Eileen Cotter

THE brother of a woman who was strangled to death nearly 50 years ago has said his sister can finally “rest at peace” after her killer was jailed.

Former bricklayer and taxi driver John Apelgren, 80, was found guilty of the manslaughter of Eileen Cotter at the Old Bailey two weeks ago and sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday. He was only caught for the 1974 killing after a DNA match was thrown up when he was cautioned for assaulting his wife in 2019.

Eileen was 22 when she was beaten, strangled and pushed out of a car. She was found behind a since demolished set of garages behind Hamilton Park in Highbury.

Speaking about the case for the first time, her brother Patrick Cotter said he did not want Eileen simply to be recalled as a sex worker who had been killed, as he felt had been the case in the reporting of Apelgren’s trial.

“Know that she was a person,” he told the Tribune. “She was a normal person. She grew up normal and had a normal life. She was a sister. My sister. Had she not got into that lifestyle, I’d have had a sister to this day.”

Mr Cotter, who was just five when Eileen was killed, remembers how his doting sister would take him to Battersea Park in his pram and used to take him to nursery sometimes.

John Apelgren

He described how she had learning difficulties and was vulnerable, and had only fallen into sex work just months before her death. Prior to that she had worked as an Avon lady, selling products door to door. She had also worked in a Welsh care home.

He described how she had gone through a series of traumatic events that led her into this “kind of very hostile, dangerous world”.

Aged just 15, she found her mother’s body after returning from school – she had taken her own life – while some years later she lost a baby when he was just nine months old.

Mr Cotter said: “My sister-in-law just said she didn’t seem like that sort of person. She just seemed so unassuming. She had a lot of trauma because of the way her mum died and losing her baby. That’s a lot of things for a young person to take in, isn’t it?”

Mr Cotter was taken into care shortly after Eileen’s death. While he was initially allowed home at weekends, social workers later prevented contact with his family as they believed at that time he would “resettle” better without them. He only reconnected with a brother in 1998, when he was an adult.

Patrick Cotter

He admitted that, as a coping mechanism, he “had to almost imagine I didn’t have a sister” and instead “emotionally shut down in a lot of areas of my life”. It has only been through Apelgren’s trial and conviction that he has opened himself up to her again, he said.

Mr Cotter said of the killer: “He sealed his own destiny – he sent himself to prison. It’s karma. Nothing can change the past, but I think many unanswered questions have been answered. Eileen can rest at peace now.”

“Justice for Eileen” has brought some closure, said Mr Cotter, who worked as a tube driver for 20 years and was given a commendation for leading passengers to safety during an incident on Putney Bridge.

DCI Laurence Smith

DCI Laurence Smith praised the original police investigation in the 1970s, which saw almost 100 men interviewed and female officers sent out to pose as sex workers in an effort to catch the killer.

He said officers in the original case had gone to “the effort of seizing and retaining samples” of her clothing when there was “no way in 1974 they could have anticipated DNA”.

He added: “Ms Cotter’s killer would have taken his secret to his grave. They really, really tried hard to identify the person who killed Eileen. We were really impressed. I’m really pleased to get a result and get some sort of justice for Eileen. You read about Eileen’s life and it was a tragedy. She had a real tough life. She was vulnerable. You look at Eileen and you do it for Eileen.”

Investigators were disappointed Apelgren was not found guilty of murder, the detective said, adding: “If you’re strangling anyone, it’s hard to say you don’t intend causing serious harm or to kill.”

He said his team were nonetheless happy to get a conviction in such an historic case which “could have gone either way”.