BRITAIN: The Hermit of Les Ecr

A new moon shone that Saturday night in March 1960 in St. Martin, a picturesque dot of a town on the coast of Jersey, largest of the bucolic Channel Islands. As the village slept, a silent intruder broke into a small cottage, abducted a 14-year-old girl from her ground-floor bedroom and led her to a nearby field, where he raped her and nearly strangled her by twisting a rope around her neck.

The girl's ordeal was only the latest in a series of similar horrors, and it sent waves of...

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