Leonard Pike was a character appearing in the episode Strangler's Wood of the ITV crime drama Midsomer Murders. Leonard was a hotelier who owned the Fox & Goose hotel in Midsomer Worthy. He was murdered in 1999 by his own mother, Dorothea Pike.
Biography[]
Unknown to everyone except Dorothea and himself, Leonard was the serial killer who, in 1990 raped and then murdered three young girls by strangling them with striped neckties in Ravens Wood (the real name of Strangler's Wood), leaving each woman to be found in the nude with the murder weapon where they died. When Dorothea learned of this, she was unable to turn her own son over to the police but instead forbade him from continuing with killing.
Nine years later, the body of Carla Constanza was found in Ravens Wood with a necktie wrapped around her neck. Although Leonard was innocent of the murder, Dorothea mistakenly thought that he had become active again, and to prevent him from hurting anyone else, she slashed him to death while he took a bath. She was taken to the hospital, where she confessed all to DCI Barnaby.
Victims[]
- Eva Hoffman, a German backpacker
- Joan Chaplin, a British housemaid
- Judith Albiston, an Australian au pair