A canopy was hastily erected and in the dim light from a single electric bulb on a bleak winter's morning, an eminent pathologist began his grim task of examining a body.

Under the cover of the wartime blackout, 16-year-old Peter Jefferies, rushing to catch a train to attend school in Winchester, stumbled across what he thought was a pile of rags dumped in a Southampton cul-de-sac, but then, to his horror, he realised it was the corpse of a half-naked woman which had been exposed to the elements for hours.

Her imitation leopard coat lay open, her skirt pulled above her waist. Robbery had not been the motive for murder, the meagre contents of her brown leather handbag nestling against a shoulder were untouched. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Horrified at what he had witnessed, the teenager rushed to the local police station and with minutes at 8.30am on February 13, 1945, several officers swarmed the scene in Exmouth Road, a short sloping road entered between the Bay Tree Inn and Oxborough's tyre depot. Its few cottages had been obliterated in air raids and the street - which no longer exists - ended at the main railway cuttings.

Helen Hoyles had recently moved to rented accommodation less than 200 yards away after a general shop, above which she lived in the same road, had been blitzed.

Chief. Supt. Harry Kemble stood nearby, studying the body of the 50-year-old spinster, a kitchen assistant at the American Red Cross Club in the High Street, dispensing not just tea and sympathy to foreign servicemen but also paid sex.

"She was known as a sporting amateur," the late former Det Con Archie Davies, then in charge of the crime record office of the old Southampton force, remarked. "She and the man had obviously gone down the cul-de-sac for sex but never got round to it."

Though Kemble publicly expressed hopes of an early arrest, privately he knew it wouldn't be a straight forward task. It had been raining all night and major clues had been washed away. Everything was afloat.

Police however harboured a secret clue. For days, police did not disclose they had recovered an American services' forage cap under the corpse. Several hairs, found inside, were carefully preserved.

But this was wartime Southampton and GIs were pouring in and out of the town day and night, and within hours, the killer could have been dozens of miles away. 

Kemble took the rare step of bringing in two trained bloodhounds, Magda and Minstrel. The owner, Nina Elms, held the cap close to their nostrils, urging: "Find him! find him!"  The dogs were taken to various military camps where parades were conducted. Hoyles had fought desperately for her life and police hoped her killer bore scratch marks but the initiative proved fruitless. Not a surprise in one sense as Hoyles was known to sport such a cap for amusement. 

Inquiries revealed she had left the club at about 10.40pm. "She had no enemies," assistant manager Ernest Williams, one of the last people to see her alive, told the Echo. "She was a very nice little woman. She kept herself to herself but was always pleasant and tidy. She got on with her job which was making sandwiches."

But her easy-going attitude gained her many 'admirers' and only ten days before her demise, she had been caught by a beat officer in a compromising position entertaining an American soldier in the bombed Holy Trinity Church. Tales abounded of her leaving work early to meet servicemen before she went home.

Police soon received a report Hoyles had been heard arguing with a drunken soldier. The man was described as being about 25, about 5ft 8in tall, of average build and with light coloured hair. His clothing included a light field jacket and an overseas cap. Significantly, he bore a striking resemblance to a man with whom she had been drinking in the Robert Burns pub a fortnight before. 

Witnesses recalled him having "staring eyes" and was called Denny.   

The investigation was however hampered by the reluctance of a local family to help. An American sailor had apparently taken a 14-year-old Bitterne girl to the cinema and on the way home they passed the cul-de-sac. The girl's mother told her not to say anything, fearing she would get into trouble, but the sailor eventually came forward, saying they had heard a quarrel in Exmouth Road, They could not make out the figures but heard the muffled voice of a woman pleading: "Don't kill me, please, please."

But they sadly did not intervene and walked on.

However, another man had aroused the police's suspicions. In Hoyles' room, they found two love letters addressed to her and written by a man called Hale. They were printed in the Echo and Hale, a US private working in a military hospital, called the police, but he was quickly eliminated as he had not been in Southampton for months.

A further line of inquiry was opened up over a sailor from Hedge End but he too was ruled out. Gradually, the murder faded from the headlines until Inspector Gordon Baker - later secretary at Southampton Football Club - flew to France to find the man with the "staring eyes". Hundreds of soldiers were quizzed but to no avail, with a jury concluding she had been murdered by "person or persons unknown."

And that appeared to be that. 

Then suddenly came a dramatic announcement that Kemble and Baker, who was still working on the case with the US military, had flown to Frankfurt to interview a prisoner at Mannheim prison. The suspect, a GI who had been stationed in England, was serving nine years for strangling a German woman. Following the interrogation by the Southampton officers, he was transferred to a prison in America.

There, the official line of inquiry ended but unofficially it wasn't.

The case files have long been lost or destroyed but it is believed they contained the name of another major suspect - not an American but a Southampton man who had been living in the Seamen's Hostel in Oxford Street. He had subsequently died at sea.

"The reason he came into the frame was that he never slept in his bed that night," Davies recalled. "There was a tie-up between the pair. They say he drowned but I doubt if anyone really knew. All I will say is that when the man drowned, the glimmer of hope of finding anyone responsible for the death of that poor woman drowned with him."