After much deliberation and thought and confession with the priest here in Wandsworth, after all the trouble I have caused, not only to you, the police, but myself, the mental torture I have gone through, the family of the person concerned, I must for my own sanity and the punishment I will receive for this horrible crime, I wish now that it was me that was dead and not the person I killed at the "Tom Tackle" pub. ... I did the murder, why I don't know. So all I can say is let justice be done".
Over the next two weeks, Hodgson gave more confessions and was also escorted to Southampton where he showed the investigating officers where he had disposed of some of De Simone's property. It was not routine to make audio recordings of police interviews at the time, and much of the original police paperwork from the case has not been located as of  2009[ [update]]. What is known, however, is that the statements taken from Hodgson by the police at that time contained "detail [which] could only have been known to the man who was responsible for the crime" or the investigating officers. Although the murder had received wide media coverage, the police had not revealed all of the significant details. At Hodgson's subsequent murder trial these were described as the "secret details". It was never investigated whether any of the officers taking Hodgson's statements had in fact disclosed any of these secret details to him when they interviewed him.
On 25 December, Hodgson wrote a further confession, claiming to have killed a man in Covent Garden, London, and on 27 December confessed that he had "also murdered a homosexual in a flat in North London at the end of '78 or '79". Investigations showed that the confessions were false and neither of the crimes had actually happened.
Hodgson trial.
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;I would like to tell the members of the jury why I can't go in the witness box is because I am a pathological liar. Secondly, I did not kill Teresa De Simone. Thirdly, every time I have been nicked by the police, which is on many occasions, I have made false confessions to crimes I have not committed, and this is the reason why I am not going into the box.
Hodgson was tried for the murder of Teresa De Simone at Winchester Crown Court in 1982. During the course of the 15-day trial, Hodgson chose not to give evidence or submit