It featured an outdoor tea party and setting with a difference. Not the quintessential village vicarage lawn in a flower-bedecked English country garden with upper-class ladies in wide-brimmed hats serving succulent sandwiches, cream teas and Pimm cocktails.

The scene was scrubland and the hosts unusual - detectives seeking the public's help to solve the grisly murder of a Hampshire woman killed on the same spot seven days earlier.

In a novel twist to a murder hunt, they were invited to have coffee and biscuits with the police in the hope they could provide vital information into the last movements of Violet Pounds who was found dead on September 30, 1978, on Browndown Common that lies between Lee on Solent and Gosport.

The 62-year-old was walking her King Charles spaniel Blaze when her attacker struck with such ferocity a police chief warned: "We are looking for a maniac. He could strike again."

The fiend had bludgeoned her to death with multiple blows to her head from a fencing post.

Detective Superintendent Norman Green, who was leading the hunt with 200 officers, said at a press conference the twice-married widow could not have fended off her assailant. "She was probably hit before she knew what was happening. It was a frenzied attack and it appears that at the moment there is no motive whatsoever."

But conducting house-to-house inquiries in the area, police soon learnt the victim had told neighbours how a man had twice exposed himself to her in the same wasteland about two months before her murder. On the second occasion, he was naked.

That fateful day, fears for her safety were raised after Blaze ran off, trailing his lead, to his home half a mile away, but before anxious neighbours and relatives reached the scene, a walker had already discovered her body under an oak tree. A post-mortem however revealed she had not been sexually assaulted.

Seven days on, police hosted the unique tea party hoping bus passengers in particular could have vital information about Mrs Pounds who was just 5ft 4in tall, of medium build and at the time she died, was wearing dark green trousers, a yellowy green top coat, a multi-coloured headscarf and light tan shoes.

In the appeal for witnesses, Supt. Green urged: "We will be interested to have any information from any travellers who may have been using the road between Lee and Gosport and may have seen something suspicious through a bus window."

In a further appeal a few days later, the superintendent repeated his call for motor cycle ramblers, who had been using the wasteland, to come forward, with the re-assurance that those, who were unlicensed or uninsured at the time, had nothing to fear. "So far, only a very few have made themselves known. Only a handful have come forward compared with the number we already know were there. We are looking for a murderer and we are giving immunity for road traffic offence prosecutions to any witnesses."

Whether it was a tip off from the public or good detective work is unknown, but less than a week later on October 16, police confirmed a man was helping with their inquiries but refused to elaborate, except to say he was a local resident.

(Image: Echo)

And the 'local resident' transpired to be David Ashfield, a 24-year-old fitter's mate from Station Road, Gosport.

The following day, he appeared before the town's magistrates, charged with murder, and though David Baverstoke, defending, made an application for bail during the eight minute hearing, he was remanded in custody for eight days.

Following a series of adjournments, Ashfield appeared at Winchester Crown Court on March 5 the following year when the Crown accepted his plea to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Prosecutor Peter Fallon QC offered no evidence on the charge of murder as a psychiatric examination revealed he was suffering from an arrested or retarded development of mind with a very adolescent approach to life. Ashfield had taken to "following women to lonely places" and any he had followed could have fallen prey.

"It was an extremely violent attack," he said of Mrs Pound's last moments. "Doctors cannot place Ashfield in any mental category but they feel he should be given a fair imprisonment which will safeguard the public and enable the Home Secretary to deal with his case as a special category."

(Image: submitted)

The victim, he added, had been struck five times on the head and had clearly tried to defend herself by raising her left arm.

Passing sentence, Mr Justice Ackner told Ashfield: "For no intelligible reason you caused the death of Violent Pounds. I fully accept the medical evidence in this case that at the time you caused her death you were, and still are, suffering from an abnormality of mind which substantially impairs your responsibility for which you did, and it is on that basis, I have been prepared to accept the plea of manslaughter rather than of murder.

"For the reasons to which the doctors have referred, the only disposal I can make, in the interests of safety in the community to whom you pose a very real danger, is to sentence you to life imprisonment."