Yahoo News The shy Sunday school teacher who was murdered in a lovers' lane
Elisabeth Foster was a quiet, cautious young woman. At 17 years old, she gave her time as a Sunday school teacher at the Pentecostal church in North Road, Preston. Each week, she would set off to catch the bus from her home in Kirkham to church.
But on the cold evening of January 7, 1972, she never made the return journey. At 5.30pm, as she waited at the bus stop in her turquoise leather coat, her bible toucked under one arm, she grew increasingly anxious, as the bus was delayed and she feared she would be late.
Elisabeth was wary of strangers, but when Brian Ball, a cheery bus conductor, pulled over to offer her a lift, she had no reason to be suspicious. After all, she travelled by bus with him most weeks. How could she have known the reason for the delay was that Ball had left work early, claiming he was unwell, and it took time to find a replacement for him that evening?
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When Elisabeth didn't return to her family home in Bleasdale Avenue, her parents were not concerned. The family had relatives in Preston and Elisabeth would sometimes stay at their home after work. Not everyone had a home phone and it was not unusual for the sixth former to be out of touch.
But the following morning, a doctor was walking his dog in a quiet lane in Wrea Green when he made a grim discovery. Elisabeth's body lay, partially clothed and beaten in a ditch behind a hawthorn hedge.
A control room was set up in Kirkham with 100 detectives assigned to the case. A post-mortem revealed Elisabeth had been sexually assaulted and strangled before her body was dumped in Brynning Lane - a quiet back road known to be a lovers' lane. Her underwear and a shoe, were later found a short distance away but it was the painstaking work of forensic experts which eventually led to her killer.
Investigators made plaster casts of tyre marks found near to where the body was found. This, along with upholstery fibres and flecks of red paint, which were found on Elisabeth's clothing, allowed detectives to narrow down the vehicle they were looking for.
Importantly, a sample taken from Elisabeth's body was found to be the rare blood type B. Every man in Kirkham was asked to provide a blood sample, with 10,000 samples being taken. 35,000 people were interviewed, but after 11 weeks, detectives were no closer to catching the killer.
However in April 1972, detectives made a crucial discovery. A suspicious vehicle had been found at a scrapyard near Kirkham. The red 1962 MG Magnette was perched among the wrecks of vehicles. It's tyres were missing and the rear was splashed with paint. Fortunately the scrapyard owner kept good records and the tyres were traced. They were Fisk - and one had a rubber plug in it, matching it to the plaster prints taken from the scene.
The next step was to trace the DVLA records in Swansea. The vehicle had last been registered to Brian Herbert Ball, a bus driver from Lancashire, who liked to chat up young passengers on his route. The pieces fell into place. Elisabeth would never have accepted a lift from a stranger, but Ball had been absent from work that evening - and he would have known where to find her.
For months, the married father-of-two had carried on his daily business, believing he had got away with the killing. His wife admitted they had marital problems but knew nothing of her husband's dark secret until the police knocked on her front door. They had their man. Ball's blood was taken and found to be type B. He was charged with Elisabeth's murder.
With the evidence stacked against him, Ball took to the witness box at Lancaster Crown Court and claimed he had chanced upon the pretty Sunday school teacher on his way home from work. He offered her a lift to Preston but took an indirect route via Inskip. He told the jury he stopped in the lovers' lane with Elisabeth, where she willingly had sex with him, but began to scream when she realised he was not wearing protection.
Her father, a church leader at the Pentecostal Church in Preston, said Elisabeth would never have given herself willingly to the 30-year-old predator. On October 20, 1972, after a four day trial, Ball was convicted of manslaughter, but cleared of Elisabeth's murder.
Sentencing him to 10 years in prison, Mr Justice Caulfield praised the work of the detectives, saying: "It is a consolation to the public that such a crime was pursued so relentlessly, carefully and cautiously."
