What's in a name?
Well, she was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and it happened on March 20th, 21st, 22nd, depending on which paper you picked up in 1985. Back then, and even today, nobody notices newspapers getting names, ages and dates wrong. That's mostly because people don't tend to read multiple versions of the same article, in different papers, to even spot typos, factual errors and the like.
Beyond that, it's just another dead woman among many. There will be another one in the national newspaper tomorrow, and the next day, and factual errors get swamped by force of numbers.
Her actual name, by the way, was Concepción Aledo Cánovas (below), according to her birth certificate and Spanish media archives, and she was born on April 23rd, 1965. Conchita to her friends and family.
It takes time - but not that much time - to get Concepción Aledo's name, age, date of birth and date of death right. That could be done, with care, in 1985 or 2024; it just had to matter enough to want to get it right. Which it didn't to national papers, looking to pad out page 11 with a paragraph, or to local papers because she wasn't a local, she was a tourist from Spain.
There were countless thousands of typos and other errors of names & ages in newspaper reporting, over the decades, and it complicates research enormously when I'm trying to track the outcome of any given murder, from initial arrest to committal proceedings to trial to verdict to appeal.
Long, frustrating hours because the name I found initially was misspelled, a nickname, a middle name, or not even the right name at all; meaning there's no later newspaper stories or court records under the name I have for my starting point.
Back to square one, guessing variations of spelling or pinning hopes that they at least got either first name or surname right. One right would be a help.
Getting a murdered woman's name right is the least she deserves, given she can't speak for herself or ask for it to be spelled right.
Where did it happen?
Jean Smith (43) was murdered on January 23rd, 1973.
One national paper wrote 'Sheffield woman murdered', which narrowed it down and enabled me to focus on Yorkshire newspapers. The most prominent of those had a paragraph saying she was found dead in Norfolk Park. A smaller paper wrote "in her flat in Fitzalan Tower"; so I went to my map and typed that in and nothing came up. Off to google search and, some more reading later, I learned Fitzalan Tower was 17 floors high, consisted of 126 flats and was demolished in 1999.
Jean lived alone in that flat, it was her sanctuary.
It got demolished for her 26 years before it did for everyone else.
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Lynn Carol Caunce (6) raped and murdered on June 12th, 1977.
Before I even tried to find out where this happened, because there is no fucking 'why' outside of the mind of the predator who did it, there's the despair of what I've just read. It never gets any easier to read and I'd probably give up if I became so inured to it to not feel anything.
She was just a child. Starting out in life.
Where did it happen? Moor Lane Flats in Preston. More reading, some tears, to arrive at Cumberland House, demolished on November 25th, 2001. Go back to 1970's ordnance survey maps to try find out exactly where that was. Probably nobody would know or care if I put the pin 100 yards away, maybe where Westmorland House once stood, but I wanted to put her pin in the right place.
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Yvonne Johnson (25) killed by her 27-year-old husband on May 18th, 1981.
It took quite a bit of reading to find out she was killed in her 9th floor flat in Franchise House, Blakenhall Gardens, Wolverhampton, a tower that was renamed to Phoenix Rise in the 1980's and demolished in 2011.
The above paragraph took less than a minute to type, the information in it took me hours to gather and put into my notes. That time included staring at maps and eventually closing my laptop when I got to the end of the process and saw he got 3 years in prison for killing her. Got out pretty much immediately from time on remand.
Released before he was 30 and just carried on with life, after cruelly ending hers.
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Demolished tower blocks tend to be the easier of the challenges because towers leave a footprint, both in media and on satellite imagery.
Much more challenging is when entire streets, estates, roads have long since vanished or been renamed, rezoned, redeveloped. Renaming of streets happened much more often than I ever thought, often council estates stigmatised by high crime rates and looking for a fresh start. Renamed streets pose a challenge, though less of a challenge than informally named places.
Journalists in the 1970's, especially for local newspapers, wrote articles assuming their readers knew perfectly well where 'Old School Road' is and it needed no contextualisation as to its location. Everyone reading the small local paper knew where it is, whereas I often don't know where to even start.
By far the most challenging and difficult days are upon discovering 'Old School Road' never existed on any map to begin with and was just informally known, locally, to describe the road leading to a school, which has also long since vanished. Many hundreds of locations on my maps were referred to by informal names and finding out where they are on a map is very difficult.
It can all be done with enough patience and perserverence.
I work progressively further back in time, to try find stories that give context to the meaning of informal places well-known to locals. Maybe a story of a car accident at the junction of 'Old School Road' and some other road that actually did exist on a map in the 1970's. Go find that road on Ordnance Survey maps and try place the pin where it once stood.
Local vs National newspapers
A woman murdered in a rural area in 1973 might get a 2 sentence report on page 7 of The Mirror.
"Woman found dead in the Cotswolds. A man is helping police with inquiries."
On a national level, it was not a big story when an abusive man stabbed his wife during an argument. It remained a small story, from the day it happened through to all subsequent court appearances. The murders that capture the attention of national papers are a small fraction of the murders committed.
On a local level, however, a domestic violence murder can be the biggest story of the year or even the decade.
The dead woman comes to life in local newspapers; who she was, where she worked, names of her children, neighbours interviewed. interests and hobbies discussed. More importantly, in terms of mapping, the location of where it happened can be described in tremendous detail. 'Body found in the lane leading from the church', 'found dead at her home at number 171 on the estate.'
If solely interested in the name of a woman who was murdered, national papers can work as a research tool. If interested in who she was and where she died, local newspapers are invaluable.
Support your local newspaper, if you have one.
