A 78-year-old man arrested on suspicion of murdering a Yorkshire schoolgirl more than half a century ago has been released on police bail.
Elsie Frost, a 14-year-old school prefect, was walking alongside a canal towpath in Wakefield when she was stabbed in the back and head on 9 October 1965.
The investigation into Elsie’s murder was relaunched by West Yorkshire police in 2015, when a team of 14 officers examined thousands of pages of written evidence.
On Tuesday, officers from the force’s homicide and major inquiry team arrested a 78-year-old man – named locally as Peter Pickering – in Berkshire on suspicion of her murder. He has now been bailed.
The senior investigating officer, DS Nick Wallen, said: “We have now bailed a man arrested yesterday, pending further inquiries. Our investigations into Elsie’s murder remain very much ongoing.”
Before the case was reopened Elsie’s siblings – 69-year-old Anne Cleave, who was 18 at the time of the murder, and 58-year-old Colin, who was six – had called for a fresh investigation. BBC Radio 4 also aired an investigation into the case.
Elsie’s body was found at the bottom of a flight of steps by a dog walker; hundreds of people were interviewed but her killer has evaded justice ever since.
In the wake of the fresh police appeal, Colin Frost spoke out about his family’s pain, recalling that his parents, Edith and Arthur, had died “with a huge amount of guilt”.
Frost said Elsie had been like a mother to him: “She was just a sweet, sweet person. She was lovely.”
In 1966, Ian Bernard Spencer, then aged 33, was charged with Elsie’s murder but was cleared on the orders of the trial judge.
Frost told Radio 4’s World At One this week: “As a family we are very pleased. All we wanted was to be taken seriously. We were aware that mistakes were made in 1965, but we’ve been impressed with the commitment of West Yorkshire police in the reinvestigation, the number of officers involved, the number of agencies involved.”
