On a cool September lunchtime 40 years ago, a Bakewell woman was savagely attacked in the town’s cemetery and died two days later. The cemetery worker convicted of her murder is now a free man after a long campaign. Scott Lomax, the author of a book on unsolved murders in Derbyshire, details the case and its remarkable aftermath.
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1973 Wendy Sewell, a 32-year-old typist working at the Forestry Commission offices in Bakewell, walked into the town’s cemetery. She entered alone and walked along the lower path browsing headstones for ideas for a headstone for her father. It has also been claimed she was intending to meet a man for a romantic, or even sexual, liaison, as she had done previously. Within minutes of entering the cemetery there was an encounter with a man but he had something other than sex on his mind. There was a savage attack during which Wendy was struck eight times about the head with the handle of a pickaxe. There was no evidence of any sexual assault although some of her clothing was disarranged…