Fred the Head
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Fred the Head is the popular name of an unidentified young white adult male found – deceased, naked, and bound – on the site of an abandoned flint mill in Burton upon Trent, England, in 1971. A number of investigations have failed to identify the body and it is now the oldest unsolved missing persons case in Staffordshire.
The body was discovered at 7:30 pm on 26 March 1971 by David Nathan.[1] Nathan was a special constable and employee of Messrs Time Consortium, a jewellers.[2] He was off duty at the time of the discovery which was made while he was walking to an area behind his workplace to carry out some shooting practice.[3][2] The site lay on an island on the River Trent accessible only by a footbridge off Newton Road, barred by a locked gate, or via a long, narrow and unpaved track from Burton Bridge.[4][3] Nathan had accessed the site through the locked gate which was considered secure enough for the police to rule it out as a potential route used by any suspect.[4][2]
Nathan discovered a fragment of a human skull after he tripped over what he assumed was a bag of cement but was a mound of earth covering a grave.[3][4][5] This lay around 100 to 150 yards (91–137 m) from Newton Road on the site of a former flint mill which had been abandoned in the early 19th century.[4][2]
Police were called and discovered the body of a man in a four-foot-deep (1.2 m) grave.[1] He had been buried in a kneeling position with his hands and feet tied, which led the police to suspect murder.[3][6] They estimated that the body was that of a white man aged between 23 and 39 and around 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m) tall, who had died 12 to 18 months prior.[1][6] The man had been of thin build and had well-looked-after hands with short fingernails. He was naked apart from a pair of pinkish-beige socks with mustard-coloured heels and toes.[7][8] He wore a woman's nine-carat gold wedding ring on a finger of his right hand.[7][8]