Murder of Teresa De Simone

Teresa Elena De Simone, a 22-year-old clerk for the Southern Gas Board who also worked part-time as a barmaid, was murdered in the early hours of 5 December 1979 in Southampton, England. She had finished her shift at the Tom Tackle public house on Commercial Road and gone to a nearby nightclub with her friend Jenni Savage. Savage drove her back to the pub car park between 00:30 and 01:00, and was the last person known to have seen her alive before she walked to her own car. The following morning her body was discovered on the back seat of her car by the pub's landlord, Anthony Pocock, when he attempted to move the vehicle for a delivery.

A pathologist determined De Simone had died of long, slow strangulation, with bruising consistent with a chain and crucifix she had been wearing, which was never recovered. Evidence indicated she had been raped shortly before death, and semen recovered from swabs indicated a male perpetrator with blood type A or AB. Numerous items of her jewellery and belongings were never recovered. Police, led by Detective Superintendent John Porter, conducted an extensive investigation involving thousands of interviews.

Sean Hodgson, who had been arrested in Southampton for an unrelated theft shortly after the murder, became a suspect. He had a history of compulsive false confessions and had been diagnosed with a severe personality disorder. In December 1980 he confessed to a priest and prison officials that he had killed a woman at the Tom Tackle pub, and gave police details that were later described at trial as "secret details" not publicly disclosed. In 1982, following a 15-day trial at Winchester Crown Court during which Hodgson did not testify, a jury unanimously convicted him of De Simone's murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hodgson maintained his innocence throughout nearly three decades of imprisonment. In 2008, solicitors acting for him traced surviving forensic swabs believed destroyed, and DNA testing conducted by January 2009 showed the semen could not have come from him. His conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal on 18 March 2009, and he was released after 27 years in custody, in what became one of the longest-recognized miscarriages of justice in English legal history. Hodgson died in October 2012.

Following his exoneration, Hampshire Constabulary reopened the case as Operation Iceberg. Familial DNA searching led investigators to David Andrew Lace, who as a 17-year-old had confessed to raping and killing De Simone in a 1983 police interview while in custody for another matter; his confession had been dismissed at the time because he had misdescribed some details. Lace died by suicide in December 1988. His body was exhumed in August 2009, and in September 2009 police announced that DNA from the exhumation was a complete match to crime-scene evidence. The Crown Prosecutor stated the evidence would have been sufficient to charge Lace had he been alive, while noting this was not a declaration of guilt absent a trial. A subsequent search for De Simone's missing jewellery, based on details in Lace's confession, did not recover any items. The Independent Police Complaints Commission reviewed the original investigation's handling of Lace's 1983 confession but concluded in October 2009 that no further action was warranted given the passage of time and deaths of senior officers involved.