Featured Image Credit: Met Police/Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: TV and Film, Documentaries, True Crime
Jess Hardiman
The unsolved ‘Playboy Bunny Murders’, which have baffled detectives since the 1970s, are set to be explored in a brand new ITV documentary.
The two-part series will delve into the mysterious deaths of Eve Stratford, a Playboy Bunny who aspired to be a famous model, Lynda Farrow, a croupier and mother-of-two with years of experience working in night-time London, and Lynne Weedon, a schoolgirl whose whole life laid ahead of her.
The Playboy Bunny Murders will see journalist Marcel Theroux investigate the three women’s murders, which to this day have never been solved.
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ITV said the documentary, which will comprise two 60-minute episodes, aims to ‘unravel the mystery of the victims’ deaths, through unrivalled and exclusive access to friends, colleagues and relatives of the victims who provide an intimate insight into their lives and personalities as well as archive material from the time that will bring 1970s Mayfair to life’.
The channel said: “A brand new ITVX premium true crime series will see Marcel Theroux investigate a set of disturbing murders of young women that have remained unsolved since the 1970s and reveal a dark and violent side hidden beneath the wealth and glamour of exclusive corners of London’s nightlife at that time.
“The journalist and filmmaker’s long-standing interest in the brutal murders, which shocked the London he grew up in, led him to return to the killings of Eve Stratford, a Playboy Bunny who aspired to be a famous model, Lynda Farrow, a croupier with years of experience working in night-time London, and Lynne Weedon, a schoolgirl whose whole life lay ahead of her.”
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Journalist Marcel Theroux added: “This is a story that has obsessed me for years. How could a serial killer kill multiple victims in 1970s London and remain unknown? What evidence was missed? What clues were the police of the time unable to make use of? As witnesses reach the ends of lives and memories fail, this might be the last chance to get justice for the three victims.”
Eve Stratford, 21, worked at London’s Playboy Club before she was raped and killed at her home in Leyton, East London, on 18 March 1975 – just three days after she appeared on the front cover of men’s magazine Mayfair as ‘girl of the month’.
Her throat had been slashed from ear to ear several times.
Six months later, schoolgirl Lynne Weedon had gone out to celebrate her O-Level results when she was hit over the head with an object and brutally raped in Hounslow, in West London.
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She died a week later in hospital, having failed to regain consciousness – with police later linking the two murders.
Meanwhile, Lynda Farrow was 29 years old when she was stabbed to death in her home in Woodford, east London, on 19 January 1979, having been found by her two young daughters, aged eight and 11, who had finished school early after being sent home due to a snow storm.
The death of Farrow - who was also four months pregnant when she was killed - was never solved, despite a number of renewed attempts to investigate what happened, including by the BBC’s Crimewatch in 2009.
Her case was previously connected to Stratford’s and Weedon’s deaths, but an official link has never been proven.