Evil Lives Next Door | The Joanna Yeates Case

Joanna isn’t particularly looking forward to the upcoming weekend, although she is excited about the two days off. She’ll be spending them without her boyfriend. Since they’ve been together, Joanna and Greg have spent practically every minute together. Now, for the first time, Greg is going to his hometown alone to visit his parents for the weekend.

Joanna will be alone in their shared apartment. Even though Joanna would have preferred to spend the weekend with Greg, she wants to have a good time. After all, Christmas is just around the corner, and it’s high time to spread some festive cheer. However, shortly after Joanna arrives home on Friday evening, neighbors hear cries for help coming from her apartment.

Over Christmas, Joanna’s face will be printed in all the newspapers in England because she will become the most wanted person in Great Britain on the end of her solo weekend.

It’s December 17, 2010, a Friday. Joanna is 25 years old and works as a landscape architect. She’s originally from Hampshire, where she was born on April 19, 1985. In December 2008, Joanna met her boyfriend, Greg, who also works as an architect.

The two fell in love and decided to move in together the following year. When they were looking for a place to live, they quickly chose Bristol. Greg’s company relocated its headquarters there, and Joanna also quickly found a new job in Bristol. By December 2010, the two had already settled into life in Bristol.

Christmas was just around the corner, and to mark the occasion, Joanna went out for drinks with some colleagues after work on December 17. Joanna would be spending the weekend alone in Bristol. Greg had already left that afternoon for Sheffield to visit his family for a few days. Joanna kicked off the weekend at a pub in downtown Bristol.

In the early evening, while meeting with some colleagues, she mentions that she’s not really looking forward to the weekend alone. It’s the first time since they moved in together that Joanna will be alone for the weekend, but the 25-year-old wants to make the best of it, passing the time with Christmas shopping and baking.

She lives in the Clifton district and sets off on foot for home around 8:00 p.m., a walk that usually takes her about 30 minutes. On the way, she makes a quick stop at the Waitrose supermarket to buy a few things. She calls her friend Rebecca on her mobile phone, and the two arrange to spend Christmas Eve together next week.

Joanna also goes to a liquor store called Bargain Booze and then buys a frozen pizza at a Tesco Express. It is assumed that she arrives at her apartment around 8:45 p.m. She and Greg have lived in the large house in the quiet Clifton district since October 2010. The house was originally built as a large apartment building, but the owner renovated it so that it now houses three rental units. Joanna and Greg live together in the ground-floor flat.

Just a few minutes later, around 8:50 p.m., witnesses in neighboring buildings heard screams. They seemed to be coming from Joanna’s apartment, but no one did anything. As mentioned, Joanna’s boyfriend, Greg, wasn’t there that weekend; he wasn’t coming home until Sunday, December 19th.

Joanna’s pub outing had been two days earlier. Greg assumed Joanna would be waiting for him in their apartment, but there was no sign of the 25-year-old. Instead, Greg only found their cat, which seemed unusually hungry and restless. Apparently, the cat hadn’t been fed or let out for a while. He tried every possible way to reach Joanna, but to no avail.

Greg also called Joanna on her cell phone, which rang inside the apartment. Greg found it in the pocket of Joanna’s jacket, which she had apparently left at home. Her wallet and keys were also still there. Something was definitely wrong. Shortly after midnight, he called the emergency number to report Joanna missing.

The police arrived shortly after Greg’s call to begin their initial investigation. Joanna’s disappearance was immediately taken very seriously. At 4:15 a.m. on December 20th, two police officers knocked on the door of Joanna and Greg’s neighbors. A young man named Vincent Tabak and his girlfriend lived there.

Vincent is 33 years old and originally from the Netherlands. He has been living in England for some time and works there as an engineer. He stated that he knew nothing about Joanna’s disappearance and had not noticed anything suspicious. Three days later, on December 23rd, his apartment was also searched. Vincent was cooperative and offered no resistance.

The investigators found nothing in the apartment that could be connected to Joanna’s disappearance. Joanna and Greg’s apartment was also searched, but there were no traces relevant to the investigation there either. This meant there were no signs of forced entry. Whoever was responsible for Joanna’s disappearance did not have to force their way into her apartment.

However, the investigators confiscated a laptop and a cell phone from Greg to search for digital evidence. Greg once again went to his parents’ house in Hampshire. Understandably, the disappearance of his girlfriend was taking a heavy toll on him. With Christmas just around the corner, the support of his family is more important than ever.

He remains in contact with the police by phone. Greg, along with friends, is organizing a website and social media channels to advance the online search for Joanna. The case is also omnipresent in the traditional media around Christmas time. Joanna’s parents address the public in press conferences, urgently requesting help in the search for their missing daughter.

But it’s as if the 25-year-old has vanished into thin air. It’s striking that the police find Joanna’s receipt for her shopping trip to Tesco Express in her apartment. It shows that she bought a frozen pizza on the evening of her disappearance. However, this frozen pizza is not in Joanna’s apartment; it’s not in the freezer, and no pizza packaging is found in the trash.

This suggests that Joanna left the apartment after returning home to eat the pizza elsewhere, or that the person who gained access to her apartment and harmed her took the pizza. On December 25, 2010, millions of families in England were celebrating Christmas, but Joanna Yeates’s family was not. On that day, they received the news they had been dreading for days: Joanna was dead.

A passerby found her body on Christmas morning. It was discovered in Longwood Lane, just a few miles from her home in Clifton. The body had been covered in snow in the days prior. Initially, no injuries were visible on Joanna’s body, so the police initially suspected that the young woman might have frozen to death.

According to the police, there were no indications of foul play. However, an autopsy quickly revealed a completely different cause of death: strangulation. This left no doubt that Joanna Yeates had been the victim of a crime. The autopsy revealed that Joanna had been killed several days before she was found, presumably on the day of her disappearance.

As absurd as it sounds, the frozen pizza that Joanna bought on the evening of her disappearance became a key piece of evidence in this case. No remains of the pizza were found in Joanna’s stomach, meaning she had never eaten it. The pizza and its packaging were not in her apartment. It seems likely that her murderer took and ate the pizza.

The police are also searching for the pizza packaging, but that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Tesco is one of the largest supermarket chains in England, and their own-brand pizza sells hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day. Several hundred tons of waste from Bristol Clifton are being searched by investigators for clues, unfortunately without success.

The reward for information, thanks to donations from private individuals and tabloid newspapers, has ballooned to £60,000. The police are investigating all leads; even cold cases from the 70s and 90s are being reopened because the police cannot rule out that Joanna’s death is part of a previously undiscovered series of murders. The search for Joanna’s murderer is one of the most extensive investigations ever conducted in England.

The police are using more than 100 hours of surveillance footage from the surrounding streets and conducting hundreds of interviews. The video footage from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, in particular, is proving invaluable. The Clifton Suspension Bridge, located near Joanna and Greg’s apartment and a key traffic hub in the residential area, briefly caused a stir.

It was quite possible that the perpetrator crossed this bridge on his way to Joanna’s and could therefore be seen in the footage. When the police were able to secure the recordings, initial optimism was high, but this was quickly followed by disillusionment. The quality of the video material was so poor that it was almost impossible to make anything out.

License plates of passing cars were illegible, and only silhouettes of pedestrians were recognizable. On December 30th, there was finally an arrest in the Joanna Yeates case. However, the man arrested was someone who had not previously appeared in the media: Christopher Jefferies. He was the landlord of the apartment complex where Joanna lived, just like Joanna, Greg, and their neighbor Vincent Tabak.

He lived in the building directly above the missing Joanna. On the day of Christopher’s arrest, Vincent again spoke to the police. He had traveled to the Netherlands with his girlfriend to spend New Year’s Eve. On the phone, he told a police officer that he might have information about the missing Joanna.

With a new suspect, the police consider Vincent’s insight so valuable that a few officers from England travel to Amsterdam to question him. From this point on, chaos erupts in the Joanna Yeates case. When Vincent Tabak is questioned in Amsterdam on December 31, 2010, he changes his statements, and suddenly the information Vincent had promised the police doesn’t advance the investigation at all.

He speaks out against the new suspect, but the suspicion against Christopher Jefferies isn’t strong enough to keep him in custody. On January 1, 2011, the murdered woman’s landlord is released on bail from custody. However, he remains a prisoner nonetheless, as the media pounce on him.

The Joanna Yeates case has been dominating British headlines for two weeks at this point. Christopher is the only known suspect, and the media have long since made up their minds. The tabloids, in particular, seize upon Christopher and hound his every move. Just because he’s been released on bail doesn’t mean the general public is convinced of his innocence.

It doesn’t help that Christopher Jefferies was very insecure during the interrogations. For example, he told the police:

“It is possible that I saw Joanna on December 17th leaving the apartment building with two people, but I might be mistaken.”

The police warned women in Bristol that they shouldn’t walk home alone late at night, not until Joanna’s killer was found.

On January 5th, the police announced that when Joanna’s body was discovered, an article of clothing was missing: a grey ski sock. Joanna was wearing the sock on the day of her disappearance, but only one was found. Investigators couldn’t rule out the possibility that the perpetrator kept the second one as a kind of trophy, or that Joanna was strangled with the second ski sock.

As part of the investigation, the police searched the sewers near Joanna’s apartment. Guests from the pub where Joanna had stayed before her disappearance were also questioned. However, all of this didn’t lead to the killer, and the police came under increasing pressure. At one point, there was even talk of taking DNA samples from every male resident in Bristol to perhaps track down the perpetrator.

The case dominated the British media in the first weeks of the year 2011, especially after a new piece of information came to light. On January 10, 2011, a letter arrived at the pub Joanna had visited before her disappearance. The envelope contained a pizza box label.

The letter arrived at the police station on December 27, two days after Joanna’s body was found. The exact contents of the letter are unknown, but Joanna’s name is mentioned. The letter is handwritten and includes an address and a phone number. Both the address and the number turn out to be fake; it is a tasteless joke and not the missing pizza box, as the label from the letter belongs to a Sainsbury’s own-brand pizza.

While more and more details of the case emerge and the witch hunt against landlord Christopher Jefferies continues, the police remain in the dark for weeks until, more than a month after Joanna’s death, another arrest is finally made. On January 20, Vincent Tabak is arrested and accused of murdering his neighbor Joanna.

DNA evidence led to his arrest; his DNA was reportedly found on Joanna’s body. Despite this, he wasn’t arrested until three weeks after the body was discovered, and after the police initially ruled him out as a suspect. This was partly because Vincent was extremely cooperative and partly because he initially implicated the landlord, Christopher Jefferies.

Vincent Tabak grew up near Eindhoven in the Netherlands. He was said to be very introverted but also quite clever during his childhood and adolescence, so no one was surprised when Vincent studied architecture after finishing school and later earned a doctorate. After graduating, he moved to England after finding a job in Bath.

There he met his girlfriend, with whom he eventually moved to Bristol, to the apartment on Canynge Road where he and Joanna became neighbors. When Joanna and Greg moved in in October 2010, Vincent and his girlfriend had already been living next door for over a year. Although both parties lived in the same building, Joanna and Vincent, her eventual murderer, had not met even once before December 17, 2010.

Vincent ultimately confessed to manslaughter regarding Joanna, but he denies that the act was murder. The question of whether the crime against Joanna constitutes manslaughter or murder naturally also has an impact on the sentence in Great Britain, and the evidence the police can assemble against the accused is quite overwhelming.

After Joanna’s death, Vincent entered relevant terms into the Google search engine, including explanations of the crime, the definition of sexual assault, sexual behavior, how forensic identification works, and the decomposition time of the body. He also inquired about the sentencing guidelines for murder and manslaughter and about other well-known criminal cases from England.

Not only that, he also looked at maps of the area around Longwood Lane where Joanna’s body was found, as well as the location of surveillance cameras on the street where he and Joanna lived. However, Vincent’s laptop contains not only these search queries but also much, much more explicit material, including videos of women being sexually assaulted. The women in the videos are blonde, just like Joanna. And not only that, but the laptop also contains 145 illicit pictures depicting children.

Vincent denies in court that the killing of Joanna was sexually motivated. He claims Joanna invited him to her apartment on the evening of December 17th for a drink. They became intimate, and after Vincent tried to kiss Joanna, she began to scream. Vincent claims he wanted to calm her down and accidentally killed her.

However, the court disagrees. The verdict explicitly mentions a psychological motivation on the part of the perpetrator. The autopsy report reveals that Joanna had more than 40 different injuries, including a broken nose, numerous wounds, and hematomas.

Therefore, there can be no talk of an accidental killing as Vincent claimed. Vincent Tabak is not convicted of manslaughter but of murder, receiving a life sentence of which he must serve at least 20 years. An additional 10 months is added for possession of the illicit pictures.

Not only was Joanna’s family severely traumatized by the murder of the 25-year-old, but throughout Bristol, fear gripped the city at the turn of the year 2011. Christopher Jefferies, the landlord of Vincent and Joanna, also suffers from the consequences of the case, because while he was mistakenly arrested for the murder of Joanna, his photo had already been printed in newspapers all over Great Britain; everyone knew his name and his face in the context of the murder of 25-year-old Joanna. The media frenzy surrounding him was so intense that his image is still associated with the Joanna murder case for many today, and he was arrested mainly because of Vincent Tabak, who was only trying to deflect attention from himself.