The Nude in the Nettles – aka Sutton Bank Jane Doe (It’s 1981 and we almost killed Bucks Fizz)

At 8am on Friday August 1981 the phone rang at Ripon police station.

A voice announced police would find “a decomposed body among the willow herbs” at a particular grid reference close to Sutton Bank top. The caller refused to give a name “for reasons of national security” and hung up.

Police attended the scene and, at popular picnic site, found the bones of a naked woman in a large patch of Rosebay Willow, in a case that became known as “the nude in the nettles”.

Even though it wasn’t nettles.

We know she wore pink Max Factor Nail Varnish. We know she might have had some yoghurt prior to her death. We’ve even got a good idea what she looked like. But to this day, we don’t know how she died, how she got there, or even who she was.

We also take a look back at 1981, when simply everyone was trying to assassinate world leaders! Along the way: Riots! Royal Weddings! Motorway pile-ups involving Eurovision winners! The disadvantages of owning a Delorean! Harrison Ford suddenly turning up in North Shields! The best joke ever told in the history of this podcast!

Claire congratulates Beyonce for not dying! John recreates the iconic rapping of Pitbull! Gareth tries to make sure that not even 23 and Me will sponsor us! Captain America crashes a six form leaving do!

If you know anything all about this case, please call the North Yorkshire Cold Case Review Unit on 01609 643292 or email at [email protected]. Let’s hope if nothing else that one day this woman gets her name back.

You can reach us on email [email protected], on Twitter at @everyonediespod, on Facebook and Instagram.

Our theme music is the song “Steady Away” by Pete Dilley and can be found on his album Half-truths and Hearsay which you can/should buy/stream here: https://petedilley.bandcamp.com/album/half-truths-and-hearsay

You’re always there when I’m lost for words, just thinking up more to finish the verse, it’s done!

Everyone Dies In Sunderland is a podcast about growing up terrified in the eighties and nineties. Ah, the good old days. People left their front doors unlocked. Children played out in the street. Everyone got burgled. Children got murdered, like, most days. Then there was Mad-Cow Disease and the Animals of Farthing Wood. It was a truly terrifying time to be a child. And those children are adults now. Adults with children and mortgages and Senseo Machines and jobs with actual responsibilities.And three of them have started a podcast where they laugh nihilistically at their own childhood trauma. Each week John, Gareth and Claire travel back to a year of their childhoods in North East England - like a True Crime Geordie Quantum Leap - and talk about what scared and scarred them that year, taking a closer look at one of the notorious crimes which were happening within walking distance of their childhood homes while they were watching Going Live.

• No. of episodes: 34
• Latest episode: 2023-06-11
• Comedy True Crime

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