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Open verdict on killer link woman
Jan 15 2003
By Staff Reporter, Birmingham Post
A woman whose death was linked to the inquiry into serial killer Philip Smith was found dead at her city flat, an inquest heard.
Divorcee Patricia Lynott's decomposed body was discovered slumped on the floor next to a bed in her home in Maxstoke Street, Bordesley Green, on October 23, 2000.
There were marks on her back and an arm which may have been bruising, but an inquest jury in Birmingham yesterday returned an open verdict on 47-year-old Mrs Lynott after hearing that police and four pathologists had failed to find any evidence she had been murdered.
Det Supt Matthew Sawyer, head of the West Midlands Police murder investigation unit, said that although nothing originally appeared to be suspicious about her death, a link later emerged between Smith, Mrs Lynott, and two of the murder victims which led to a major investigation.
The connection was The Rainbow pub in Digbeth where Mrs Lynott did housework and helped look after the licensee's children and where 36 year-old Smith based himself as a taxi driver and sometimes took her home.
Two of the women Smith killed - 21 year-old Jodie Hyde, of Alum Rock, and 25 year-old Rosemary Corcoran, from Castle Vale - had also been customers at the pub and been driven by him.
The inquest was told that a pathologist who performed an initial autopsy on Mrs Lynott failed to establish a cause of death and it was possible this was because she had been lying dead for up to seven days at her home before she was found.
Her body was later exhumed but three Home Office pathologists who attended another post mortem examination could not say how she died.
City coroner Aidan Cotter said: "Det Supt Sawyer has said despite all of the investigations no evidence was found to put before a court to show Patricia Lynott was murdered and nothing to link Smith to her death."
Smith got three life sentences in July 2001 after he admitted the murders of Jodie Hyde, Rosemary Corcoran and Carol Jordan.
