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Alan Wood

Age: 50

Sex: male

Date: 24 Oct 2009

Place: Manor Lodge, Lound, Bourne, Lincolnshire

Alan Wood was bound, tortured and mutilated at his home, Manor Lodge in Lound.

He was last seen alive on Wednesday 21 October 2009 when he had been shopping in Stamford at the Morrisons supermarket and had been in the nearby Willoughby Arms pub.

The police said that they thought that Alan Wood had been in bed reading when he was disturbed on Saturday 24 October 2009 and had possibly gone to the front door from which point on he was attacked. It was suggested that his attacker or attackers might have been someone that he had known and who he had let into his house willingly.

During the attack at his home his throat had been cut a number of times and an attempt to decapitate him had been made. He had been bound up with sellotape and also stabbed in the eye. The police said that he had multiple stab wounds to the head and that they thought that they had been inflicted in order to torture him, possibly to force him to give up his PIN numbers.

The police said that it appeared that he had then had his throat cut and that after he had died an attempt was made to decapitate him but cutting from the back of his neck.

When he was found he was dead on his living room floor.

His post-mortem stated his cause of death as being due to incised wounds to the neck.

Police described the attack on him as 'incredibly frantic and incredibly personal'.

Manor Lodge where he had lived and was murdered was kept as a crime scene for two years but then demolished.

The police said that whoever killed him had only taken a few hundred pounds. During the next couple of days his bank cards were used in Bourne and Stamford.

A DNA profile of a person was found at the scene and the police said that a focus of their investigation was in finding that person. They said that it was not in the UK DNA database but added that they were also looking at international databases. The police said that they didn't know how many people had been at Manor Lodge but said that one person there had injured themselves and had bled and that it was that blood that they had got the DNA from. They said that the injury was probably a hand injury.

The police found suspicious footprints at the scene that were matched to that of a pair of Converse trainers. The police further worked with the shoe maker in the United States who determined that the print was that of a particular upper that had come in two styles that had been sold largely across Europe and North America at the time.

Paper fragments were found attached to the sellotape that had been used to bind Alan Wood up which were later matched to a Delaine bus ticket which ran services in the Bourne area. The police questioned bus passengers and drivers and concluded that the ticket was probably not Alan Wood's. They said that there was no evidence that he had used the bus and no one that used the services regularly seemed to know him. The police said that this led them to believe that his attacker or attackers had used the bus and that it had fallen out of their pocket whilst they were in his home and binding him up.

Examination of CCTV footage revealed a man described as ATM Man who was seen at ATM machines on a number of occasions during the days that followed the murder. Police described ATM Man as being 5ft 9in to 5ft 11in tall and dressed in a smart casual manner and wearing a distinctive striped scarf. He was also thought to use, or had used, Delaine buses, whose ticket fragments were found at the scene in the sellotape used to bind Alan Wood up with. The police said that he also seemed to have local knowledge and appeared to be avoiding CCTV systems around Bourne and Stamford. The police also said that ATM Man probably had a limp which was possibly due to one of his legs being longer than the other. They added that the man might or might not have been aware of that condition.

By 2014 the investigation had looked at over 16,000 suspects.

In 2014 the police also said that they were interested in speaking to a certain Polish national who was said to have lived and worked in the Peterborough area at the time. The police stressed that they were not saying that he was a suspect but that they thought that he could help them.

Alan Wood ran a small gardening business called Gardens TLC and was not thought to have had any enemies.

In 2015 a documentary was made about his murder that ran on Donal MacIntyre: Unsolved on CBS Reality.


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