Naomi Louise Smith was born in Coventry on 4 March 1980, the daughter of Brian and Catherine Smith. She attended Hartshill School. Her family lived on Bretts Hall Estate in Nuneaton, a postwar housing estate where children went out to post letters because that was the kind of place it was. On the night of 14 September 1995, when she had not returned home by 11.15pm, Brian Smith took his taxi out to look for her. He drove first to Emma Jones's house. When his daughter was not there, Emma came along to help search. Sometime before midnight they turned into the car park of the local recreation ground, the playing field at the heart of the estate where every child on the Bretts Hall had played at one time or another. Brian Smith found his daughter there. The next morning the Smith family woke into a different life from the one they had gone to sleep in.

Detective Superintendent Tony Bayliss of Warwickshire Police set up an incident room at Bedworth Police Station and led the inquiry. By the next day, 15 September, search teams of around thirty officers were combing the estate. Police appealed for any witnesses, offering a £10,000 reward. A young girl who lived opposite the post box had watched Naomi post the letter, walk on, turn back, and then turn into a footpath behind the estate that locals called the jitty. A motorist had seen her standing by the post box as if waiting for someone. A cyclist on the main road had seen a young man running from the area, athletic build, short bleached spiky blond hair, aged perhaps twenty to twenty-five. Bayliss made the unusual choice to publicly describe the worst details of Naomi's injuries, explaining that he wanted anyone with mixed loyalties to feel compelled to come forward. Saliva recovered from her body offered the possibility of a DNA profile, and Bayliss did not rule out a mass DNA screening of local men if the investigation required it. The forensic science of 1995 was new enough that this was still discussed as a tool of last resort.

More than twenty addresses were raided in the weeks that followed. The investigation cycled through suspects who were questioned and released without charge. On 16 November 1995, two months after Naomi's death, four more men were arrested. One of them was Edwin Douglas Hopkins, a 19-year-old who lived with his parents close to the recreation ground where Naomi was found. He was unemployed. On 18 November he was charged with her murder; he was remanded in custody after his appearance at Nuneaton Magistrates Court on 20 November, and his eight other co-suspects were eliminated from the inquiry. His trial began on 22 January 1997 at Birmingham Crown Court. Hopkins maintained he had been at his sister Julie's house in Ansley Common playing Trivial Pursuit on the night of the murder, briefly going out by bicycle to an off-licence near the post box. Julie gave evidence for the prosecution, not the defence. The jury convicted Hopkins; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 18 years.

Hopkins has continued to maintain his innocence. In 2010, his solicitors applied under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to have his minimum term reduced, three years short of his earliest possible parole date; Mr Justice King reviewed the application and confirmed the original 18-year tariff. Hopkins moved to an open prison in 2021 and was released from custody in December 2023. He was recalled to prison twenty-three days later after breaking one of the strict conditions of his release. The case has become a recurring subject for British true-crime television. Forensic psychologist Paul Britton, who had advised the inquiry, wrote about it in his 1998 book The Jigsaw Man. A 2001 BBC documentary series, Catching the Killers, devoted an episode to it. ITV Central's To Catch a Killer (2004), the international series Cold Blood and TrueCSI (broadcast in Britain in 2012), and the Crime+Investigation channel's Murdertown series (2019) have all returned to the same dark patch of Bretts Hall Estate, the same post box, the same slide. For Naomi's family, the case has never finished being public.