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Ditch body identified after call to police

Sunday 31 July 1994 23:02 BST
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POLICE believe they have identified a woman whose battered body was found in a Lincolnshire ditch, naked and wrapped in a duvet.

The breakthrough in the inquiry came when a man called the murder incident room after seeing a computer-enhanced picture of the woman in a national newspaper.

The body was discovered near Coleby on 6 July. Detectives are contacting her dentist to check her records and will trace her relatives before they name her. Police are withholding details about the man who telephoned them until a positive identification has been made and the family informed.

Describing her killer as 'callous and calculating', Detective Superintendent George Pattinson, leading the murder inquiry, said yesterday that if their suspicions about the identity were correct it would be a major breakthrough. A post-mortem examination had shown that she died as a result of a severe beating and would have taken a considerable time to die.

'She was either still unconscious or dying when the killer dumped her body in the ditch at Coleby,' he said.

Police needed to know who she was before deciding if her death was linked with the murders of two prostitutes found stripped and dumped in remote ditches in the region.

Previously, they said a woman fitting the unknown woman's description was seen being followed by a man in Lincoln three days before her body was found in Coleby, seven miles south of the city.

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