Chapter 3 - The 'Mad Dog' Case: Part 1

It all started at the end of 2019, specifically on November 30. It was then that, in a single-family housing estate on the outskirts of Cardiff, a neighbor, concerned that her friend from the neighborhood had missed their appointment, decided to visit her at home. After a long, ineffective knock and call, a woman noticed that the back door was open, so she went inside and found her friend lying in the bedroom on the bed, covered in a pool of blood. Of course, the woman immediately notified the police.

The murdered woman was Martha Jones, a slim blonde of medium height, at the age of 25, according to witnesses, she had lived in this district for several months after she graduated with honors and her parents bought her a house as a reward. She worked in downtown Cardiff as a secretary in her father's law office and was generally liked, sometimes only her female colleges, jealous of her beauty, spread rumors about the girl's countless love affairs. At least that's what girl's closest friend - the woman who found her - thought. The rest of the neighbors mentioned that she was often visited by various men, and quite wealthy at that, many also believed that maybe one of them was married and that the murder of this girl was the work of one of the jealous wives who found out about her husband's cheating. The police obviously had to check this trail, but it was doubtful that a jealous woman could have committed such a brutal crime.

In addition to countless stabs and bruises and traces on the wrists from the fact that the young woman was tied tightly to the bed with two leather straps, she also had several bites on her body. It looked as if a dog had bitten her, except that it was the marks of human teeth. Chunks of meat torn from the woman's body, some quite large, lied down scattered around the room. The woman's face suffered the most - eyes gouged out, skin cut horribly - making it impossible to recognize the face visually. Also, in every photo in the house, her face was additionally damaged. Luckily, the neighbor who found the body had photos with her friend and additional DNA testing confirmed the victim's identity. Upon closer examination of the body, it also emerged that the woman had been raped prior to the murder.

After a thorough examination of the traces found in and around the house, adding the testimony of a large number of neighbors and co-workers, also checking the surveillance cameras, the version of events was as follows - on November 29, as usual, Martha returned home from work in the evening, parked her car in the driveway and went into the house, ate dinner, took a bath and went to bed with a book; but she had forgotten to close the back door of the house, as her friend from the neighborhood had always pointed out to her. And as it turned out, her friend was right doing so, because probably late in the evening the perpetrator entered her house through that door, surprised the young woman in the bedroom, tied her to the bed with leather straps, then brutally raped, and finally tortured by beating all over her body, slashing her face and biting off pieces of flesh, at the end stabbing her with a whole bunch of stabs. It was not known exactly at what point in this torture the girl died, but it certainly happened around 1 a.m.

Of course, the most valuable part of all of this was teeth and sperm marks, as no fingerprints or footprints were found around the house. Unfortunately, checking the database did nothing, clearly indicating that the murderer was someone new, never recorded or punished by the police, at least not in the UK. Inquiries were sent to other countries in Europe and the USA, but that also did not bring any results. So it looked like police had to search a bit in the dark, unfortunately. In addition, the tooth traces were not as accurate as everyone initially thought - in the laboratory tests, traces of metal were found, which meant that the perpetrator used some kind of reinforcement, probably to make his bites more effective and easier for him to tear off pieces of the body. This obviously meant that he had to get such a 'reinforcement' somewhere, so all places where you could buy or order something similar were checked. Unfortunately, this did not bring the expected results, which could only mean that either the murderer had made the 'reinforcement' himself or purchased it illegally, which of course made tracking impossible.

Camera footage near the victim's workplace indicated that she had been followed for some time by a hooded man of medium height, who also appeared to quite well-built. Unfortunately, that was the end of the description, because his face was not visible, and he changed clothes frequently. The man also traveled on foot and always disappeared into smaller alleys where there were no cameras. When the footage of the cameras from the neighborhood where the victim lived was carefully examined, several shots showed a familiar figure, but nothing more was visible than the same things seen on cameras in the city center. The victim's house was barely visible through the amount of trees surrounding, so it was hard to see if someone was nearby. Additionally, the fact that it all happened at night only worsened visibility, so any shadow that moved in the footage could be the culprit.