Remembering real tragedies
When I was 15, a teenage girl was raped and murdered in my local area. We lived in a sleepy rural part of south Oxfordshire, and I remember it feeling surreal that something so terrible could happen within my world.
When I set about writing The Night She Dies, I found myself thinking about that crime a lot. The book is set in the village where the victim lived – Chinnor – and close to where she died. I used my memories of that time to help shape the village community’s response to my fictional murder, and in recognition of the insight I took from this case, I wanted to share more about Rachael Partridge 37 years on.
Rachael was 17 when she died and living with her family at Chinnor Hill, on the outskirts of Chinnor. I didn’t know Rachael personally, but she had gone to my school, two years above me, and left after her O levels. In 1987 she had a trainee job, a busy social life, and a boyfriend.
On the evening of 25th August, Rachael visited a friend in Thame, then decided to hitch a lift home. Chinnor Road is long and straight, and I’ve driven it hundreds of times over the years. The journey takes about 10 minutes, but Rachael never made it home. This was before mobile phones, or location trackers, so when her boyfriend got worried, he got on his motorbike and went to look for her. But without success. Rachael’s body was discovered by farmworkers the next morning, in a barn in Bledlow Ridge, six miles from Chinnor.
The crime made the national news and was featured on Crimewatch. It also became the talking point of our school and local community. I am ashamed to say that the horror we all felt was tinged by a feeling of intrigue, and the big question – who did it?
I remember never doubting that it would be somebody local. I don’t know if this was down to my narrow outlook at 15 years old or how the police were conducting their investigation. They asked all the men in the Bledlow Ridge area (including Chinnor) to turn up at either the police station or the village hall to have a DNA sample taken. I remember my best friend’s father giving his, and the totally unjustified look of culpability on his face when he returned – as though just by being the same gender as the killer, he had something to feel ashamed of.
Eventually they caught and charged 29-year-old Ronald Cheshire for Rachael’s murder using DNA evidence – one of the first murder trials to use this – and he was given a life sentence in 1989. And he was local – he was from Thame.
In 2010, Cheshire had served over 20 years, so may have been eligible for parole soon after. But then his DNA was matched in a cold case investigation – a crime he pleaded guilty to and was given an additional nine-year sentence for. Seven years before he attacked Rachael, Cheshire had kidnapped and raped a teenage girl in Maidenhead, 20 miles from Chinnor. Criminologists suggested that this followed a familiar pattern of crimes escalating.
As a crime writer, I create fictional murders to give my readers the intrigue of working out who the killer is without the horror of a real victim. But cases like Rachael’s remind me that real murders do happen, and it’s important to remember the utter devastation they cause for families and communities.
