THE man suspected of murdering Hampshire grandmother Georgina Edmonds has been bailed again until January next year.

The Daily Echo exclusively revealed how Matthew Hamlen was arrested during a dawn swoop by police on his mother’s home in Bishopstoke in June this year.

He was held in custody and quizzed by murder squad detectives over the brutal killing of the 77-year-old at her Brambridge home in January 2008.

Hamlen, 32, has lived in the Eastleigh area most of his life although he works out of the area.

Specialist search teams spent the day of his arrest scouring two addresses – his mother’s home in Hamilton Road and a second location in The Crescent, Eastleigh, where he was living in a top floor flat at the time of the killing.

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The latter property is just a short walk across the railway bridge to the Tesco Express store in Twyford Road where the killer tried to use Mrs Edmonds’ cashcard in the hours following her death.

The grandmother of two died from head injuries after being beaten with a rolling pin taken from the kitchen of her cottage home in Kiln Lane.

She had also been repeatedly stabbed across the top of her body with what police think was a kitchen paring knife – believed to have been a form of torture to try and get her PIN.

Hours later her body was found by her son Harry, in the kitchen, when he returned home from work on the evening of January 11.

Hamlen’s arrest on June 30 was one of just a handful made since the murder enquiry began and four men living at an ex-offender’s hostel nearby were questioned before being released without charge.

It came just weeks after police carried out fresh searches of a stretch of the river and towpath close to where Mrs Edmonds lived – thought to be the route the killer took when he fled the scene, discarding her mobile phone as he ran.

Detectives will not be drawn on whether Hamlen was one of hundreds of local men asked to provide a mouth swab during a mass DNA screening in Eastleigh earlier in the year.

It’s understood Hamlen returned to a station in the north of the county to speak to police this morning, before being bailed again until January 11, 2011.