16/06/2024
Death Of A Brighton Schoolboy Keith Lyon
Keith lived with his family, parents Valda and Ken Lyon, and younger brother Peter, in the village of Ovingdean.
Saturday, the 6th May 1967, was a lovely sunny day, also it was pocket-money day. 12 year old Keith had 4 shillings (just over £3 today), and wanted to spend it on a geometry set and compass that he needed for his homework. Ovingdean had only a single shop, and there was a bit more variety of shops in nearby Woodingdean, Keith decided that Saturday afternoon to make the short journey to the next village and back. Setting off at around 3pm, Keith headed off to Woodingdean on foot, walking along the bridle path that connected the two villages and that ran through Happy Valley.
Just over an hour later, at approximately 4:15pm, a 16-year-old girl was out dog walking in the area. Found Lying on a grass bank at the side of the path, heavily bloodstained and clearly dead, was the body of a young boy clothed in a grammar school uniform. It was Keith; he had been stabbed to death and left at the side of the path. The girl immediately fled in fear and contacted police, who arrived at the scene quickly and cordoned the area off.
Looking at the body in situ, Keith’s clothing had not been disturbed, but his trouser pockets had been turned out, and his money and a set of keys was missing. He was heavily bloodstained (a pathologist noted 11 separate stab wounds to his stomach, back and chest area) and there was no sign of a murder weapon at the scene. It was imperative that the police enquiry got off to the best and most proactive start.
As a massive house to house enquiry got underway, a makeshift incident room was set up immediately at a nearby primary school, and a massive search of the area was undertaken by police, who had extra officers drafted in from all over Sussex. Police search teams and dog handlers were used to search fields, woods, farm buildings and empty premises, looking for Keith’s abandoned keys or more importantly, a murder weapon. This was believed to be a sharp, serrated knife. Assisting police in their search was the use of a powerful magnetic mine detector from nearby Aldemaston Camp, which was capable of drawing out metal from inches underneath the ground. However, this failed to find anything in the immediate areas of the murder scene that police searched.
But a bloodstained, serrated knife with a broken tip was found a day or so later near the rear of nearby Fitzherbert School, and handed in to police by schoolboys. The blood on the knife was found to be of the same blood type as Keith’s.
Two women who lived nearby came forward to say that on the same day and around the time Keith was murdered, they saw four youths involved in a scuffle near the path – in fact the witnesses used the word 'sparring'. They did not intervene however, and later saw three youths fleeing across nearby fields. A local bus driver also came forward to say that on the afternoon in question, two youths had been passengers on the No 3 bus he was driving to the nearby Whitehawk estate, and both were in an 'agitated' state. They had got on at Vines Cross Road and stayed on until the Whitehawk Garage stop, before getting off in a 'blind panic'.
After the two women and the bus driver had come forward as witnesses, police adopted the view that Keith’s killers were a gang of local youths and his murder was a result of a robbery having gone wrong. There was evidence to support this – Keith’s killer(s) would have been significantly bloodstained, and evidence was found to suggest that the murderer had used a nearby public lavatory in Lawn Memorial Park to clean up. A public lavatory that would have only been apparent to someone living in the locality. A mass questioning and fingerprinting of local youths got underway – but even though thousands were spoken to and fingerprinted over the course of the enquiry, this did not lead to any arrests.
Although Keith’s murder has today fallen into the category of a cold case subject to periodic reviews over the years, it still creates headlines from time to time. An appeal had been made a number of times on Crimewatch UK, and in the mid 2000’s, three men in their 50’s were arrested on suspicion of murder, but were ultimately released and not charged . None of these men were ever named, and there is no record of what led to their arrests. But it is reported that police now have partial DNA evidence that could link the murderer to the scene. As forensic examination has evolved in the years following Keith’s murder, technology now exists that has enabled scientists to obtain a workable DNA sample from the evidence that was presumed lost for so many years, namely Keith’s clothing. But of course, a match for this DNA profile has so far remained elusive from the DNA database.
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