Video exclusive: Forgotten victims revisited in UK’s biggest cold-case review

Tragic cases dating back to the mid-1970s are being studied by detectives for a major programme of cold-case investigations, codenamed Operation Kharon and overseen by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA).

Police say each concerns a person who had relatives or friends, but whose name remains unknown despite public appeals for information and diligent work by forensic scientists.

Detailed accounts of eight of the region’s mysteries are to be featured in a special four-part series in the Yorkshire Post, starting today.

They include the story of a man whose funeral was attended by only four people, the discovery of a woman’s body in the Dales which triggered an international inquiry, and the case of a woman whose death in suspicious circumstances was linked to the disappearance of an escaped prisoner.

Detectives hope the reports will help readers remember the deaths and spur witnesses into coming forward with new information.

The NPIA operation has already helped name one Yorkshire victim, a man whose body was found in a river 15 years ago.

Detectives at North Yorkshire Police have informed the NPIA of eight bodies they are trying to identify, discovered between 1981 and 2008.

The force’s head of major and specialist crime, Detective Superintendent Lewis Raw, said: “There is a certain poignancy in all these cases.

“At some stage they have been members of a family or had friends, but now unfortunately those relatives and friends won’t know where they are.

“These people have died alone and that is the sadness of their stories.

“At this stage, none of the cases are crimes. The deaths are all being treated as unexplained deaths.

“Because some of the bodies were at such an advanced stage of decomposition, it would be difficult to ascertain whether that person has been a victim of an unnatural death.”

Detectives in West Yorkshire are trying to identify eight bodies which have been discovered since 1974.

The most recent case was reported in May this year, when a baby girl was found dead at a waste processing site in Shipley.

The NPIA said the number of cases being investigated by Humberside Police was in “single figures”. One is believed to be that of a baby born prematurely whose body parts were found in a sewage works at Saltend, near Hull, in August 2009.

South Yorkshire Police has no unidentified body cases on its books.

Detective Superintendent Colin Prime, head of West Yorkshire Police’s Operation Recall team, which investigates cold cases, said: “We continually review cases where bodies have been found which are unidentified to both re-examine existing evidence and take advantage of the latest developments in forensic technology.

“In the vast majority of cases where remains are found in West Yorkshire they are identified quickly but, as with all cold cases, those we are not able to successfully resolve are never closed and certainly not forgotten.

“Enquiries are currently ongoing by detectives to uncover new evidence with regards to those bodies we have yet to identify.”

Joe Apps, who manages the Missing Persons Bureau at the NPIA, said there were about 700 unidentified bodies on its database nationwide, dating back to 1960.

The agency has solved eight cases since the review began in November 2009, including the mystery of a man whose body was found in the River Don in Sheffield in 1996.

The man had been reported missing in 1995, but it was only in May last year that police were able to match those details with the body in the river.

“Our interest is in providing closure to families,” Mr Apps said. “We know the anguish that families of missing people go through.

“We have contact weekly with families who have had relatives missing for years and we will not give up.”

Mr Apps said the force with the largest number of cases was British Transport Police, which must investigates people who die on railway lines in accidents or apparent suicides.