On the school run this morning I noticed Police activity in Chatsworth road in very close proximity to the location of Heather Barnetts unsolved murder in Capstone road in the Charminster area of Bournemouth, I imediately thought to myself ..I hope its not another murder! I dropped my daughter to school & retraced my steps & managed to establish that there had been a development in the case & that the Police had arrested a person believed to be an italian man, within yards of the original murder scene. Lets hope the police have their man at last, Bournemouth becomes safer without a killer on the loose & finally there is closure for the family.
To recap for anyone who is not aware: On Tuesday November 12, 2002, in the Charminster area of Bournemouth, Dorset, two young school children, Terry aged 14 and Caitlin aged 11, arrived home as usual from a day’s tuition. It is a date that will be indelibly etched on their memory for the rest of their lives because they found their Mum, Heather Barnett, lying dead in the bathroom. She had been brutally murdered.
The 48-year-old seamstress who grew up in the Dorset village of Sturminster Newton, had been bludgeoned with something similar to a hammer, stabbed several times and her breasts had been sliced off with a scalpel and placed next to her body. In a bizarre twist, her murderer also placed a lock of someone else’s hair, about 9cm long, in her right hand.
Another clue left at the scene by the murderer was a trail of bloody footprints made by a running shoe which stopped in the middle of the front room, leading Dorset Police to speculate that the murderer may have changed clothes before leaving to avoid leaving a trail in the street. Detectives travelled to Nike in Portland, USA in order to identify the shoe which turned out to be the distinctive Nike “Terra Part” trainer.
Murder of Heather Barnett and the Disappearance of Elisa Claps Linked
Detectives quickly found a link between the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl in Potenza, Italy and the murder of Heather Barnett. One of the last people to see Elisa Claps alive in 1993 was an Italian man who subsequently moved to Bournemouth and lived opposite Heather Barnett’s ground floor flat on Capstone Road, Charminster, at the time of her murder. He was arrested and questioned in 2004 but released without charge.
In 2006 experts from Reading University were able to provide Detectives with a profile of the person by using Stable Isotope Analysis on the hair found in Heather’s hand. Women in the area of Potenza had also reported having their hair cut at the time of Elisa’s disappearance. Detectives from the UK organised DNA samples from the Italian women to see if there is any connection with the evidence gathered from the Bournemouth murder scene.
Lets hope this latest twist & development leads to a prosecution & closure for the family of Heather Barnett RIP.
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