Joanna Yeates: police arrest architect's landlord on suspicion of murder - Telegraph

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Detectives arrested 65 year-old at his home at 7am on Canynge Road in the Clifton area of Bristol. This morning they were seen removing his car - a silver Chrysler Neon - for forensic examination. The retired English teacher lived in the same block of flats where Miss Yeates lived with her boyfriend Greg Reardon. He told his neighbours that he thought saw Miss Yeates leaving her home with two other people on the night she disappeared. The 25-year-old architect went missing on December 17 after meeting friends for a drink in a pub and her frozen body was found in a country lane on Christmas Day. She had been strangled and was dumped in Failand, North Somerset, three miles from her home, several days before she was found. An Avon and Somerset Police spokeswoman said: “Just after 7am this morning police attended an address in Canynge Road and arrested a 65-year-old man on suspicion of murder. “Detectives are continuing to carry out forensic examinations.” Police activity was focused on Miss Yeates’s home on Wednesday, with forensic specialists removing the front door of her flat. She only moved into the property with Mr Reardon in November. There has been some confusion since Mr Jefferies's disclosure on Wednesday. The former chairman of The Prayer Book Society, who was described by one neighbour as "a little bit eccentric", claimed what he had told police had been "distorted", but refused to elaborate. Mr Jefferies described himself as the secretary of the management company for the property on Canynge Road in the Clifton area of Bristol. He told several neighbours of the possible sighting. Geoffrey Hardyman, 78, who lives in the top floor flat, said: “He [Mr Jefferies] saw people coming out after dark as he was parking his car. I don’t think he was really paying any attention but just assumed they were from Flat 1, Joanna’s flat. He didn’t know if they were male or female.” Liz Lowman, who lives on the opposite side of the road, said Mr Jefferies told her the three people were coming out of a shared entrance to the house. “These people were leaving through the communal entrance,” she said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t hear or see anything. “I don’t think there was a party that night as I would have heard the music and we heard nothing and we were in all evening.” Mr Hardyman was also at home that night as he was in bed with a cold: “I was just starting to suffer from a very bad cold. “I was in that night and I didn’t hear anything at all.” In the latest CCTV footage, Miss Yeates was seen striding into Bargain Booze wearing jeans, black boots and the white waterproof jacket that was found in her flat after she disappeared. She appeared relaxed and smiled at the cashier as she dug around in her bag to find her purse and paid for two bottles of cider. Both were found at her home, one partially drunk and the other untouched. The off licence is only a few metres from the Tesco Express where she bought a Finest mozzarella, tomato and basil pizza. Although detectives found the receipt from Tesco, the pizza was never recovered. Yesterday, police carried out a second sweep of her home to ensure no clues had been missed. Mr Reardon is being treated as a witness by police. He had been staying with his half-brother in Sheffield for the weekend and raised the alarm when he arrived back at the flat on Dec 19. He is now staying with friends in Bristol. Police believe Miss Yeates may have been strangled and dumped within the first few days of her disappearance, as a pathologist concluded that her fully clothed body had been in situ for “several days” by the time she was found. Tributes continue to be left on Facebook, including from colleagues at BDP, the firm where both Miss Yeates and Mr Reardon worked.

A real Christmas murder mystery - I thought they only happened in books. Technically it should have happened in a country house - a purist would surely say that it was a necessary criterion, but honestly, who lives in them these days? We can't murder the Duchess of Devonshire every year. It would get boring.

I wasn't very interested in this, tbh, when it seemed like it was just some random loon. Now it's one of the dramatis personae, it's a proper mystery rather than just a police procedural with Christmas trimmings. To have a former chairman of the Prayerbook Society as the murderer is a delicious idea.

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I wasn't very interested in this, tbh, when it seemed like it was just some random loon. Now it's one of the dramatis personae, it's a proper mystery rather than just a police procedural with Christmas trimmings. To have a former chairman of the Prayerbook Society as the murderer is a delicious idea.

Indeed

F

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"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

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Officers carrying forensics bags entered a £1.5 million detached house next door to the flat where the murdered landscape architect lived with her boyfriend, Greg Reardon. They spent more than an hour speaking to the owner of the property, Peter Stanley, and his tenant, Laurence Penney, 41, and later left carrying a small number of items in a brown forensic bag. Mr Penney, a design consultant, told The Daily Telegraph that he had been asked to account for his movements around the time of Miss Yeates’s disappearance. He said the questioning had been “routine” because he had only just returned home after a Christmas break in Europe. Detectives took away for examination a maroon BMW car belonging to Mr Stanley, a 56-year-old mechanical engineer. He drove the vehicle to a police station accompanied by a detective and was driven back about an hour later in a marked police car. The developments came as police continued to question Miss Yeates’s landlord, Christopher Jefferies, 65, on suspicion of her murder. It is understood that police are keen to establish the chain of events that took place at the address in Canynge Road, in the Clifton area of Bristol, in the hours before Miss Yeates disappeared on Dec 17. Earlier that evening, Mr Stanley helped Mr Jefferies start Mr Reardon’s car, which had a flat battery. After successfully using jump leads borrowed from Mr Stanley, the 27-year-old travelled to Sheffield where he spent the weekend with his half-brother, leaving Miss Yeates alone. Mr Jefferies, a former English master at nearby Clifton College public school, was arrested on Thursday morning after he allegedly reported seeing Miss Yeates, 25, leave her flat with two people around the time of her disappearance. Detectives were granted a further extension to continue questioning him last night and now have until 7am on Monday morning to charge or release him. Neighbours said yesterday that Mr Jefferies may have spent Christmas away from Bristol, possibly in one of the properties he owned in southern France. They said they had not seen him at all over the Christmas period and believed he may have been abroad. Mr Jefferies owned two flats in Nice, in the south of France, which he let out to holidaymakers and friends. A close friend, who asked not to be named, said he visited the properties once a year to carry out routine maintenance. The friend said Mr Jefferies was an admirer of French culture and bought a house in the Dordogne in 1995. “He used to spend three weeks a year there and spent a great deal of time doing the property up. He was always interested in French culture,” he said. He sold the house five years ago and invested the proceeds in the two flats in Nice. Mr Penney said he and his landlord, Mr Stanley, had been helping police with their inquiries. “I’ve been away and police interviewed me today,” he said. “I was here when Joanna disappeared but didn’t see or hear anything unusual. “I see him [Mr Jefferies] from time to time. He is a very intelligent man, a delightful chap. “I didn’t see him on that day or after she disappeared. It’s very sad. I assumed she had absconded with someone, I didn’t think she’d had been killed. “I didn’t know her or her boyfriend myself. Police were just making sure they knew where I was on the day she disappeared, if I had any emails or anything to back up what I was saying.” As the focus of the investigation moved next door, forensic officers wearing white protective suits completed their search of Miss Yeates’s basement flat. As detectives continued to question Mr Jefferies, more details emerged of his early life. Born in Grimsby, he moved to Cheshire with his parents, Kathleen and Edward, when he was aged 10. A pupil at Sandbach Grammar School, he excelled academically, and studied English at Bristol University. Neighbours of his late parents said he was keen on classical music as a youngster and had an organ in his bedroom as a child. When his mother died, he played the organ at her funeral. He joined the staff at Clifton College public school in the late 1970s and was well regarded among the staff and pupils. In 1991, he bought a flat belonging to Clifton College in Canynge Road in the Clifton area of Bristol. Mr Jefferies bought the flat in the same building as the one rented to Miss Yeates in the 1990s from a fellow teacher who was currently in jail for abusing a young boy at the property. Stephen Johnston, a French Master at nearby Clifton Preparatory School, is serving a seven-year term for molesting a 13 year-old pupil. There was no suggestion that Mr Jefferies had any involvement in Johnston’s crimes. The Attorney General warned yesterday that some coverage of the case could risk damaging the prospects for a successful trial. “We need to avoid a situation where trials cannot take place or are prejudiced as a result of irrelevant or improper material being published, whether in print form or on the internet, in such a way that a trial becomes impossible,” Dominic Grieve told the BBC.

Joanna Yeates murder: neighbour interviewed by police over boyfriend's flat battery incident - Telegraph

Grimsby ftw.

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Joanna Yeates: Police not ruling out multiple killers | UK news | The Guardian

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Police are not ruling out the possibility that more than one person was involved in the murder of Joanna Yeates or that her killing was sexually motivated, it emerged today. Detectives also said Yeates's landlord, Chris Jefferies, remains a suspect over the death of the 25-year-old landscape architect. Officers gave more details about the investigation, revealing they had received more than 1,300 pieces of information, which had generated more than 900 lines of inquiry. The investigation team has categorised 239 of these as "high priority". Police said they had so far viewed more than 100 hours of CCTV footage and were sifting through 293 tonnes of domestic rubbish seized in the area around Yeates's flat in Clifton, Bristol. Chief Inspector Phil Jones, leading the investigation, emphasised that the inquiry was complex and could be time-consuming. Speaking at the headquarters of Avon and Somerset police's major crime investigation unit, Jones said officers were exploring every possible hypothesis. "We are carrying out detailed forensic analysis of her flat and outcomes from this can take a considerable amount of time." Jones said he was "satisfied" that Yeates got back to her flat on December 17. "But I am not going to speculate whether she let someone into the flat, whether someone was already there or whether someone broke into the flat." Yeates's body was found on Christmas morning on a roadside verge three miles from her flat, but Jones could not say where or when she was killed or when the body was left where it was discovered. Snowfall on December 18 had "considerable impact" on this line of inquiry, he said. Jones highlighted a report of a light-coloured 4x4 vehicle spotted that night close to the spot where the body was found and asked the driver of that car or any other in the area to come forward. Yeates bought a pizza and cider as she walked home on the night she vanished. Neither the pizza nor its packaging have been found – though the receipt for it was at the flat. Jones said it was not clear if Yeates had eaten the pizza. He said: "I assure you we are determined to bring Jo's killers to justice." Asked about his use of "killers" rather than "killer", Jones said the plural emphasised that he was keeping an open mind. He said that there was no evidence Yeates had been sexually assaulted but he had not ruled out that there had been a "sexual motive". Jones said Yeates's landlord, Jefferies, was on police bail and was therefore still a suspect.

293 tonnes of rubbish? Pull the other one, mate. Where would they keep it? Not to mention that they'd never finish sorting it. FYI, the average household produces just under a tonne of rubbish per year. If we presume that the bins had been collected last a week prior to the search, that means that over 15000 homes have had their rubbish collected by the police.

Odd about the pizza, isn't it? Presumably it means that she either left with someone she knew and they took it with them, or she was kidnapped by more than one person - if you're going to drag a presumably non-compliant girl from her house, you wouldn't want to encumber yourself with frozen pizza.

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Joan Smith: How about telling men, not women, to stay indoors? - Joan Smith, Commentators - The Independent

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Imagine the scene: thousands of students are about to return to a university city where a young woman has been brutally murdered. The police do not know where or when she died but they announce that her killer "remains at large". They call on men not to go out after dark until the killer is caught. "We ask men to go out in the evening only if their journey is really necessary, and to make sure they're accompanied by a woman," says the senior investigating officer. Well, that's my fantasy. What the police have actually done in Bristol, where they're under huge pressure to identify the killer (or killers) of a young landscape architect, is issue an appeal to women not to walk home alone after dark. They've issued this alarming edict even though there's a glaring hole in their logic: detectives say they're "satisfied" that 25-year-old Joanna Yeates arrived at her flat in Clifton on 17 December, the night she disappeared, which suggests that home isn't a particularly safe option for local women either. That message has been reinforced by police advice to "householders" to make sure that their premises are secure and take care when answering the door to strangers. But the specific advice to women to avoid walking home alone after dark means that the onus is once again on one half of the population to make radical changes in their daily routine. How on earth are women and girls in Bristol supposed to avoid going home alone in the dark when the sun sets at around 4.15 in the afternoon? Do Avon and Somerset police seriously expect the city's female population to observe an unofficial 16-hour curfew? Just think of the chaos on public transport if women teachers, supermarket cashiers, office workers and indeed female police officers – there must be one or two, even if the top brass haven't noticed – rush home before it gets dark. Then there are the cleaners and bar staff whose jobs require them to work unsocial hours; some of them are bound to be students or single mothers, and unable to afford taxis home at the end of a shift. I was going to write that it's incredible, in the 21st century, that the police are still issuing this thoughtless and insulting advice to women. Sadly, it isn't: it's easier to impose an unofficial curfew than to think about how the streets can be made safer, even if that means accepting the astonishing proposition that our cities and towns are no-go areas for women during the hours of darkness. Could there be a more damning indictment of the police in this country? Everyone wants more officers on the streets but they're especially needed at night when women are leaving restaurants, waiting for buses and walking home from bus stops. Last year, when I reported a spate of car crime in my street, a PC let slip that there are no routine patrols after 6pm, even though it's a popular late-night cut-through for pedestrians from one main road to another. It isn't just girls and women who should be angry about this cavalier attitude to public safety. I wonder how men would feel if the entire male population was periodically advised to stay home between dusk and dawn if they want to avoid being murdered? Such advice is more than an imposition; it's an outrage. It isn't a big step from telling women to stay indoors at night to questioning why we have to go out at all during the hours of darkness when a murderer is "at large". I mean, are we stupid? Guilty of "contributory negligence"? In Bristol, women are already telling reporters how frightened they are in their own homes, let alone on the streets; they don't know what to do and the situation has been exacerbated by confusing and contradictory messages from senior officers on the Yeates investigation. A "suspect" has been released on bail and suddenly there is talk of more than one killer; it still isn't clear whether Ms Yeates was followed home by a stranger, let someone known to her into the building where she lived, or confronted the killer inside her flat. What's particularly distressing about this case is that the victim was a modern young woman, doing a job she loved in a vibrant city. On the night she disappeared, she did perfectly ordinary things like stopping on the way home for a pizza; if this could happen to her, it could happen to anybody. Against this background, making local women feel even more vulnerable isn't helpful, especially when the advice they're being offered is next to useless. What's needed is the reassurance of extra patrols, police travelling on buses at night, and a much greater readiness on the part of officers to look out for and challenge men on dark streets. And if you think that's a breach of civil liberties, it's no more so than expecting half the population to stay at home after dark. A similar edict was given in the 1970s, as the number of women murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper continued to climb. Ripper squad detectives warned women not to go out alone after dark – a fat lot of good to me, since I often had to work night shifts on a radio station in Manchester, a city where the Ripper had already killed two women. Long before Peter Sutcliffe was caught, I realised that the police were making a terrible mess of the investigation, largely because of their outdated and misogynist attitudes to women's lives. Now senior officers in Bristol appear to be treating local women like Victorian ladies who are accustomed to needing chaperones. In 1977, women students in Leeds responded by organising the first Reclaim the Night march in this country, and similar demonstrations were soon taking place in other towns and cities. The message – that women would not be terrorised off the streets either by the Ripper or the police failing to do their job properly – was unambiguous. I understand why the murder of Joanna Yeates has gripped the nation, and I want her killer or killers to be caught. In the meantime, local women are right to be anxious – and entitled to advice that recognises how they live and work. If Avon and Somerset police can't provide that, I hope women in Bristol will come on to the streets and once again Reclaim the Night

Why is it always "brutally murdered"? I'd love to read an article in which someone is fastidiously murdered for a change, or murdered with a panache that is worthy of broadway.

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It's Ripper hommage time. This smells strongly of prank.

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The note, which was scrawled in A5 paper in black ink, was sent to the Bristol Ram pub shortly after her body was discovered on Christmas Day. Written on lined paper ripped from a notepad, the letter included a fake address and telephone number, and mentioned Miss Yeates by name. It also contained a label torn from a pizza box, and made reference to various pizza toppings. Miss Yeates, who disappeared on December 17, had bought a mozzarella and tomato pizza on her way home from the Bristol Ram. But no trace of it or its packaging has ever been found. Detectives hunting the killer of the 25-year-old landscape architect have seized the letter and label as part of their investigation. It is understood the letter did not make direct reference to the murder of Miss Yeates but police are still keen to trace the sender. The landlord of the Bristol Ram, Alex Major, confirmed the information was correct but said police had requested he does not speak about the matter. A source said: "I was in the pub when the police came but saw the letter before they took it away. "As soon as I saw her name I realised it could be very important. The police were clearly interested. "I could not see whether the label came from the same pizza that she is supposed to have bought." Miss Yeates went to the Bristol Ram on Park Street on the evening of December 17. She then walked back to her rented flat in Canynge Road, Clifton, stopping off at a Waitrose store, a Bargain Booze shop and a Tesco Express on her way home. She was reported missing by boyfriend Greg Reardon, 27, two days later when he returned home from a weekend away. Her snow-covered body was found three miles away at the side of Longwood Lane in Failand on Christmas Day. Miss Yeates' landlord Chris Jefferies, 65, a former teacher at Clifton College, was arrested on suspicion of murder on December 30 but released on police bail two days later. Last Friday police retraced her final movements, speaking to more than 200 people in Failand, Clifton and at the Bristol Ram in Park Street. Leading criminologist Professor David Wilson said he was not surprised the letter had been sent. He said: "I am inundated with letters about Joanna Yeates on almost a daily basis. He added: "Her story connects with people who read newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio. "When a story connects with a lot of people they want to be associated with it. That letter arrived at the Bristol Ram just because it is involved in the case.” A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said all reports linked with the murder case were taken seriously.

Joanna Yeates murder: letter containing pizza label sent to pub where architect had final drink - Telegraph

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Also, this critic's opinion: pizza label = far less impresive than body parts

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