Could a tragic 1975 walk home finally unmask a killer’s SECRET PLAYBOY DOUBLE-LIFE?

On the night of Sept. 3, 1975, 16-year-old Lynne Weedon left her friends and began walking home through Hounslow in west London.

But she never made it.

Lynne was apparently followed from Great West Road into a secluded alleyway called The Short Hedges, near her home and school, according to The Guardian, the BBC and the London Standard. There, she was struck with a heavy, blunt object, thrown over a fence surrounding an electrical substation and raped.

She was found barely alive the following morning and taken to West Middlesex Hospital, where she died one week later. Her cause of death was a single blow to the head from a heavy, blunt weapon that was never recovered, Sky News reported.

For years, her killing appeared to be an isolated crime. However, nearly three decades later, advances in DNA testing revealed that the same man had killed another young woman on the opposite side of London six months earlier.

Schoolgirl Lynne Weedon who was found a few yards from her home and school in Hounslow, Middlesex.

Charles Ley/Mirrorpix via Getty

On March 18, 1975, Eve Stratford, a 22-year-old model and Playboy Bunny, was last seen walking home to the apartment she shared with her musician boyfriend on Lyndhurst Drive in Leyton, east London.

It was a snowy afternoon, and Stratford was returning from a meeting with her agent, The Guardian reported. At about 4:30 p.m., neighbors heard a man and woman speaking calmly inside the apartment. Then they heard a loud thud, according to the BBC.

Stratford’s boyfriend returned less than an hour later and found her dead in the bedroom. Her hands had been bound with a scarf, and her neck had been cut nearly a dozen times. There were no signs of forced entry, according to The Guardian.

Sky News reported that the murder weapon was never recovered.

Before her death, Stratford had been building a career as a model while working at the Playboy Club on Park Lane, where many of the women employed as “bunnies” were also aspiring singers, models and actresses.

She had joined the club in 1973 and was part of a close-knit group of women who socialized and looked out for one another, her friend and former coworker Sheen Doran told the BBC in 2025.

“It was very good money, but very hard work,” Doran recalled. “You are a glorified waitress. You had to stand for 10 hours in heels. But we felt safe on the job.”

“We were a lovely bunch of girls, we stuck by each other and we all got on,” she added.

Shortly before she was killed, Stratford appeared as “Girl of the Month” on the cover of Mayfair, an adult magazine. Police later believed the cover may have drawn her killer’s attention, according to the BBC.

Murder scene of Eve Stratford, 61a Lyndhurst Drive, Leyton. Eve was found dead on 18 March 1975.

Mike Maloney/Mirrorpix via Getty

Doran was near Oxford Street with another Playboy Club worker when they saw an Evening Standard placard bearing the words “Bunny Girl Dead.”

“We ran straight from Oxford Circus to the Playboy Club and into the bunny mother’s office,” she told the BBC.

Initially, the killings appeared unrelated. Stratford and Lynne lived on opposite sides of London and were not believed to have known each other.

But when investigators revisited the evidence years later, DNA found on both victims matched. The discovery meant the two women had encountered the same unidentified killer.

In 2015, 40 years after the women were killed, investigators renewed their appeal for information and offered a £40,000 reward. Police said the attacker would have known the Hounslow area because the alleyway where Lynne was attacked was removed from busy streets, where her screams might have been heard.

Lynne’s mother, Margaret Weedon, said the family had spent four decades imagining everything their daughter had been denied.

“She missed out on life, no relationship or marriage, no career or children or even just traveling the world, all taken from her,” she said, according to The Guardian. “We are left 40 years on always wondering what it would have been like — a true life sentence.”

She also mourned Stratford, whose surviving relatives had died without seeing her killer identified.

“That young lady also had her life snubbed out,” Weedon said. “Her family have died now. Another true life sentence.”

On the 50th anniversary of Stratford’s murder in March 2025, Doran and three other former Playboy Club workers sent flowers to her grave.

Doran, who left the club after her friend’s death, said the loss had been “too much” for her at the time. And five decades later, she said it “still is,” per the outlet.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed to the BBC and the Standard in 2025 that the murders remained active investigations, adding that historic unsolved cases are reviewed regularly to determine whether they can be advanced with the passage of time.

The killer has not been identified.