The discovery of pretty Judith Roberts’ battered body led to an intensive murder hunt. But, almost 40 years on, her killer has never been caught. However, the case did lead to one of Britain’s longest miscarriages of justice. Crime Correspondent Mark Cowan examines the case.

IT WAS June 7, 1972, Derby Day, when the Staffordshire town of Tamworth was rocked by the gruesome reality that a murderer had struck.

The discovery of pretty Judith Roberts’ battered body under a pile of hedge clippings and plastic fertiliser bags in a field spelled the beginning of one of the most intensive murder hunts in the Midlands for years.

The clever 14-year-old, grammar schoolgirl had left her home in Wiggington to ride her green bicycle along Comberford Lane, Tamworth.

Instead of a pleasant ride out, she met her killer. She was dragged from her cycle, battered to death and her body partly covered by sacking and half-hidden by a hedge.

A police hunt began. At the height of the inquiry, more than 200 detectives were looking for the murderer of the shy teenager.

They took more than 15,400 sets of fingerprints and more than 11,000 statements.

Nearly 11,000 house-to-house inquiries were made and road checks were set up.

A total of 4,200 separate pieces of information were acted on.

But it wasn’t until four months later that detectives had what they thought was a crucial breakthrough when boy soldier Andrew Evans, a depressed asthmatic Army recruit, confessed to her killing.

His health at the time was so poor he had just been discharged from Whittington Barracks, near Lichfield.

Shaking and stuttering, he contacted detectives at Longton police station in Stoke after being disturbed by a dream in which he believed he saw the face of the murdered girl and said he wanted to see a photograph of her.

He told police: “I keep seeing a face. I want to see a picture of her. I wonder if I’ve done it.”

When he was asked if he had ever been to Tamworth, he replied: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I could have been. I forget where I have been.”

And asked if he had murdered the girl, he told detectives: “This is it.

“I don’t know.

“Show me a picture and I’ll tell you if I’ve seen it.”

Investigating officers initially believed the teenager, who was taking prescribed drugs for depression, was a fantasist and viewed his confessions, which increased in certainty as he was interviewed, as not credible.

Eventually, after three days of interviews conducted without his parents, a solicitor or a doctor present, Andrew Evans confessed to the murder.

Coupled with inconsistencies in his original statement – he claimed to have spent the night of the killing in his barracks with three other soldiers but police later discovered that two of the soldiers had left the barracks by then and a third could not be traced – police thought they had their man.

By the time of the trial at Birmingham Crown Court in June 1973, Andrew believed that he was innocent.

But he could not support his alibi that he had been in the barracks all day.