Police investigating to see if Teresa's killer struck again (From Daily Echo)

Did David Lace strike again after killing Teresa De Simone?

6:04pm Monday 21st September 2009 in News By Sian Davies, Senior News Reporter

INVESTIGATIONS are continuing today into whether the man who murdered Teresa De Simone ever killed again.

Hampshire detectives are trawling through a number of unsolved murders and sex attacks to find out if there were more victims of David Lace.

He was named as the killer of Teresa last week after DNA evidence proved that he was the man who brutally raped and strangled the gas board clerk.

Lace, who was from Portsmouth, confessed to strangling the 22-year-old in her car parked at the back of the Tom Tackle pub in Southampton on December 5, 1979. He was only 17 at the time.

But inconsistencies in his story meant police never followed it up. His admission also came after the conviction of Sean Hodgson, who wrongly spent 27 years in prison for the crime.

He is now in line for a £1m payout from the Home Office and could yet sue the police and the forensic science service for further damages.

Forensic evidence which was used to prove Mr Hodgson’s innocence and Lace’s guilt is now being used by officers to see whether he was responsible for other serious crimes.

So far they have searched through the national DNA database, specifically those crimes where only a partial DNA profile was recovered.

The team is also looking into murders and rapes across Hampshire and surrounding counties in an effort to discover whether Lace ever continued his violent offending.

They have revealed that, along with unsolved cases in Hampshire, officers have also extended their inquiries into Devon where Lace lived for a short time before killing himself in the fishing port of Brixham in December 1988.

Detective Chief Inspector Phil McTavish who led the Operation Iceberg inquiry team, said: “Research has been undertaken in relation to historical murder and rape cases both in Hampshire and surrounding areas including Devon. This work continues.”

He added that to date no link had yet been established between Lace and any unsolved serious crime.