Featured Image Credit: BBC/Metropolitan Police Service
Topics: TV And Film, Documentaries, UK News, True Crime
Jess Hardiman
The unsolved mystery of a murdered pregnant mum who was found by her own children is set to be explored in a brand new ITV documentary.
Lynda Farrow was 29 years old when she was stabbed to death in her home in Woodford, east London, on 19 January 1979.
She was found by her two young daughters, aged eight and 11 at the time, who had finished school early after being sent home due to a snow storm.
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Farrow was also four months pregnant when she was killed.
The case was never solved, despite a number of renewed attempts to investigate what happened – including by the BBC’s Crimewatch in 2009.
During a reconstruction on the programme, her daughter Justine said: "She didn't arrive to pick us up from school. We waited and waited, I think until everyone had gone home. You do have that horrible sick feeling in your stomach when something like that happens.
"I remember seeing these massive footprints in the snow. I saw her car so I knew she was in. I went straight to the front door and knocked and knocked. I didn't hear anything. I decided to look through the letterbox and there she was.
"There was a knife next to her. I just didn't know why or how someone could do that. What could she have done?"
Now her story is being explored in a brand new ITV documentary, The Playboy Bunny Murders, which will also into the murders of two other women whose cases have previously been connected to Farrow’s - although an official link has never been proven.
It will comprise two 60-minute episodes, aiming to ‘unravel the mystery of the victims’ deaths, through unrivalled and exclusive access to friends, colleagues and relatives of the victims who provide an intimate insight into their lives and personalities as well as archive material from the time that will bring 1970s Mayfair to life’.
Announcing the new documentary today (Thursday 25 May), ITV said: “A brand new ITVX premium true crime series will see Marcel Theroux investigate a set of disturbing murders of young women that have remained unsolved since the 1970s and reveal a dark and violent side hidden beneath the wealth and glamour of exclusive corners of London’s nightlife at that time.
“The journalist and filmmaker’s long-standing interest in the brutal murders, which shocked the London he grew up in, led him to return to the killings of Eve Stratford, a Playboy Bunny who aspired to be a famous model, Lynda Farrow, a croupier with years of experience working in nighttime London, and Lynne Weedon, a schoolgirl whose whole life lay ahead of her.”
Journalist Marcel Theroux added: “This is a story that has obsessed me for years. How could a serial killer kill multiple victims in 1970s London and remain unknown? What evidence was missed?
"What clues were the police of the time unable to make use of? As witnesses reach the ends of lives and memories fail, this might be the last chance to get justice for the three victims.”