The Cutprice Guignol

On May 13th, 1983, Andy Mould and Peter Dooley arrived expected nothing but a normal day of work. The last thing on their minds was discovering human remains – but, by the day’s end, they would discover a human head buried in the Lindow Moss bog that would go on to irrevocably change the course of a twenty-year-long missing person’s case, despite the fact it was nearly two millenia old.

Lindow Moss, occasionally known as Slattersley Common, is a small peat bog on the outskirts of the Cheshire market town of Wilmslow. It’s been a feature of the surrounding landscape long before humans made a home nearby, the deep crags that made up the bog left behind by melting ice during the last ice age. Over the years, the various communities that had surrounded the bog had made use of it for purposes both practical and supernatural – it was believed that Lindow Moss served as a site of religious or spiritual significance for the ancient Celt people, and, in later centuries, the peat was excavated, dried, and used and sold as fuel.

Peat fuel remained a profitable industry through the 20th century, though, by the 1980s, the hard physical labour had mostly been replaced by machines. Mechanical excavators would remove chunks of peat from the bog, the large sections would be left to dry, and then they’d been transferred to a mill where they’d be processed and inspected to make sure they were free of any unwanted additions that might have impacted the quality of the fuel, such as branches or large quantities of bark.

Overseeing such inspections on May 13th, 1983 were Andy Mould and Peter Dooley. As the dried peat was loaded on to the conveyor, nothing, at first, seemed amiss – but, eventually, a round object covered in dirt was spotted amongst the dried matter, around the size of a football, nothing like the bark or tree branches they usually sifted from the peat. Intrigued, the pair pulled it out and brought it to supervisor Ken Harewood, who cleaned the mysterious object. Once the dirt had been sloughed off, a grim discovery awaited them: a human skull, preserved well enough to still have skin, some tufts of hair, and even the left eyeball intact.

It wasn’t the first time that some part of a well-preserved body had been found in such peat bog operations – in Schlewsig, Germany, around thirty years before in 1952, the bottom half of a preserved leg and part of a hand had been pulled from the conveyor belt just before it was destroyed, and submitted to local police. They soon established that the pieces had been accidentally trimmed off an ancient body preserved in the bog, not calling for any further investigation. And the skull found in Lindow Moss might have been subject to the same treatment – were it not for the fact that the bog led almost directly on to the garden of a man who’s wife had vanished under mysterious circumstances some twenty years before.

Peter Reyn-Bardt, an airline employee, was in his early thirties when he’d met Malika de Fernandez in 1959 – on paper, it seemed as though they were both instantly smitten with each other, as Reyn-Bardt proposed to de Fernandez after just a few hours, and they were married a few days later, in late October 1959. However, the truth was less than rosy – they moved to Cheshire together, but within just a few months, Malika de Fernandez would separate from her husband and vanish from the community altogether, leaving him living alone in a small bungalow that overlooked the Lindow Moss bog.

Reyn-Bardt claimed that his wife had left of her own accord, using his airline connections and perks to continue the travel which she had enjoyed so much, but rumours swirled around the local community about the truth of her disappearance. He would later allege that the marriage was a mutual agreement that benefitted both – on her part, an opportunity to travel cheaply and extensively, and on his, an opportunity to hide his homosexuality and gain credibility in his field (at the time that the two married in 1959, homosexuality was still illegal in the UK, and would remain that way for the better part of a decade after their nuptials).

But, while Reyn-Bardt was in prison on unrelated charges (the specifics of which I couldn’t confirm during my research, but are often quoted as revolving around sex crimes against children) in the few months before the discovery of the head in the bog, other prisoners claimed that he had boasted to them about murdering and disposing of his wife’s body in his garden. When police were alerted to the discovery of a well-preserved female human head in the bog that led on to his property, an investigation was launched into connections between the recently-recovered skull and Reyn-Bardt’s prison confessions.

On 16th May, the skull was examined by Robert Connolly, a physical anthropologist at the department of anatomy at the University of Liverpool. It was found to contain a few pieces of brain matter, the remains of an optical nerve, and a piece of scalp with several tufts of black hair – they estimated that the skull was between twenty and fifty years old and that the victim had been between twenty-five and thirty-five at the time of her death, a near-perfect match for the timeframe of de Fernandez’ vanishing. After Reyn-Bardt’s confessions, local police chose to confront him with the discovery of the skull, pulling him in for questioning in the disappearance of his wife in June of that year.

Peter Reyn-Bardt made little attempt to deny his crime: when confronted with the discovery of a female skull just a few hundred yards from his own, he confessed to the police that, in 1961, he had strangled de Fernandez and dismembered and buried her in the garden of his bungalow after failing to burn the remains. Trembling and clammy, he led the police to the garden of his bungalow, and pointed out where he had buried the body of his wife decades before. “It has been so long,” he told them. “I thought I wound never been found out.”

Reyn-Bardt was swiftly taken into custody and charged with the murder of his wife some two decades earlier, his trial set for December 1983, less than a year after the skull had been found. And, with a confession and the skull of the victim in hand, it looked as though Reyn-Bardt was guaranteed to live out the rest of his life behind bars.

But, for Detective Sargent George Abbott, something about the case didn’t sit right. When the police set about digging up the garden of the bungalow to find the other pieces of de Fernandez’ body, they came up with nothing. Even though the skull that had been discovered seemed to fit the description of de Fernandez, Abbott send the head to Oxford University for further analysis.

Late in the summer of 1983, Professor Teddy Hall, of the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, was met by two uniformed police officers carrying a hat box. When he took off the lid, he was met by the sight of the skull that had been found in the bog, now known as the Lindow Woman – it had decayed due to improper storage under police jurisdiction, but enough tissue had survived for Hall to conduct accurate testing on the skull. A month later, he returned with the results: the skull had not, as they initially suspected, been hidden in the bog for a few decades, but had actually been there for more than 1600 years. Whoever this woman was, she had been killed before the Romans had left Britain, not in the summer of 1961 – and could not be the body of Malika de Fernandez.

But how exactly had this body that was more than a millenium and a half old convinced police that it could be connected to such a recent case? The excellent preservation of the specimen is down to the unique properties of bogs like Lindow Moss; specifically, the presence of large quantities of sphagnum moss and an average annual temperature of 10°C or lower. Upon decaying, sphagnum moss consumes oxygen, creating an anaerobic environment conducive to tissue preservations. Add to this the natural tannins (chemicals used to tan and create leather from skin) found in peat bogs, and you have a near-perfect place to preserve soft tissue for millennia – while harder substances, such as bone and objects buried with the bodies, decay, the skin, hair, and even internal organs can survive for hundreds of years. So-called “bog bodies” have been a source of fascination and discovery for the archaeological community for centuries, after the first was found in the 1600s in Germany. The majority have been uncovered in the colder Northern regions of Europe, and have offered a unique and valuable insight into ancient people, their anatomy, and their rituals.

In Cheshire, the discovery of the skull’s true age sent the case against Peter Reyn-Bardt into chaos – the widower attempted to recant his confession, and sought to have his charge downgraded to manslaughter. While trying the case with no body would be more difficult, his detailed confession led the authorities to continue with the charge of murder, and Reyn-Bardt went to trial in December 1983.

During the trial, Reyn-Bardt confessed once again – he told the story of how de Fernandez had come to his home, which he shared with his male lover, in an attempt to extort money out of him in return for keeping the truth of his homosexuality hidden. What began as an amicable meeting, according to Reyn-Bardt, soon escalated into violence, as de Fernandez scratched at Reyn-Bardt’s face with her long nails; Reyn-Bardt grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, not realising until after the assault that she was dead. “I was terrified and could not think clearly,” he offered, as explanation for his makeshift burial. “The only thing that came to mind was to hide her.” Under questioning from the defense attorney, he admitted that he had dismembered his wife’s corpse with an axe before burying the pieces of her body in a drainage trench in his garden, just a few hundred meters from Lindow Moss.

While none of the other parts of de Fernandez’ body were recovered, the prosecutor suggested that they may have been carried off by local wildlife, such as foxes or badgers. After deliberating for just three hours, the jury voted 11-1 in favour of Reyn-Bardt’s guilt, and he spent the rest of his life in prison for the murder of Malika de Fernandez.

But, less than a year later, another discovery was made in Lindow Moss – in August 1984, once again, Andy Mould brought the conveyor to a halt when he spotted what looked to be a large piece of bark amongst the peat. After quickly brushing off the dirt, he discovered a toenail poking through peat, and the police were swiftly informed of this new discovery.

Officers attended the scene – could this be the missing body of Malika de Fernandez that had eluded them for so long? Archaeologist Rick Turner was called to the bog, where he confirmed that a flap of skin – tanned a deep brown after decades in the bog – was sticking out from beneath the peat. Turner led an excavation of the area, and soon, the body was uncovered. After eleven weeks and extensive testing, it was confirmed that the body was that of a man, and that the bog had served as another burial site for an ancient resident of the area. The Lindow Man, as he would come to be known, was estimated to be around 1900 years old, and, while his death presents a murder mystery in its own right, it was one that predated Ryan-Berdt’s case by at least a century and a half.

The Lindow Man would come to be recognised as the first intact “bog body” to be found in the UK, while his predecessor would gain the most infamy thanks to her connection with a bizarre murder case and the confession that followed. The Lindow Woman’s identity still poses its own mystery, but, in the process, she solved another – hundreds of years after she died.

If you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me on Patreon or dropping me a tip via my Support page.

Sources

The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People by Don R Brothwell

Contemporary Newspaper Reports

The Scientific Study of Mummies by Arthur D Aufderheide

The Lindow Man Phenomenon Ancient and Modern by Rick Turner

BBC Documentary Overkill