n 29 October 2004, a young woman walked into Wembley Point, a distinctive triangular office block in the outer reaches of north-west London. The 21-storey tower slices into the sky, a lattice of windows and white and bronze panelling. More than double the height of any other building in the vicinity, it is surrounded by a large car park and situated on an intersection: the roaring traffic of the North Circular on one side, the off-licences and chicken shops of Harrow Road on the other.
In the cafe, the woman bought a coffee and sat at a table close to a window. She smoked a cigarette from an almost empty 10-pack of Marlboros and leafed through a copy of the Guardian she was thought to have brought with her. Then she stood up, climbed on to the table, opened the window and jumped out. “Things happened in a split second,” one person in the cafe at the time
Soon after 9am, police retrieved the woman’s body from the river below. She did not have a single identifying document or object on her; no wallet, no bank cards or driving licence, no house keys, no phone. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, the questions only grew. No one came forward to identify the woman’s body or report her missing. The police investigation stalled, if it ever really began; the death was clearly a suicide with no evidence of third-party involvement, so probably not a high priority. “I didn’t hear any more about it,” Hedderman says. “We didn’t get interviewed. We didn’t see police in the building.
In the US, the rise of genetic genealogy and the huge popularity of commercial DNA testing sites such as 23andMe have helped to solve a wave of cold cases. But the British police do not currently use these commercial entities, and while they do check DNA against their own databases, in 2004 DNA science was still in its infancy – and it is not clear if samples were even taken from the Wembley Point woman. The case soon went cold. No one was actively trying to find her – until a few years ago.
Angela Watts, 67, is a former Salvation Army minister based in Wiltshire who leads the team of volunteers looking into the Wembley Point woman. Now retired, she spends her time volunteering – not just with Locate, but as a rescue driver for the Salvation Army’s modern slavery programme, transporting people across the country to safe houses, often at very short notice. Watts’s interest in people left behind, forgotten and marginalised began with her work as a minister.
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