Norfolk headless body

The Norfolk headless body case relates to a woman who was murdered around the first or second week of August 1974. Her decapitated body was found near Swaffham, Norfolk, England on 27 August 1974. Her head has never been found. Although the woman has never been identified, one theory being investigated is that she was a sex worker known as "The Duchess" who worked the Great Yarmouth docks under that pseudonym prior to her disappearance in mid-1974.

Death The badly decomposed body of this woman was discovered on 27 August 1974 by a 19-year-old tractor driver named Andrew Head who had been out walking when he found the body on land belonging to Peter Roberts. Head later recalled: "I lifted one corner of the cover over the body and that was enough – I could see what it was. I went home and phoned the police." The body was discovered near a track leading to Brake Hill Farm, Brandon Road, within Cockley Cley. Combine harvesters were used to clear fields to allow them to be searched.

Police believe the woman died in either the first or second week of August 1974. She was estimated to be aged between 23 and 35 Her hands and legs were bound to her body She had been decapitated Her body was wrapped in a plastic sheet embossed with the words National Cash Registers. A collector in the United States identified the cover as being from a payroll machine and the exact model but the enquiry also established that thousands of the machines would have been made with many exported.

Investigation After the woman's remains were exhumed in 2008, samples of her toenails, hair and thigh bone were subjected to DNA and isotopic analysis. A full DNA profile of the victim was obtained but there was no match with any database, but the independent isotopic analyses carried out by professor Wolfram Meier-Augenstein and another scientist, which looks at the traces left in the body from the water consumed during a person's lifetime, both indicated that she was probably from the central Europe area including Denmark, Germany, Austria and northern Italy. Norfolk police were examining a theory that the woman is "The Duchess"; a sex worker who lived in Great Yarmouth docks and who disappeared in mid-1974 leaving all her possessions behind. "The Duchess" is believed to have arrived in the port town on the Esbjerg Ferry from Denmark. Her clients were often lorry drivers who travelled between Esbjerg and Yarmouth using the ferry, and she also sometimes accompanied drivers on deliveries across England. This woman is understood to have worked as an escort around Great Yarmouth in the mid 1970s. She was aged in her late 20s or early 30s, hailed from Denmark, and regularly travelled between East Anglia and Denmark in 1973–74. She had lived for four or five months in the dockers' hut at the Ocean terminal,