24/05/2026
A CASE WHICH HAUNTS ME TO THIS DAY
The Great Yarmouth Major Enquiry Kidnap Abduction and Murder of Leoni Keating aged 3 years and Friday The 13th
During September 1985 little blonde haired Leoni Keating also known as Cornell, who was aged three years old (the same age as my daughter), was on holiday with her mother in Caravan K24 at Seashore Holiday Camp part of the huge sprawling complex of Vauxhall Caravan Park situated on the north side of Great Yarmouth adjacent to the golden sandy beach of this popular Norfolk seaside resort.
They had escaped for a short time the inner city environment of Acton London where they lived in a battered wives hostel with a group of other women and children who they had come on holiday with. Leoni’s mum had never seen the child happier as she had played all day long on the sandy beach, and paddling in the chilly North Sea surf; but now the holiday was over; tomorrow they would be going home.
On that last evening of Friday the 13th Leoni dressed in pyjamas was tucked up in bed by her mother who went out at 10pm for some light relief, a baby-sitter and patrolling baby watch had been arranged for 10:30pm and Leoni was left alone asleep in the locked static caravan, but with a window ajar for ventilation. Due to a mix up the baby-sitter was half an hour late and when she arrived at 11:00pm the front door of the caravan was open, Leoni’s bed was empty and it was wrongly assumed that her mum must have changed her mind and taken Leoni with her. When Leoni’s mum returned from the Disco Bar at 12:10am some two hours later she found neither babysitter nor Leoni. In the confusion that followed it wasn’t until 3:00am that the Norfolk Constabulary were alerted.
The first reaction was that Leoni had probably woken up before the baby-sitter arrived and had got up and wandered off. Officers with dogs and powerful torches searched the camp, the beach and the sea front. Perhaps she had been found wandering by other campers who had taken her in for the night. But by dawn there was still no sign of her.
As soon as Great Yarmouth Police received the missing person report a force wide manpower team was set up and a search made during the night and into the next dawn of the immediate area in the belief that Leoni had awoken and being alone had wandered off and had some sort of accident or had drowned in the sea. With still no trace of her on the Saturday morning Norfolk Constabulary called on all Early Turn duty officers in the county to muster and go to the nearby Caister Holiday Camp for briefing and deployment and I was one of the officers from King’s Lynn who was so deployed.
On arrival at Caister I saw that there was an enormous amount of police officers and holiday makers alike and after a briefing on the circumstances we were tasked with going to Great Yarmouth and conducting an extensive search of The Race Course, Sand Dunes, Beach, Caravan Site consisting of approx. 1000 caravans to search together with the entire Norfolk Constabulary Police Dog Section and as many holiday makers and local people who were available. Coastguards, two life boats and an air-sea rescue helicopter searched offshore whilst we combed the landside but to no avail.
What was not known at that time was that this little girl barely out of babyhood had been snatched through the caravan window and spirited away into the night to be s*xually assaulted and murdered. The following Sunday Papers were full of the report and most carried a copy of the last photograph of little Leoni playing happily with her rag doll on the beach a few days before.
Little did anyone on the enquiry know then that the little child was already dead and more than 40 miles away floating semi naked, gagged and tied up in a water filled drainage ditch at Mildenhall in Suffolk having been r***d and murdered by being thrown in the water whilst still alive with her hands and feet tied behind her back with a yellow washing line, like one of the young victims of Robert Black; 10 year old Sarah Harper.
But as heinous as that crime was this little mite was no more than a toddler and could not have put up any fight; having expended his evil lust her perpetrator left her trussed up like a piece of meat before tossing her into water to die in an agonising drowning with no chance of survival. Who knows what Leoni would have made of her life, had she lived she would be nearing thirty-four years old now, an adult, and probably married and with children of her own, but her young life was snuffed out before it had a chance to begin.
In the CID office at Yarmouth Police Station detectives had good reason to fear that Leoni’s disappearance might not be an accident or misadventure. Earlier that summer during June, there had been a terrifying incident at the same campsite. A fourteen year old girl getting ready for bed after her parents had gone out for a drink had been grabbed by a man who had burst into her caravan. He had dragged her outside and tried to carry her off in his car. The girl had torn herself from his grasp and as she broke free her attacker lunged at her with a knife stabbing her in the back. Luckily the wound was not serious, although it did need four stitches. The attacker had not been found, for Yarmouth CID it was an unsolved attempted abduction, but it could easily have become a murder. Had the same man come back and snatched Leoni? It was a horrible possibility.
A Major Incident Room was set up at Great Yarmouth Police Station with everything coming in being placed on the newly formed HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) computerised system. Having been HOLMES trained as an Indexer/Researcher I was on standby to travel to Great Yarmouth with a suitcase packed for an extended stay.
The terrible news everyone had feared came; Leoni was found five days later in the manner described. Some 40 miles away from Great Yarmouth, a woman motorist pulled into a Pic-Nic site on the A1065 road at Barton Mills, situated between Bury St Edmunds and Mildenhall in Suffolk. It was a pleasant site, with wooden tables set back from the road in a copse of pine trees.
The woman walked through the trees until she came to a wide d**e, a Relief Channel that carried flood water away from the River Lark. There caught in the reeds at the edge was the body of a small child floating face down in the water. The Detective Chief Superintendent, head of Suffolk CID watched as police divers lifted the body from the muddy water and laid it on a sheet of plastic. She had been gagged and her hands were lashed tightly behind her back with a length of yellow nylon washing line. It was Leoni Keating and she was still wearing her pyjama jacket, but the trousers were missing. The area was sealed and an intensive search for clues began. The pathologist confirmed that she had been dead for about three days, her lungs were full of water which meant that she had died by drowning the killer had thrown her into the water whilst she was still alive, but with no chance of being able to save herself.
The Det Supt Head of Suffolk conferred with the Norfolk Head of CID where the abduction had taken place, and as Suffolk was the County she died in; they elected to run the murder enquiry at this point on from Suffolk Headquarters at Ipswich and Mildenhall with Norfolk having a dual Incident Room at Great Yarmouth, that way all three rooms were in direct contact by computer, fax and telephone. During the afternoon of Friday the 20th of September one week after Leoni’s abduction and a short time after her body had been discovered I was on Rest Day at home. A local officer brought me a message to report for duty at King’s Lynn the following day at 6:30am and there would be transport laid on to take me to Great Yarmouth for 9:00am and to have a case packed for a prolonged duty at Great Yarmouth Incident Room. Sometime later in the day these instructions were cancelled so this is one Incident Room I was short listed for but didn’t actually get to go on.
While one group of detectives scrutinised the details of the previous abduction attempt at the Yarmouth caravan site, another case came back under the spotlight. Exactly three years before Leoni was abducted and murdered, an 11 year old girl was kidnapped from a holiday camp 70 miles further south along the North Sea coast, at St Osyth near Clacton in Ess*x. On the 13th of September 1982. This girl who was from Harlow in Ess*x, was on holiday with her mother at the Bel Air Caravan Park. Like Leoni and the attempted abduction, she too was alone in the caravan getting ready for bed, when a man knocked on the door. It was 10:20pm. The caller told her that he was a Mini-Cab driver who had been sent by her mother to collect her. The trusting girl, still in her pyjamas went with the man to his car a brown Rover saloon. But once inside the man grabbed Pauline and tied her arms behind her back and stuffed a gag in her mouth. He then took her on a five-hour drive.
Somehow the terrified girl persuaded her abductor to remove the gag from her mouth. Certain that she was going to be taken away to be murdered the girl held her nerve and found enough courage to engage the stranger in conversation. The girl told him of her love for animals and that her mother had enrolled in the anti-vivisection society. The kidnapper told her that he had once broken into a place where experiments on animals were carried out. Detectives were convinced that this was the conversation that had saved her life. The kidnapper identified too much with the child and could not bring himself to murder her.
But it was how the girl’s ordeal had ended that was so significant, her abductor drove her from Ess*x, through Suffolk, to Norfolk; there he headed for Gt Yarmouth. At 5:00am on the 14th of September, 1982 the girl was found bound and gagged but otherwise unharmed in the lavatory block of the North Denes Caravan Site, close to the site that Leoni was later abducted from.
She had described her abductor as being a man in his 20’s, strongly built, with brown hair and a moustache. The 14year old in the attempted abduction case described a muscular man with brown hair and a moustache. Detectives from the three East Anglian Forces reviewed all the information they had and a further media appeal was launched.
The request brought a small but vital result, a motorist contacted the police to say that he had been on the A1065 at about 3:30am on the 14th of September 1985 and at the bridge where the road crosses the flood relief channel he had noticed a brown Rover saloon parked by the side of the road. Also intensive police work at the Seashore Site in Yarmouth had produced witnesses who had seen a dark coloured Rover saloon near the campsite around the time that Leoni had vanished; it had a sticker in the rear window. Members of the Leoni task force questioned suspects drawn up from their locality and officers from other surrounding forces were asked to carry out checks on other suspects living in their districts.
In the meantime several months elapsed and more and more information was fed into the HOLMES system, including similar crimes committed elsewhere and this coupled with pertinent intelligence submitted by a Detective Constable with Norfolk, trawled out a suspect Gary Hopkins. On the 6th of November 1986, a DC of Bedfordshire CID was detailed to visit a man living in Severn Way, Brickhill, a district of Bedford.
Gary Hopkins then aged 28 years, barely literate a former labourer and Bingo Caller, but then unemployed lived in a flat above a greengrocer’s shop with his common-law wife. Hopkins was well known to the Bedfordshire local police. Over the previous 10 years he had collected a dozen or more convictions for burglary, theft and assault on police. He also had convictions for indecently exposing himself to women. It was the combination of the burglary record and the convictions for minor s*x crimes that had made him a fringe suspect in the Leoni case. Also in the St Osyth abduction of three years previous, on the same night that the 11 year old girl was snatched, Ess*x Police had earlier been called to another strange incident at the site. Two women in their 20’s found that their caravan had been burgled and a camera stolen amongst other property. Later the same evening a crudely written note was pushed under their caravan door saying if they wanted their camera back they should open their curtains and perform obscene acts together in front of the window; in order that he could self-pleasure himself. It was suspected that this was the earlier work of the girl’s abductor, who had continued to prowl around the camp until the Police left and he later snatched the schoolgirl from her caravan.
The DC had read the file on the case thoroughly before leaving his office. At first Hopkins denied that he had ever been to Yarmouth and more importantly the Seashore Holiday Camp; but the DC noticed Hopkins body language, fidgeting in his chair and his eyes flickering nervously. The DC asked him if he was absolutely sure. Hopkins changed his mind. Yes, he remembered now, he had been to the Seashore Camp, but it was a week before Leoni disappeared. Hopkins denied having a car and again was nervous and evasive, then said at least not currently. When pressed he eventually admitted that he had sold his car a few days ago; it was a Brown Rover. After more persistent questioning Wright established that a local garage had the Brown Rover.
The DC drove straight there and they still had the car, a Brown Rover with a sticker in the back window. The DC headed back to his Bedford Office and rang the murder squad at Suffolk HQ; they studied his report carefully, and sent out a team of officers to Bedford to talk to Hopkins. After that the East Anglian officers were convinced that Hopkins was the man that they were looking for and put him under surveillance.
On the 22nd of November 1985 a search warrant for Hopkins home was obtained and Hopkins was arrested and taken to Suffolk HQ, where under questioning he broke down and confessed to kidnapping Leoni. He told the investigators that, after putting false number plates on his Rover, he had gone to the caravan park with a bunch of keys to burgle caravans while holidaymakers were out on the town. He claimed that he never intended to kidnap anyone (look at the previous circumstances) and was in K24 and was rummaging around for something to steal when Leoni “suddenly appeared.” All of the previous evidence suggests a character that would spend time in preparation and pre-select his victim prior to abduction to make sure that the coast was clear.
Hopkins claimed that he could remember nothing until he found himself driving towards Barton Mills with Leoni bound and gagged in the car (Jackanory). He admitted stopping at the Pic-Nic site, but denied that he had killed her. Weeping, he told detectives he had no idea that there was a river behind the fir trees; he had never been there before. He said “I was scared. I panicked. I tied her up and left her there, but I swear that I didn’t put her in the water behind the trees because it was pitch dark. She must have walked through the trees and fallen in by accident. I am not a murderer.”
But the detectives knew that he was lying, at his flat they found a roll of undeveloped film, which proved to include a sequence of shots of the Pic-Nic site and the flood relief channel. Leoni hadn’t staggered through the trees to her death, the area between the Pic-Nic site and the water was almost impassable with thorns and brambles. Yet there was not a single scratch or cut on Leoni’s legs when she was found. The following day Hopkins was charged with the abduction of the 11 year old and the abduction and the wounding of the 14 year old at Gt Yarmouth two months before Leoni vanished.
The trial of Gary Hopkins began at Ipswich Crown Court on the 23rd of June 1986. He pleaded guilty to kidnapping Leoni, but stuck to his story that he did not kill her. The Prosecution destroyed Hopkins claims that he had not killed Leoni, Mr Michael Hill told the Jury: “The condition of her legs showed she did not get to her feet before stumbling through the forest and falling down the bank into the water. The truth is that this man threw her into the water while she was tied. She drowned because of his deliberate actions.” The trial lasted only three days; the Jury decided unanimously that Hopkins was a murderer. Mr Justice Mann told him: “The circumstances of her death displayed a degree of callousness and depravity which is almost unbelievable.” He gave Hopkins four life sentences with a minimum term of 25 years which originally meant that he would be eligible for release in late 2011 when he was aged fifty-four years and young enough to pick up where he left off. Author: In August 2008 Hopkins had a 30 year minimum tariff put in place, which amended the original sentence. He now will not be eligible to seek parole until December 2015; which included the 6 months on remand before his trial; God willing he should never be released. Update June 2016 currently there is still no decision on Hopkins release date.
Cold Case Reviews should be looked at for the decade from the mid-1970’s when he was 17, forward to September 1985, for offences of a similar nature occurring on the East and South Coast, utilising the National Method Index at New Scotland Yard, tying in with Hopkins known antecedent history movements; as it is clear to me that his 1982 offence was not his first attempt at abduction and intended murder.
Child murderer denied parole for FIFTH time after 40 years behind bars
Gary Hopkins, now Xavier Themis, has been denied parole for the fifth time after kidnapping and murdering Leoni Keating and abducting two other…
