TY, from very lengthy link, rbbm...The Wembley Point mystery: who was the woman who jumped to her death?
One October morning in 2004, a woman took the lift to the 21st floor of an office block in north-west London, bought a coffee in the cafe there – then opened a window and jumped out. No one knew who she was. Do they now?www.theguardian.com
''It was before 9am and workers were still filtering into Wembley Point. The woman got into the lift. Two fellow passengers recall she was intensely distressed. One told investigators he said something like: “Cheer up, love, it might never happen.” When they got out, she continued to the 21st floor, where there was a cafe. It was a workplace canteen, not the kind of place you’d know about if you weren’t familiar with the building.''
''In the cafe, the woman bought a coffee and sat at a table close to a window. She smoked a cigarette from an almost empty 10-pack of Marlboros and leafed through a copy of the Guardian she was thought to have brought with her. Then she stood up, climbed on to the table, opened the window and jumped out. “Things happened in a split second,” one person in the cafe at the time told investigators. “One moment she was sat very still in the far corner of the restaurant''.
''Soon after 9am, police retrieved the woman’s body from the river below. She did not have a single identifying document or object on her; no wallet, no bank cards or driving licence, no house keys, no phone.''
''But if she picked the building at random, why take an oil painting with her, and how did she know the cafe was there? “Security was quite lax, but the cafe wasn’t the kind of place where you saw members of the public,” Hedderman says. “And how would you know there were no safety locks on the windows? Even in 2004, I think that was quite unusual on such a high floor.”
''In the US, the rise of genetic genealogy and the huge popularity of commercial DNA testing sites such as 23andMe have helped to solve a wave of cold cases. But the British police do not currently use these commercial entities, and while they do check DNA against their own databases, in 2004 DNA science was still in its infancy – and it is not clear if samples were even taken from the Wembley Point woman.''