Another Victim Of The 1990s: Retired Nurse, Elsie Freeman, UK

In Cambridgshire is a small village called Impington. It is only about 2 miles from Cambridge itself so these days it is a village yet it has all the advantages and disadvantages of city suburbs.

Elsie Viva Freeman was 76, a retired nurse and lived in the leafy surroundings of a house on Mill Rd. From what I can tell Ms Freeman never married. She was born 8th April 1921 in Cambridgeshire and had been in the same house since before the war. She was living alone by 1998 and was regarded in the press as a recluse. The grounds to her large detached house were overgrown and this might well have assisted her killer. As with all of the people I write about I know little about Ms Freeman. A quick bit of digging shows that she was a nurse going way back and this included service during WW2.

Ms Elsie Viva Freeman. She died of head injuries 7th March 1998.

She was last seen on 4th March 1998 and by 7th March family had become concerned enough to check on her. The house had been burgled. A window had been broken and Ms Freeman was found bound and battered to death in her bedroom. The cops at one point wanted to find out the whereabouts of a watch she owned and have described this as a burglary gone wrong.

A bit of research indicates the house in question is a little way down on the left of this shot. the gardens at the rear open onto countryside.

I would say yet another burglary gone wrong. It is not the police’s fault but of course it depends on the intentions of the robber. That is a detail that can only be established upon an arrest. So the police tend to suggest burglary when items are missing. If it was to sneak in and steal before stealthily leaving then what happened in Impington went wrong. If the intention was to sneak in and kill while stealing then it went right. Sadly it went very well for the offender. The case remains unsolved to this day.

There were appeals, notably in 2005. At that time the cops said there was DNA evidence. There has been no mention of any developments in the case. What I do note is some elements of similarity with other cases. To go over them would be to speculate in rather a wide circle from the known facts.

What I can say is that in the 1990s home invasion style attacks on women were rare but far from unheard of.

Already on here you will find the cases of :

Julie Pacey

Janet Brown

Jaqueline Palmer- Radford

Carolann Jackson

Nasreen Akhtar

They are just the ones in the UK that spring to mind. If we step back into the 1980s you will find more.

The case of poor Ms Freeman illustrates that we might have DNA of interest, but you still need a person to compare it to. MS Freeman seems to have lived alone in that house since her mother died in the early 1970s. So you have a retired nurse, a WW2 veteran and woman alone who falls prey to some unknown ‘nothing’ of a human. Not a good trade off for us is it?

I looked on the Cambridge police website but there is no mention of Ms Freeman. That is the norm in the UK. I think it is less than perfect. You and I might well assume a case is open, but there maybe some witness who has sat on information for one reason or another. They decide that times have changed and they want to speak out. So they look and see ‘no interest’ from the police online.

Well if they ever read this let me assure them the cops would be interested in what they have to say.

On their website they refer anyone wanting to give information anonymously to Crimestoppers

I’m not wanting to disparage Crimestoppers. However, I thought I would do a quick search for any updates and appeals about Ms Freeman. I got the below link on their site. Sign of the times? Still I was a bit disappointed.