Julie Pacey (Unsolved Murder)

At 4.15pm on Monday 26th September 1994 the Pacey’s 14 year old daughter arrived home from school to be met by silence. She looked for her mother Julie throughout the large house which was situated in an affluent part of Grantham, Lincolnshire. In the upstairs bathroom the teenager found her 38 year old mother unresponsive on the floor. The brave girl attempted CPR but it was not until the paramedics arrived that the true horror of what had happened became clear. Julie had been murdered. Underneath the polo neck of her sweater was the unmistakable mark of a ligature. Numerous  witnesses reported sightings of a strange man, wearing a blue boiler suit, in the area at the time. This enigmatic figure became known as “Overalls Man” and continues to be the prime suspect in a case dogged by anonymous callers and rumours of another potentially linked murder.
 
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Transcript

Julie Pacey

The Pacey family lived in a luxury, ranch-style detached home on Longcliffe Road in an affluent area of Grantham, Lincolnshire. 39 year old Andrew Pacey was self-employed and owned a well-established and successful plumbing business. 38 year old Julie worked part time as a relief care worker at St Peter’s Day Nursery. The rest of her time was largely spent running the busy household. The couple had two children, an eleven year old son who was in his first year of secondary school and a fourteen year old daughter, who I will refer to by the inital H, who attended a local girls grammar school. 

The morning of Monday 26th September 1994 was a typical start to the working week in the Pacey household. All four members of the family were out and about early. The two children left for their respective schools and Andrew went to work. He was working on a contract at Pechiney Packing, just ten minutes away in Springfield Road. Julie had some errands to run before she started work, she visited Woolworths at around 8.40am to return a video rental the family had watched over the weekend. 

Julie started her shift at the nursery at the normal time of 10am and finished at 2pm. After this she drove her metallic blue (in some more recent reports it is called grey) E registered Audi 80 saloon car to her father’s house in the nearby Barrowby Gate Estate. This would only have been a few minutes drive. After a short visit Julie left her father’s house before 2.30pm. At this time she was seen by acquaintances at shops in Grantham. She then returned to her home on Longcliffe Road on the Manthorpe estate. At 2.45pm neighbours saw Julie parking her Audi in the driveway of the Pacey home.

At the house Julie took off her turquoise nursery dungarees and hung them behind her bedroom door. The 38 year old, who was 5ft 6, or 170cm, and had blonde shoulder-length hair, then changed into a brown checked skirt with a black polo neck jumper which she put on over a smaller black sweater. Julie also put on a gold coloured necklace. 

Julie’s whereabouts over the next hour and a half are somewhat unclear. It was first presumed that she remained in the house but one witness who knew Julie well said they saw her driving towards her house at around 3.10 to 3.15 pm. If this was Julie, no-one knows why she was in the car or where she was returning from.

At a little before 4.15pm, the Pacey's 14 year old daughter, H, made her way up Longcliffe Road on the last stretch of her walk home from school. As she approached the driveway to the house the teenager saw a man walking away from the property. H let herself in and called out for her mum, but the house remained silent. She began to move around the house from room to room. She eventually made her way upstairs to check the first floor and tried to enter the bathroom. Something prevented the door from opening. She forced it open and found her mother, Julie, lying facedown on the floor. H tried to stir her mother but found her unresponsive. H soon realised that her mother was not breathing and tried to resuscitate her by attempting mouth to mouth. With no one else on hand to help, H phoned for an ambulance, saying that her mother appeared to have fallen and was injured. 

The paramedics arrived and took over CPR assuming they were responding to a tragic accident. It was only when one of the ambulance crew rolled down the neck of Julie’s jumper that they noticed the unmistakable markings of a ligature on her skin. It wasn't long after the ambulance arrived that Julie’s 11 year old son came in from school. A short time later Andrew returned home from his day at work. Neither could comprehend what had happened. What had started as a typical mundane Monday had turned into the worst day of their lives. 

Persons Unknown is a true crime podcast dedicated to unsolved murders and disappearances. The podcast is based in Wales, UK and covers cases from Wales, the rest of the UK and the wider world. New episodes are released every other Monday. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Persons Unknown Podcast. For a list of sources please see the episode notes on your app. If you enjoy the podcast please give us a review and you can help others get to hear about Persons Unknown by sharing and recommending on social media. Thank you so much for listening. Now back to this week’s case.

Julie Elizabeth Pacey was born on November 28th 1955. Reading the obituaries of Julie printed in local papers in 1994 and on the anniversary of her death in the years since it is abundantly clear that she was loved by many people. She made a profound and meaningful impact on the lives of those close to her and the wider community in Grantham.

In the days after the murder her manager at the day nursery where she worked described Julie in the Grantham Journal as a super colleague who was popular, conscientious and reliable. Her genuine love for the children she worked with was evident and the children loved her in return. Her family were deeply shocked by what had happened and struggled to come to terms with the reality of it. Her husband Andrew could not speak to the press for some time as he was too distraught to go in front of journalists or TV cameras. 

Initial newspaper reports stated that Julie had been strangled but that there was no evidence of sexual assault. This was soon revised, after pathologist Clive Bouch completed a post mortem. Detective Superintendent Roger Billingsley, who headed the investigation, went on record within days of Julie’s murder to say that a sexual assault had occurred and it was believed the motive for the murder was sexual. 

The following details about the crime scene are known: Julie's tights and underwear had been pulled down to her knees but the clothing on her upper body was undisturbed. Julie had no bruising or cuts on her body other than the ligature mark. Her fingernails were all intact and there was no evidence of  defensive wounds. 

There was no sign of a break in at the Pacey’s home so how the perpetrator entered the house was a mystery. All the windows were locked and the back door was locked. The daughter H was quizzed on whether she remembered if the front door was unlocked when she arrived or whether she needed to use her key. Due to the incredible stress and trauma she could not remember and could not be sure either way.

 It looked as though the attacker had surprised Julie, as there was no sign of a struggle.The house was impeccably tidy with nothing appearing out of place. Julie’s handbag and purse lay on the bed and had not been rifled through. A bottle of nail polish remover was found next to the handbag. The only things of note were half a cup of coffee which stood on the bedside table and an empty chocolate wrapper on the floor in the bedroom. Police believed this was Julie’s post-work snack.

The murder weapon was not found at the scene but is thought to have been a piece of electrical cable or flex. It was presumed that the killer had brought this with him as nothing similar was missing from the Pacey’s home. 

All these facts led police to believe that this was not the first crime committed by this perpetrator. It was likely that whoever killed Julie had a history of voyeurism and had committed other sexual assaults in the past. The fact that the attack happened in broad daylight and at a busy time of the afternoon 9.15 (school pick-up) suggested a confident and organised offender. Police said there was no evidence that Julie knew her attacker.

Lincolnshire police were quick to praise the bravery of Julie's daughter H in her efforts to try and save her mother. After the traumatic incident, H had to be treated for shock. Both she and her little brother had been sent to live with relatives in the village of Long Bennington, South Kesteven, in Lincolnshire, to give them space to work through what had happened. 

Very early on in the investigation a description was given by police of a man they were seeking to speak to in relation to the crime. This was based on the man H witnessed walking away from the house moments before she arrived home, and similar sightings of a scruffy-looking man seen in the area in the days before and after the murder. 

The man was described as a white and in his forties. He was around  5 feet 8, or 172cm, tall  and according to a description in The Dundee Courier was “fat all over”. He was also referred to as  stocky. The man had red cheeks and a ruddy outdoor complexion. He was wearing blue overalls with a loose fitting bib over a checked shirt, believed to be red and black. On his feet he wore workman style boots. This figure began to be referred to by the police and in articles about the case as “overalls man”. Julie may have met this man before in an incident that occurred at the house just three days before the murder on Friday 23rd September.

On that afternoon Julie had returned home from work and was pottering about upstairs. She heard someone ring the doorbell and assumed it was the young girl who lived next door. Every weekday except Mondays Julie would look after the girl when she got back from school until her parents arrived home from work. She shouted down for the girl to come in as the front door was unlocked. Thirty seconds later Julie made her way downstairs to greet the girl. As she did so she was shocked to see a man she didn't know standing in the hallway. The man said he was looking for directions to another street on the estate. Julie obviously thought this a little odd, but told him where he needed to go and then politely asked him to leave. The man did so and headed down the street on foot. Julie told this story to her daughter and described the stranger as scruffy looking. The neighbour’s daughter also saw the man coming out of the Pacey’s driveway as she arrived at the house. This man matched the description given earlier.

It may well be that the man had gone to the house on Friday to attack Julie but got cold feet. This implied that Julie was specifically targeted and possibly even stalked in the run up to her murder.

Police issued a warning that there could be a man stalking women in Lincolnshire and urged people to report any incidents. In the Nottingham Post on 6 October 1994 it was first suggested that Julie’s case could be connected to another murder that had occurred three months previously in July 1994.

21 year old Sharon Harper disappeared on the way home from her shift at the Market Cross Pub in Westgate, Grantham in the early hours of July 2nd 1994. Two days later her body was found lying in an ornamental shrubbery in the car park of Shepherd Construction in Earlesfield lane in Grantham. This location was less than a kilometre from Sharon’s flat in Sycamore Court. Sharon had been beaten and strangled. It is believed she was killed in the early hours of the morning of July 2nd. 

Sharon was a mother of a 4 month old daughter and had a long term boyfriend. She worked three nights a week behind the bar at the Market Cross pub. On the night she disappeared she had dropped her daughter at a friend's flat close to her own, as her boyfriend was also working. She was due to pick her child up after her shift at around midnight. Colleagues said that Sharon was happy at work and made plans to go out with work friends on Sunday evening. After her shift finished Sharon stayed for a few drinks and a chat which was part of her normal routine. She was the last person to leave the pub and set off to walk home between 12.15 and 12.20am on July 2nd. Her route home normally took her through Westgate, Harlaxton Road and then on to Trent Road. Sharon never made it to her friend's house to pick up her baby daughter. The police were notified when she failed to meet her boyfriend for a shopping trip at 8.00am the next morning. 

Sharon was found fully clothed and police were unsure if she was killed at the scene or elsewhere. There was evidence that Sharon had sexual intercourse the night she was killed but police refrained from saying she had been sexually assaulted.  A rogue hair was discovered at the crime scene which was not identified.  Police also said they were trying to trace a dark coloured car seen at dawn in the car park where Sharon’s body was found on July 3rd.

In the aftermath of the murder police received two anonymous calls with similar information. They are not sure if the calls were made by the same person, but it is a distinct possibility. The caller said he had seen Sharon on Harlaxton Road near the Archways service station, arguing with a long haired man, estimated to be in his thirties. The caller said he knew Sharon and in one of the calls the man said he stopped to ask if Sharon was alright. Sharon replied that she was ok. The caller said he had seen Sharon with the man before. The man seen with Sharon was described as wearing jeans and a white shirt. In one of the calls the shirt was said to be a Leeds United football shirt.

A taxi driver came forward  to provide a later sighting of Sharon on the night she was killed. He said he had seen Sharon on Wharf Road between 12.40 and 12.45 am. This location is near the pub where Sharon worked. Sharon was arguing with a man on a payphone. It looked like the man was pulling her away from the phone box. The man was described as having shoulder length hair and wore jeans and a white t-shirt. If this sighting is correct it seems Sharon travelled from Harlaxton Road back towards her place of work. Police do not know why she did this. 

These descriptions of this unidentified man were similar to a man seen with Sharon a month before she was killed.

A friend of Sharon saw her talking to a man with long hair in a passageway by Morrisons supermarket in Grantham. The witness walked past them and returned fifteen minutes later to find Sharon and the man still there. Sharon walked towards the witness and the unknown man followed her. Sharon stopped to talk to the witness but the man carried on walking. The witness asked Sharon who the man was but she said it didn't matter and she didn't want to tell her. The witness turned to watch the man walk away but Sharon told her not to do this. The man was said to be wearing jeans, jumper and a small canvas knapsack. 

The police received another anonymous call from a person who named a student as Sharon’s killer. The student was looked into but he wasn't in Grantham on the day in question and it turned out the  whole thing had been a hoax. 

Whether the murders of Julie Pacey and Sharon Harper are connected has remained a contentious issue. In the Autumn of 1994 Detective Superintednet Stuart Clfton, who headed the investigation into Sharon Harper’s murder, did say were keeping an open mind regarding this question.  In later years there were some developments on this matter and I will go into these details in due course.

October 7th 1994 saw Andrew Pacey go before the media for the first time. The broken husband gave a press conference where he described the devastating impact Julie’s murder was having on the family. He asked for the killer to come forward and said that he believed he would after seeing the effect his actions had on Julie’s loved ones. Its worth saying here that, as in any murder investigation of this type, Andrew was questioned by police, but he was never considered a suspect. Numerous people were able to verify that he was working all day.

The police used the appeal by Andrew to release further information about the crime and share leads with which they required assistance from the public. 

Police were attempting to identify a mystery car seen driving along Longcliffe Road at approximately 3.00pm on the day of the murder. The car was said to be a metallic blue BMW, believed to be a 5 series.  Shortly after that it was seen parked in the Pacey's driveway next to Julie’s Audi. A car matching this description was also reported in Heathcliffe Road near the junction of Longcliffe Road between 3.20 and 3.30pm. Julie’s Blue Audi was said to be seen driving past this car at this time. Most bizarrely, more than one witness saw Julie driving a car matching this description around a week before the murder.

No one in the Pacey family recognised the car or could think of any reason why Julie would have been driving this vehicle. This element of the case continues to draw blanks and the significance of the BMW and who it belonged to  has never been established. I will mention here that police obviously did extensive background checks on Julie but found no evidence of any extramarital affairs, nor did she have any known enemies or people with whom she had any form of conflict.

To help jog memories and assist their enquiries police organised a reconstruction of the afternoon in question. Fourteen year old H had to reenact her walk home from school. She retraced her route from her grammar school and passed Grantham hospital on Manthorpe Road before turning into Longcliffe Road. The ordeal was too much for the teenager and she couldn't complete the last 30 metres to the house. She broke down, inconsolable, and the police officers in charge did not make her continue with the rest of the reenactment.

 Over 500 questionnaires were handed out in the area, and door to door enquiries were carried out throughout the Manthorpe Road Estate. Attempts were made to speak to every person living there, as police were sure that, as the attack had occurred in the middle of the day and at school pick up time, the key to unlocking the mystery was to be found within the local community. 

The murder featured on the BBCs Crimewatch television programme. A local actor applied for the role of the overalls man and got the job within minutes of the audition as he bore such a striking resemblance to the e-fit the police had produced. Soon further details emerged about the unidentified overall clad man many believed to be the prime suspect. 

Several people said they had seen a scruffy looking man in the area in the days leading up to the murder. Many had been approached by him and asked for directions. He had often requested directions to Eskdale Road or Meadowdale Crescent, both of which lie south off of Longcliffe Road where the Paceys lived.

One person who was getting into a taxi at 2.45pm (one report states the time as being 3.10pm) on the afternoon of the murder saw a man wearing a blue denim boilersuit step out onto Longcliffe Road and narrowly avoid being hit by a car. The witness said the driver of the car was Julie Pacey. She waved an apology and continued driving her Audi the remaining 100m to her home. When the incident occurred, the man was walking down the street away from Julie’s house. The witness said after the near collision the man changed direction and started walking (some reports say running) back in the direction of the Paceys’ house.  

The Grantham Journal reported on the 11th November 1994 that a man matching the description of overalls man was arrested by police. The unnamed man was said to be well known to police but he was very swiftly released without charge. This was obviously disheartening for the family and the police but the search continued with conviction. 

A team of thirty detectives worked the case and while they considered the idea that the blue overalls were worn by the man as a disguise, the most probable explanation for his attire was that the man was probably a tradesperson or manual labourer of some description. A lot of renovation and building work was being undertaken on and near the Manthorpe Estate and local residents were asked to come forward with names of individuals and companies that they had employed or had seen working in the area. 

Police announced  they were trying to trace the driver of a van that was seen parked near the Paceys’ house on the same side of the street less than an hour before the murder. The van was said to be a light blue transit type van. On the side of the van was written the words plumbing and fireplace with another word in between. A telephone number was printed on the van which had a Grantham area dialling code. 850 homes on the Manthorpe Estate were specifically asked about this van. Police received about 30-40 messages following media appeals but from what I can tell the van driver was never traced. 

As the new year started, Lincolnshire police received a phone call from a public telephone situated in the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire area, about an hour's drive from Grantham. I believe the anonymous caller rang at 2pm on Friday 30th December and said that he knew the killer of Julie Pacey. The police took the information very seriously. Lead investigator Detective Superintendent Billingsley said the caller shared pieces of information about the case which suggested this was not a hoax and the person was telling the truth. The male caller was disconnected during the conversion and never phoned back. Police urged him to make contact again to share more about what he knew about Julie’s murder. 

The caller never did phone back and soon fresh leads in the case began to dry up. Joy and Keith Wilknison, Julie's parents, made a fresh appeal at Easter 1995 but results were negligible and no new leads materialised. As a result, police released further information concerning blue overalls man which included a timeline of various sightings over the days surrounding the murder.

Three days before the murder, on Friday 23rd September 1994, a witness saw overalls man crossing the street at the junction of Sandcliffe Road and Manthorpe Road. This was at 9.45am.  Later, at 2pm, he was seen standing in a driveway of Ravendale Close before walking in the direction of Longcliffe Road. At 3.30pm Julie Pacey is believed to have talked to this man in her hallway when he came into the hallway and asked for directions. 

At 8.15am on the day of the murder the man was said to have been standing on wasteland close to the Paceys’ house. This piece of land was made up of shrub and grassland and was popular with local dog walkers. A white transit style van with side windows was parked nearby. The man may have been connected with it. Side windows on a van usually denote a seated cab area in the back, or possibly that the vehicle has been converted to a camper van.

If you remember, on the day Julie was killed she made a trip to Woolworths at 8.40am to return a rental video. Overalls man was sighted at the video counter at the same time as Julie. Two hours later, at 10.45am, a man matching the description was seen in a tatty beige car or van with a ladder on top of it. The vehicle stopped at the top of Longcliffe Road and asked a passerby for directions to Ravendale Close. Again this road is just off of Longcliffe Road. This is the only occasion when the man was specifically seen with a vehicle. 

At 2.30pm a witness saw the man in Westgate at the junction of Guildhall Street which lies about 2.5km from Julie's home. Julie was spotted in this vicinity at the time, as it is near the Barrowby Gate Estate where her father lived. 

Forty minutes later he was seen near the junction of Highcliffe Road and Longcliffe Road. Shortly after he was spotted outside number 41 Highcliffe Road, walking away from Longcliffe Road. When this timeline was published in the Grantham Journal on May 19 1995, there was no specific mention of the man walking out in front of Julie's car, narrowly avoiding being hit, but I believe this is when this event occurred.

Then at 3.25-3.30pm the same witness who saw him at 2.30pm in Westgate saw him again walking quickly on Manthorpe Road towards Grantham hospital. 

The Paceys’ daughter, H, saw a man walking away from their house just before arriving home at 4.15pm. 

Between 4.20 and 4.30pm he was seen near a footbridge at Harrowby Mill walking and then running from the direction of Manthorpe Road. 

Interestingly overalls man was also spotted around the area during the day following the murder.  On Tuesday September 27 the man was spotted early in the morning at  Harrowby Mill footpath. This Is 2.5km from where Julie was killed. He was seen kicking the grass and it  appeared as though he was looking for something. Later that day he called at a  children’s clothes shop in Vine street, Grantham asking if he could buy old records. When staff explained that they didn't sell items like that, the man got agitated and aggressive. 

Seven months into the investigation, police had spoken to 3500 people and taken 400 statements, but Detective Inspector Mick Holland of Lincolnshire police said the key to the case was identifying the overalls man. Police did caveat this by saying the sightings reported may not all be of the same person. 

In response to this information being made public the police said there were about six tips that they were actively looking into. Talk of overall man continued and residents of Grantham and throughout Lincolnshire were very fearful he may strike again. At one point it was reported that the same man who killed Julie may well be responsible for an attempted break-in at a house on the Spinnery Estate, Grantham. The woman occupier was terrified and claimed a man matching the description of overalls man had tried to break in early one morning shortly after her husband had left for work. She said the same man had tried to break into the house back in October 1994, just weeks after Julie was killed. The woman reported this incident at the time and was convinced back then that it was overalls man. Police did look into a link but concluded the incidents at this house were not related to the murder of Julie Pacey. 

A year after the Julie’s murder, the police investigation was significantly scaled back. There were now just two detectives working on the case full time. Detective Superintendent Roger Billingsley remained resolute that someone local to Grantham knew something and continued to urge people to come forward. Julie's family were struggling to find any hope. The children found it very difficult to talk about their mother and Andrew also had to deal with the loss of his father in early 1995. It was an extremely trying time, dealing with the loss of a spouse and parent while also trying to keep his business going and looking after the children.

Joy Wilknson, Julie's mother, was interviewed in The Grantham Journal on the first anniversary of Julie's death. She seemed resigned to the fact that the case was going to remain unsolved, as she felt that too much time had passed and it was now unlikely that anyone would come forward with new information. Nonetheless the family wrote an open letter in the local press pleading for more people to come forward. Joy said if she won the lottery she would give it all as a reward to the person that gave them the information the police needed to crack the case. 

To coincide with the anniversary of the murder the police decided to reveal another detail about the murder that they had been keeping close to their chest. When Julie’s body was first discovered there was no sign of robbery or theft and it appeared that nothing had been taken from the house. This was not the case. During an episode of the BBC TV programme Crimewatch, police revealed Julie’s watch was missing and was believed to have been taken by the killer. It was presumed she had been wearing it when she was killed. The police had refrained from divulging this information in the past as they hoped that the watch could act as strong evidence against the suspect. It was felt that after a year police had to risk sharing this information.

The watch was not expensive and had been bought for 99 francs or £12 during the family’s trip  Paris in the summer of 1994, only a month or so before the murder. It was a quartz watch made by the brand, Luc Desroches. There were no UK suppliers of the watch and as a result it was deemed to be very rare and almost certainly one of no more than a handful in the country. The public were asked if they had seen the watch or received it as a gift. Following the Crimewatch programme some calls did come in but nothing of note was discovered and no new  leads developed. 

In November 1995 detectives from Lincolnshire travelled to Dorset on England’s south coast to question a man over the murders of both Julie Pacey and Sharon Harper. The move came after an anonymous person telephoned Andrew Pacey, Julie’s husband and named a single suspect for both murders. The man was said to have lived in Grantham at the time of the murders. Following further police enquiries the man was dismissed as a suspect. He had a strong alibi for both murders. 

Six months later, in the spring of 1996, Lincolshire police announced that the investigation into Julie’s murder was to be further scaled back. The same happened with the investigation into Sharon Harper’s murder. Investigators were keen to point out that this step was part of the natural management process of the investigation and that both cases would remain active.

During the rest of 1996 there were a few sporadic developments The police did receive another anonymous call from a man who gave the name of a person who had already been looked into by police for Julie’s murder. All police would say was that the person named in the tip-off had not been completely eliminated as a suspect. At the end of the year an inquest took place into Julie's death. It lasted barely five minutes. The findings were that Julie was strangled, and that death could have taken as little as ten seconds. The motive for the murder was sexual and it was concluded that Julie had been killed by person or persons unknown.

As I have mentioned, ever since Julie’s murder there had been the question of whether her murderer had killed before. As mentioned, in particular the murder of Sharon Harper had always speculatively been linked, but the Lincolshire police had never fully committed to this theory. In 1996 Operation Enigma was established by the Crime Committee of the Association of chief police officers and coordinated by the National crime facility at Bramshill, a police training college in Hampshire. The task of operation Enigma was to examine 200 unsolved murders of women over the previous decade, since 1986, and to look for possible connections between them. In other words they were looking for possible undetected serial killers. Engima found that there were 14 cases that had the traits of serial murders. These 14 could be subdivided into four groups  with four different killers responsible. The murders of Sharon Harper and Julie Pacey were two of the cases that they believed could be connected. 

Lincolnshire police, however, have never officially linked the cases of Julie Pacey and Sharon Harper. In a 2015 article in the Grantham Journal it states that police do not believe the cases are linked but that they have never given the reasons for this conclusion.  Sara Fowler, who was a small baby at the time of her mother’s murder, continues to campaign for justice on behalf of her mother, Sharon Harper. In the stated article the frustration felt by Sara at not being told why the murders of her mother and Julie are not connected is evident. Over the years a couple of suspects have been speculated over in the media in connection with Sharon Harper’s murder. They include Alun Kyte, also known as the midlands ripper, who went to prison in 2000 for the murders of two women from Stafford: Samo Paull in 1993 and Tracy Turner in 1994. He is suspected of up to ten more murders. His MO was to target women at motorway service stations and in red light districts. Christiopher Halliwell is a name that sometimes comes up in Sharon’s case. Halliwell is behind bars for the murders of two women, Sian O’Callaghan and Becky Godden-Edward. He also is suspected of being a serial killer and has been linked to many more murders and disappearances across the country. These men have not been linked  with Julie’s case as it does not match either man’s MO. They also do not fit the physical description of overalls man.

In an average year the detectives of Lincolnshire would expect to deal with three murders but in 1994 they were faced with eleven. A huge spike in cases. Some of these murders were linked with that of Julie Pacey in press reports at the time. Most notably the murders of Wendy Speakes in March 1994 and Kathleen Hempsall in Ocotber 1994. Wendy’s case has since been solved. “The shoe fettish killer” Christopher Farrow was given a life sentence for the 51 year olds murder in November 2000. The now 63 year old Christopher Farrow is not a suspect in the Julie’s murder. Kathleen Hempsall’s murder is still unsolved, and from what I have read it is quite a complicated case. It is not believed to be connected to that of Julie Pacey or Sharon Harper. 

The biggest breakthrough in Julie’s case was announced in July 2015. DI Helen Evans, a senior major crimes investigator at East Midlands Special operations, said on an episode of BBCs Crimewatch that police had developed a nearly complete DNA profile of an individual extracted from forensic evidence found at the crime scene. This DNA profile had been put through the national DNA database  but had not found a match. What this told police was that the person had not been arrested for a violent or sexual crime since 1995 and had not been arrested for any crime since 2003. In 1995 DNA was only taken from prisoners found guilty of violent or sexual offences. This has since been expanded to mean that anyone arrested for all but the most minor offences can have their DNA taken. 

Armed with this vital clue, police appealed to the public to provide information that could lead them to potential suspects they could check against the DNA profile. The police reminded the public of the details of the case. They focused on the description of overalls man, the mystery BMW that Julie was seen driving a week before her murder and which was witnessed on the drive of the house on the day she was killed, and the Les Desroaches watch. 

The episode of Crimewatch that featured this new information about the DNA profile also rebroadcast the original reconstruction of the murder, filmed back in 1994. As a result police received one hundred calls, with two people naming the same person as a suspect. The name they gave was the actor who had played overalls man in the dramatised reconstruction. 

The man called Steve Watson had been recognised by two people in his home town of Newark, Nottinghamshire. The confused viewers had phoned in thinking they were helping but they inadvertently put the spotlight on an innocent man. Speaking in a Newark Advertiser article in 2017 Steve said the ordeal was a nightmare and he ended up having to provide a DNA sample in order to be officially cleared. He said at the time of the original reconstruction in 1994 some of the witnesses started crying when they saw him and had to be persuaded he was an actor. Others stopped him on the street to accuse him of being the killer. He had told BBC producers at the time not to show too much of his face. When the feature was rebroadcast in 2015 he wasn't informed it was going to air again as producers said they could not trace him. 

It was certainly a horrible thing to happen to an innocent man but thankfully the DNA profile was able to exclude him and Steve Watson was able to get on with his life.

Nearly three decades have now passed since Julie’s life was taken from her. With so many sightings of the overalls man it seems incredible that he was simply able to disappear and never resurface on the radar. There are so many puzzling aspects to this case, not least the BMW that Julie was seen driving a week before she died. There are a lot of potential clues in the case but I suspect an equal number of red herrings. While Lincolnshire police have said they don’t believe  the cases of Julie Pacey and Sharon Harper to be linked there is much support for this theory from bloggers and online sleuths. Until the cases are solved this will continue. 

Please do share Julie’s story as I feel the answers to her unsolved murder can still be found. I believe the DNA profile will solve this case one day but the police need more information to utilise this trump card.

If you have any infarction about the murder of Julie Pacey or Sharon Harper you can contact the Lincolnshire Police Incident Room on 01522 532222.