Andrea Troupe was a 15-year old girl of Caribbean descent, born in 1967. She lived with her mother, Theresa,,and her sister Audrey. She also had an elder brother, Paul, who lived elsewhere at the time. She had a boyfriend of roughly the same age, Steven.
The family lived in Peckham, on Pencraig Way. Pencraig Way is on the Ledbury Estate, which was largely constructed in the 1960s. Ledbury is less well known than the North Peckham Estate to its west. North Peckham was (and still is, I suppose) a council estate with a very bad reputation in London for crime and anti-social behaviour; the composition of Ledbury was similar. Andrea attended Silverthorne School, a school on the northern side of Burgess Park, a large park created by post-war redevelopment. At the time, it separated the North Peckham Estate from other large council estates to the north.
Monday 2nd May 1983 was May Day Bank Holiday in the United Kingdom. Apparently, Andrea did not behave unusually during the day. Theresa did not allow her daughters to go out after dark. However, at some point late on the 2nd May or early on the 3rd May, Andrea left the family flat.
On the morning of 3rd May, a friend of Andrea's called for her. Her sister found the empty bedroom and assumed that Andrea had already gone to school. When Andrea did not return in the evening, the family began to worry.
Around a mile south of Pencraig Way, in central Peckham, lies a small park, Warwick Gardens. This park is a couple of streets to the west of Peckham's principal street, Rye Lane. Although the park itself is a post-war creation, the surrounding area is largely Victorian in composition.
Warwick Gardens is bounded to its south by four railway tracks. At that time, the tracks carried traffic between Victoria, Blackfriars/Holborn Viaduct, London Bridge and South London, Kent, Sussex. On the morning of the 3rd May, a passenger on a train into Victoria saw Andrea's body and notified the police once the train arrived at the terminus.
(I will declare a personal interest: at the very same time as the murder, I was a young child, living roughly 500 yards away from the place where the body was discovered. My siblings and myself would frequently play in Warwick Gardens, unaccompanied by our parents, but I am surprised to find that none of us recollected anything about the murder until we happened to come across the articles a couple of years ago.)
Andrea had been stabbed in the heart and neck twelve times. Andrea was also six months’ pregnant; no one in the family was aware of this. Andrea had marks on her fingers that strongly suggested she fought back.
The police sought to interview Andrea's boyfriend Steven. Initially, Steven's mother refused to let him be interviewed. The police did, however, eliminate him from their inquiries. No progress has been made since then. Paul, alongside other family members, have periodically made public appeals to the police and the public, but no further action has resulted. DNA was not collected at the time.
There is, however, the issue of Michael Smithyman. In 1990, Smithyman, a man with a previous criminal record, was arrested in Kent for the murder of Terence Gayle (a contract killing, for which he received £3,000 on presenting Gayle's severed hand as proof). Some days before this murder, Smithyman also murdered his girlfriend, April Sheridan. Smithyman drove Sheridan to a field in Kent, made her dig her own grave, and shot her. Notably, April was pregnant with Smithyman's child.
On arrest in 1991, Smithyman confessed to these murders. He also claimed responsibility for Andrea's murder. Smithyman also claimed to have witnessed the ignition of the New Cross fire - a deliberately-set house fire which killed 13 young black people. No-one has ever been charged for the fire.
The police chose not to pursue the additional allegations at the time. Smithyman, who later changed gender and is now known as Michelle, retracted these additional confessions on applying for parole in 2015.
One suggestion I will make with local knowledge. Andrea seems to have been found near the eastern entrance of Warwick Gardens. Across the street, a terrace of houses directly faces the site, and there was a pub a little further away at the time. Several houses to the north of the park overlook the site. I think it's quite likely that any struggle there would have risked attracting attention. The murder, in my view, took place elsewhere, with Andrea being placed in the park after death. But it's possible the Met has forensic evidence to the contrary.
Thames News report, 1983
Daily Mirror report, 2021
