Susan Fairley had been married for 11 days when they found her.
She was discovered on the morning of September 4th, 1975 in a drainage ditch at the edge of a wheat field near the village of Thornton Parva in Suffukk, 63 mi from the flat in North London where she had lived with her husband since their wedding.
63 mi.
She had no car.
She had no relatives in Suffukk, no friends, no connection to the county that anyone could initially explain.
She was 23 years old.
She was wearing the dress she had last been seen in on the evening of September 1st, 3 days earlier, when she had stepped out of her front door to buy milk from the corner shop at the end of her street.
The milk was never purchased.
Detective Inspector Colin Warick, who received the call at Thornton Paraver that September morning, stood at the edge of that ditch for a long time before he spoke.
What he understood immediately was that this had not happened here.
Susan Fairley had been brought to this field.
Whoever had done this had driven 63 mi to put distance between themselves and the place where they had committed a crime.
That kind of thinking, that cold, deliberate thinking told Warrick something significant about the person he was looking for.
It would take 22 years for the name to surface.
But before we get to that, we need to go back to North London in the late summer of 1975.
Because to understand what was done to Susan Fairley, you first have to understand who she was.
The London of 1975 was a city still finding its postwar footing.
All council blocks and corner shops, market stalls, and secondhand furniture.
A city where a young couple could rent a one-bedroom flat in Tottenham for £12 a week and feel cautiously like they were getting somewhere.
Susan and Robert Fairley were getting somewhere.
Susan had grown up in Coventry, the daughter of a factory worker and a school dinner lady.
She had done well enough in her O levels to stay on for A levels, well enough in those to get a place at a polytenic in London where she studied business administration, and well enough at that to walk into a job at a North London insurance brokerage at 21.
She was the first person in her family to finish formal education past 16.
Her mother kept a photograph of her graduation day on the mantelpiece for the rest of her life.
Robert Fairley had grown up three streets from the polytenic.
He worked for the local council in their housing department, a steady job that came with a small pension, and the kind of predictable hours that made planning a life together feel possible.
They had met at a friend’s birthday party in 1973, been together for 2 years, and married in a registry office on August 22nd, 1975, a Thursday.
Because Thursday was cheaper and neither of them cared about the day, only about each other.
Their honeymoon had been 4 days in toi which had been wet.
They had not minded.
They came home to their flat, their secondhand sofa, their small kitchen, and the rest of their lives ahead of them.
Susan had gone back to work the Monday after they returned.
She liked her job.
She liked the people she worked with.
She liked above all the feeling that the life she was building was being built by her own hands.
On the evening of September 1st, she told Robert she was going to pop out for milk.
He was watching television.
She had her purse.
She had her door key.
She was going to the corner shop 40 yard from their front door.
She kissed him on the cheek before she went.
He heard the door close.
He went back to the television.
An hour later, he noticed she hadn’t come back.
He went to the corner shop.
She hadn’t been in.
At 9:15 that evening, Robert Fairley called the police.
The initial response was measured in a way that Robert found infuriating.
Adults left.
Adults made spontaneous decisions.
Adults in the estimation of the constable who came to the flat were not missing persons after a single evening.
He was advised with well-meaning bureaucratic calm that he should wait until morning.
Robert Fairley did not wait until morning.
He spent the night walking his street, knocking on neighbors doors, calling Susan’s mother in Coventry, calling her friends, calling her colleagues, calling anyone whose number he had.
By 7:00 in the morning, he had established beyond any doubt that no one had seen or spoken to Susan since she walked out of their flat at 8:15 the previous evening.
At 9:00 that morning, he returned to the police station and refused to leave until a detective spoke to him.
Detective Sergeant James P opened the missing person’s investigation.
He took Robert’s statement, noted the details, and began the methodical work of tracing Susan’s last known movements.
The corner shop owner, a man named Mr.
Patel, who ran the shop 7 days a week, opening at 7:00 and closing at 10:00, confirmed that Susan had not come in on the evening of September 1st.
He would have remembered her.
She came in most days.
She always bought semiskmed.
Two witnesses on the street, a woman walking her dog and a teenage boy returning from a friend’s house, reported having seen separately a dark Ford Cortina parked on double yellow lines outside the hardware shop, three doors down from the corner shop on the evening in question.
Both witnesses noted it because parking on double yellows on that stretch was unusual.
One witness said the car appeared to be occupied.
Neither could provide a registration.
Susan Fairley’s body was found 60 3 m away 40 8 hours later and the investigation became something much larger and much darker than a missing person’s case.
Diwar coordinated between the Metropolitan Police and Suffach Constabularary for the next 4 months.
It was in 1975 a cumbersome process.
Different forces, different filing systems, different cultures of investigation, all trying to work toward the same answer.
The forensic evidence established that Susan had been killed elsewhere and transported to the field at Thornton Parva.
Postmortem results confirmed she had died on the evening of September 1st.
The cause of death was recorded in the case file.
The Ford Cortina became the center of the investigation.
Working through VAR records, a process that in 1975 involved manually cross-referencing paper files, investigators identified 47 dark colored Ford Cortas registered to owners within a 5m radius of the flat in Tottenham.
Each one was visited.
Each owner was interviewed.
Alibis were checked.
Vehicles were inspected.
One of those 47 vehicles belonged to a man named Jeffrey Oats, 31 years old, who lived in Haringi and worked as a self-employed decorator.
His car was a dark green 1972 Cortina.
When detectives visited him in October 1975, he was cooperative, calm, and produced an alibi.
He said he had been at a pub in Wood Green on the evening of September 1st with two friends who confirmed his presence.
His car was inspected.
Nothing was found.
He was eliminated from the inquiry.
Dwarik never felt entirely comfortable with that elimination.
He noted in his case file in neat, careful handwriting that would be read by investigators 22 years later that Oats had been calm in a way that didn’t feel natural.
He could not act on a feeling.
He had no evidence.
The alibi held.
The vehicle was clean and the investigation moved on without Jeffrey Oats.
By early 1976, the investigation had no viable suspect and no physical evidence connecting any individual to the crime.
It was formally classified as a cold case in March of that year.
Robert Fairley was informed by letter.
Robert Fairley moved back to Coventry in 1977.
He couldn’t stay in London.
He couldn’t stay in the flat.
He spent the next two decades in a kind of suspended grief, working, living quietly, never remarrying, and maintained a correspondence with the Metropolitan Police that ran to several hundred letters over the years, each one asking in careful and increasingly resigned language.
Whether anything new had been learned, the answer for 20 years was always no.
Susan’s mother, Vera Alcott, kept the graduation photograph on her mantelpiece.
She died in 1994 without an answer.
By 1990, 15 years had passed.
The flat on the Tottenham Street had been through three sets of tenants.
The corner shop had changed ownership twice.
The hardware shop, where the Ford Cortina had been parked, was now a video rental outlet.
The street had changed in a hundred small ways, and in one enormous way Susan Fairley’s presence in it had been erased by time and painted over and forgotten by everyone except the people who had loved her.
Every case on this channel is built from weeks of careful research, police records, inquest documents, court transcripts, interviews.
If you want us to keep recovering stories like Susan’s from the silence, please take a moment to like and subscribe and leave us a comment telling us where you’re watching from.
Now, back to Tottenham and to 1997.
In 1997, the Metropolitan Police Cold Case Review Unit was in its early years of existence, equipped for the first time with technology that allowed investigators to resubmit physical evidence from historical cases for dinar analysis.
Susan Fairley’s case was selected for review in the autumn of that year on the basis that forensic samples collected at the time of the original investigation had been properly preserved.
The review was led by detective inspector Anne Whitfield, who had not been born when Susan Fairley died.
She pulled the original case file, read D.
Warrick’s notes with close attention, and found the handwritten observation about Jeffrey Oats calm in a way that didn’t feel natural.
She ran Oats through current records.
Jeffrey Oats, now 53, was living in Hertfordshire.
He had no criminal convictions.
He had been married, divorced, and married again.
He was, to all external appearances, an ordinary middle-aged man who ran a small painting and decorating business.
The Denior analysis of the forensic samples collected in 1975 produced a profile.
In 1997, that profile could be compared against the national database, which had not existed when Susan was killed.
It did not produce an immediate match, but Whitfield had the authority to request a voluntary dena sample from persons of interest, and the note in Warick’s file gave her the basis to approach Oats.
He refused.
The refusal was legally his right.
It was also, practically speaking, the thing that sent Whitfield directly to a magistrate’s court to request a compelled sample on the basis of his previous connection to the investigation.
The magistrate granted it.
Joffrey Oats provided the sample on a Thursday morning in February 1998 in a police station in Hertfordshire in the presence of his solicitor.
He sat across the table from Dwitfield and said in a voice she later described as absolutely flat that he had nothing to hide.
The DNA matched.
The profile from the 1975 forensic evidence was a conclusive match to the sample provided by Jeffrey Oats 22 years after he had sat across from a detective in 1975 and provided an alibi that held an alibi that when reinvestigated in 1998 proved to have been given by two men who were themselves old friends of Oats and who when reintered immediately retracted their statements.
Jeffrey Oats was arrested at his home in Hertfordshire on a morning in April 1998.
He said nothing on arrest.
He said nothing in his first police interview.
His solicitor entered a not-uilty plea on his behalf at the magistrate’s court.
He changed that plea to guilty 3 weeks before trial.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1998 with a minimum tariff of 15 years.
The judge in sentencing noted that Oats had allowed Robert Fairley to spend 22 years without an answer, had allowed Susan’s mother to die without knowing the truth, and had allowed a young woman’s life, a life barely begun, a marriage 11 days old, to be simply erased.
He called it an act of sustained and deliberate cruelty that extended far beyond the night of September 1st, 1975.
Robert Fairley was in court for the sentencing.
He was 51.
He had spent more than half his life carrying the weight of that September evening.
When the sentence was handed down, he sat very still for a long moment.
Then he bowed his head.
He told a journalist outside the court that he didn’t feel like celebrating.
He felt like Susan deserved better than a verdict in 1998.
She had deserved it in 1975.
He was right.
Susan Fairley was 23 years old.
She was the first in her family to finish her education.
She had built her own life with her own hands and then chosen to share it for 11 days before it was taken.
She had kissed her husband on the cheek before she went to buy milk.
She never came back.
Joffrey Oats drove 63 miles to put distance between himself and what he had done.
And for 22 years that distance held.
It held until Dina evidence, the patience of two detectives separated by more than two decades and a handwritten note in a case file calm in a way that didn’t feel natural finally closed it.
What does it mean for a justice system when the truth is available from the moment a crime is committed, but the technology to find it doesn’t yet exist?
And how do we measure what was lost in the years between September 1975 and April 1998?
Not just for Robert Fairley, but for every person who loved Susan and was left to carry the uncertainty.
Leave your thoughts in the comments and tell us where you’re watching from.
Justice found Susan fairly 22 years late.
Subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.
The links are in the description.
Thank you for being here.
What the records from the original investigation reveal, read with four decades of hindsight, is that Diwark was closer to Jeffrey Oats than the 1975 case file fully conveys.
In his personal notebooks obtained by his family after his death and donated to the Metropolitan Police’s Historical Archive in 2001, Warrick returned to Oats on three separate occasions between 1975 and his retirement in 1983.
The notebooks are the private document of a detective who could not let a feeling go.
The first notation from November 1975 reads, “Oats alibi depends entirely on two men who have known him since school.
This is not an alibi.
It is loyalty.
There is a difference.
I could not say this in court.”
The second from 1978, 3 years after Susan’s death, Oats has moved.
New address in Barnett.
I drove past the house.
I don’t know what I expected to see.
The third from 1982, a year before he retired, I have been looking at this case again.
Nothing new, but the calm.
That particular kind of calm is not innocence.
It is practice.
Dwarik wrote that last observation 14 years before Jeffrey Oats was arrested.
He was right, and he knew he was right.
And the tools of 1982 could not help improve it.
This is the particular cruelty of pre-Nar cold cases.
The detective’s instinct and the forensic capability exist in different eras.
The instinct arrives first.
The capability arrives decades later and the gap between them is measured in the years of family spends without an answer.
Robert Fairley spent those years in Coventry.
He worked at a manufacturing plant.
He went to his local pub on Friday evenings with a group of men who had worked with him for years and who knew without his having to explain it that certain subjects were not raised.
He was not a man who talked about his feelings.
He was a man who made cheese on toast for one on Friday evenings and sometimes very occasionally.
On a Saturday night when the television was showing something he couldn’t be bothered to follow, made it for two.
His friends understood.
He wrote his letters to the Metropolitan Police with the regularity of a man who had decided that the writing itself was a form of action, that not writing was a form of giving up, and giving up was not something he was prepared to do.
By the time Dwitfield joined the cold case unit in the mid 1990s and pulled the Fairley file, there were 43 letters from Robert Fairley in it.
43 letters over 21 years.
Each one politely asking whether anything new had been found.
Each one ending with his phone number, his address, and a sentence that read in slightly different forms each time, but always with the same meaning.
I am still here.
I am still waiting.
Please do not forget her.
Dy Whitfield read everyone before she made any further inquiries.
She said later that by the time she finished the letters, she understood the full weight of what she was carrying.
Susan Fairley had been 23.
She had been the first in her family to finish university.
She had been married for 11 days.
She had kissed her husband on the cheek before she went to buy milk.
She had done everything right, and a man in a dark green cortina had undone it all in the space of a September evening, and then he had sat across from a detective, and been calm, practiced in his calm, as Warrick had written, and let 47 minutes in a haring street become 22 years of Robert Fairley’s life.
Jeffrey Oats sat through his trial in 1998 with the same composure he had shown in 1975.
He was 53.
He wore a suit.
He looked to everyone who saw him across the courtroom like a man who believed that composure was a form of innocence.
The jury of 12 people disagreed.
They had heard the dinina evidence.
They had heard the testimony of his two former friends who came to the stand looking like men carrying something heavy and who told the court that they had lied in 1975 because Jeffrey had asked them to and they had not known.
They said this emphatically and it may even have been true.
They had not known what they were lying for.
The judge sentenced Oats to life imprisonment.
He recommended a minimum of 22 years, one year for every year Robert Fairley had been left without an answer.
Robert attended the sentencing, wearing a dark suit he had bought for the occasion.
He was 51.
He had lived without Susan for longer than he had lived with her.
They had known each other for 4 years before the marriage, and the marriage had lasted 11 days, and the 43 letters had spanned 22 years.
He sat in the courtroom and heard the sentence read, and then he sat very still for a moment, as people do when something ends that has been part of them for a very long time.
Susan Fairley deserved to buy the milk.
She deserved the flat and the furniture and the insurance brokerage and the children they might have had and the ordinary continuous unremarkable decades that were stolen from her on a September evening in Tottenham.
She deserved all of it.
What she got was a verdict in 1998 and a husband who wrote 43 letters because not writing was not something he was prepared to do.
That will have to be enough.
It is not enough but it will have to be.
