Teresa Thorling - A possible Yorkshire Ripper victim
root > 24-08-2019, 03:15 PM
Teresa Thorling - A possible Yorkshire Ripper victim
On 30th August 1980 Teresa Thorling, 26, was brutally murdered following a blow to the head and being strangled.
A bus ticket found in Teresa's possession showed the time of 16.45. She'd travelled into Malmo to work as a prostitute for the evening.
It was widely believed that Teresa Thorling often engaged in prostitution in order to earn the money required to fund her drugs habit.
At this time in Malmo prostitution was still legal with Kungsgatan and Exercisegatan being well known red light areas.
Sex workers reported seeing Teresa around Exercisegatan in the early evening. There were also early evening sightings of her with clients - but nobody recalled seeing her later in the evening.
Two days later, on Monday afternoon, an old man collecting bottles for cash stumbled across Teresa’s body in the stairwell of a derelict building. Her body had been covered by an old carpet.
Teresa's body was lying naked on her front. A piece of wood had been forced into her rectum.
The post-mortem showed that Teresa Thorling had been murdered on Saturday evening and the cause of death was most likely strangulation.
The doctor also noted high-levels of narcotics in her blood. Before being killed, the young woman had been hit on the back of the head with a blunt object. She had bruising on the front of her neck that could have been caused by hands, or by a thin object being pressed against her tongue bone, which had been broken. There was no evidence that she had been raped, but there was a substance found on her back that could have been semen.
A cold-case investigation called Operation Painthall was a little-publicised investigation into a number of unsolved murders and assaults that may have been committed by Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Swedish police were contacted in August 2016.
Inquiries highlighted that Peter Sutcliffe may have travelled with a lorry on board a car ferry between the port of Limhawn (now understood to be a mis-spelling of Limhamn) in Sweden and Dradoer (a mis-spelling of Dragor) in Denmark.
The recorded travel dates were 30th August 1980 and 1st September 1980. These dates covered the date Teresa Thorling was killed.
Swedish police were subsequently contacted by DCI Dunkerley who was leading the cold-case review.
DCI Dunkerley said that he was absolutely certain that Sutcliffe had never been in Sweden.The telex that Operation Painthall had originally written about described nothing more than a rumour. As far as he was concerned, the case was closed.
Police later compared Teresa's murder with the brutal murder of Gertie Jensen , a part-time prostitute found murdered at a Gothenburg demolition site.