The Murdered Sussex Schoolboy: Keith Lyon

 

The still-unsolved murder of a Sussex schoolboy in 1967 is a classic cold case. After a few years, the trail evaporates and even the most conscientious detectives sense that the file has to be closed. The murder of Keith Lyon was one of those cases.

Keith Lyon, who was twelve years old, was walking along a bridle way up Happy Valley, a small area of downland between Ovingdean and Woodingdean near Brighton in Sussex, to buy a geometry set for his homework when he was set upon by some youths and killed. His body was found on 6 May 1967 on the bridle path. He had been stabbed eleven times. The murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was found some days later a mile away in the grounds of a school. The knife was forensically tested at the time and it was found to carry traces of blood of Keith’s blood group and also traces of another blood group as well. It was not known who the second blood sample came from.

The police questioned a number of people, and they had their suspects, but there was no evidence. The case petered out and then the material was boxed up and put into store.

Recently some workmen were modernizing a sprinkler system in Brighton Police Station when, quite by chance, they uncovered the evidence from the Keith Lyon case locked in a basement. What they stumbled on was several boxes of items relating to the case. The collection had been lost for thirty-five years. When the evidence was re-examined, detectives realized that forensic tests devised since 1967 might reveal rather more than could have been hoped at the time. Among the finds in the boxes was the murder weapon, still stained with both Keith’s blood and the blood of another, unknown, person.

With the advent of DNA profiling, it may at last be possible to tie the second blood sample to a particular individual, and the police believe that that person was the murderer.

As Detective Inspector Bill Warner of Brighton and Hove City CID has commented, the murder happened so long ago that it is possible the murderer may be dead by now, but it may still be the case that his profile is on the National DNA Database. The door has opened on the possibility, even after all this time, that the killer of Keith Lyon may yet be brought to justice. It is a distinct possibility that the youth who so casually and brutally stabbed Keith to death went on to commit other crimes, which raises the chances of finding his DNA profile on the UK database. If, on the other hand, the youth was so shaken and appalled by what he did that he never committed another offence, then his DNA will not appear in the records.

Detective Inspector Warner said, ‘The most disturbing fact was we mislaid the exhibits. The case was reviewed several years after the initial inquiry and again in the mid-1970s. It was always thought that the knife had been mislaid somewhere. The significance of the find is that we have got the evidence now and we have got the chance of forensic retrieval to identify the offender.’

Sussex detectives are now re-examining the list of original suspects in the case, to see if they can find a DNA match. They already know that one of the suspects has died. But, as DI Warner said, ‘provided we have his DNA, we can find out who did it.’ DNA has opened the door on clearing up this and tens of thousands of other cold cases – murders and other serious crimes that the police had previously lost hope of solving.