13-year-old April Fabb vanished on April 8th 1969, 50 years on and there is still no answers.
April Fabb went missing on 8 April 1969
On April 8th, 1969 at around 13:40 April headed off on her bike to her sisters house 2 miles away. April lived in Metton near Cromer and her sister lived in Roughton. It was April’s brother-in-laws birthday and she was delivering 10 cigarettes to her sisters house for him. However, she never arrived.
Police launched a big search to find April and since her disappearance officers have visited 400 houses, done hundreds of interviews and taken nearly 2,000 interviews. April’s bike was found in a field near Metton by a passing motorist, this discovery added to officers’ fears that she had run away.
April’s bike / NORFOLK CONSTABULARY
In the early hours on April 9th, Norfolks senior detective at the time, Det Ch Supt Reginald Lester, was called in to help. He came to the conclusion that April had been abducted. He led one of the biggest searches in the history of the Norfolk force. On the first day, 40 officers and every available police dog in the country were called in to help find April. Members of the Aylsham Round Table assisted with the search, an RAF helicopter was up above and distant relatives were contacted.
April was described as 5 foot 4 inches, with light brown hair and blue eyes.
On April 10th, more locals were helping and were eager to find April. A bloody handkerchief embroidered with ‘A’ was found and reports of a speeding van in Metton on the day she went missing were reported. Lakes were being searched, posters of April were put up everywhere and places were being checked for sightings.
Three days after her disappearance her parents appealed to the press for her return. As time went on police made a timeline below:
- April left Metton to bike to her sister Pamela’s house.
- April had seen two friends playing with a donkey in a farmer’s field and she had stopped to pet it then resumed her journey.
- The last sighting of April was by a driver of a Land Rover passing in the opposite direction at 14:06.
- Nine minutes later her bike was seen in a field by three Ordnance Survey workers passing from a distance. The bike had been thrown over a six foot bank on a country lane.
As time past the police trail had become cold and they found that the handkerchief had been used by a women whose son grazed his knee.
Back in them times police did not have the technology and abilities that they do present day. This means solving the disappearance back then way extremely difficult as there was no CCTV, automatic number plate recognition or mobile phone records.
in 2010, police looked at a well near Metton after hearing a landowner had seen a black polythene sheeting at the bottom at the time of April’s disappearance. The following year reports came that a man had been seen digging a grave nearby in 1969.
One man;’s name had been put forward as a possible suspect, he was named Robert Black, he was a notorious serial killer and had murdered four girls between 1981 and 1986. Black snatched girls from the roadside which linked to a possible theory of what happened to April however, police could not produce evidence to link him to Norfolk in 1969.
