Qualla: Murder of Naomi Smith

Murder of Naomi Smith: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Procolotor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Naomi Smith was fifteen years old. She had spent the day of 14 September 1995 with her best friend Emma Jones at rehearsals for a local marching band where Emma played the xylophone. That evening her mother asked her to walk to the post box at the end of the road to post a letter. The post box was only a few hundred metres from their house on the Bretts Hall Estate in Nuneaton. She set out, posted the letter, and never came home. Just before midnight her father Brian, a local taxi driver, and Emma found her body in the recreation ground at the end of the estate, lying beneath the children's slide. What had happened to her was the kind of crime that fixes itself permanently in a community's memory. It also became one of the early British murder investigations to lean heavily on DNA evidence, in the years just before that became routine.

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Image: Procolotor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murder of Naomi Smith: A Family's Search

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Procolotor, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 pla...

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Image: Procolotor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murder of Naomi Smith: The Investigation

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith D, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 £10,00...

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Image: Keith D | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murder of Naomi Smith: Edwin Hopkins

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Procolotor, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Image: Procolotor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murder of Naomi Smith: Appeals, Release, Recall

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Procolotor, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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-ye...

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Image: Procolotor | CC BY-SA 3.0