# 7: Little Sophie Hook's Tragic Murder

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 9 May 2023, 15 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880307/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851606-44100-2-34148a07df911b01.mp3

Today's episode is on 7 year old Sophie Hook, originally from Cheshire in England, taken from Llandudno in Wales. Trigger Warning: child death, rape, paedophilia Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a True Crime Podcast. Where we crack.
[0:11] Open some of the most notorious cases in history.
[0:15] Given the topics that we'll be investigating, it goes without
[0:18] saying that this show comes with a content warning.
[0:21] The details can get a bit heavy and you might find some of the
[0:24] themes we discuss triggering. Listener discretion is strongly
[0:28] advised and check the description for some resources
[0:31] and further information. Today we're going to be talking
[0:40] about the case of Sophie Hook, and this actually took place in
[0:43] Wales. And so I just want to start
[0:45] right now by apologising for the way that I might pronounce Welsh
[0:49] place names. But yeah, I'm just going to get
[0:52] straight into it. I just want to give my usual
[0:54] disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:56] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:58] This is all just information that I have found on the
[1:01] Internet and I'm compiling it into one video.
[1:03] S Sophie Louise Hook was a 7 year old girl born on May 27th,
[1:07] 1988 in Cheshire in England. In late July of 1995, Sophie had
[1:12] only just turned 7 years old and her and her family were
[1:15] travelling to Wales for a little while to go and see some
[1:18] relatives who lived over there. They stayed at Sophie's uncle's
[1:21] house in Llandudno in North Wales because it was her
[1:25] cousin's birthday and so they were all just going to have a
[1:27] bit of a party and celebrate over there.
[1:29] On July 29th, 1995, it was a particularly warm, sunny day and
[1:34] so Sophie and the rest of the kids in the family were all
[1:37] playing outside in the peddling pool in just their underwear.
[1:40] So that night all four children were planning on sleeping
[1:43] outside in a tent in the garden, just for fun.
[1:46] As you do when you're kids, you do weird things like that.
[1:49] So then it got to the actual night and they set up the tent.
[1:52] They took everything inside the tent and then at about 12:20,
[1:56] one of the children decided to go back inside.
[1:58] They didn't want to sleep in the tent anymore.
[2:00] So that left just three of them, including Sophie.
[2:02] Sophie's uncle went out to check on the children before he went
[2:05] to bed at about 12:40 AM. And then he went back inside and
[2:09] left the back door open and unlocked and everything just in
[2:12] case, like they needed the toilet, they wanted to come
[2:14] inside. Anyway, they all went to bed and
[2:16] then at 2:30 in the morning, Sophie's cousin, who she was
[2:19] sharing the tent with, woke up. He checked the time, He checked
[2:23] on the other two kids in the tent.
[2:24] They were both still asleep. Sophie was actually sleeping in
[2:27] the middle of the other two children and everything seemed
[2:30] fine, so he went back to bed. That same cousin then woke up
[2:33] again at 7:15 the following morning and noticed that Sophie
[2:37] was actually gone from the tent along with her sleeping bag.
[2:40] Her cuddly toy was still in the tent along with all of her other
[2:43] belongings, but Sophie and her actual sleeping bag went there.
[2:47] So the cousin got up. He decided to go into the house
[2:50] and go get Sophie because obviously she was in the house.
[2:53] But when he got out of the tent, he noticed that Sophie's
[2:55] sleeping bag was just on the grass, but Sophie wasn't there.
[2:59] He went inside the house to go and find her, thinking that she
[3:02] was probably just at the toilet or getting some food or
[3:04] whatever, but he looked all around the house and she wasn't
[3:07] there. And so he woke up the parents.
[3:09] So immediately they all panicked, they all got dressed,
[3:12] they all ran outside. They were searching the garden,
[3:14] they were searching the nearby fields and streets and every
[3:17] everything, and they just couldn't find her.
[3:19] There was absolutely no sign of Sophie or any of her belongings.
[3:22] And so after an hour of searching the kind of
[3:25] surrounding area, her parents decided to call the police and
[3:28] report her as a missing person at 8:20 that morning.
[3:32] However, it was already too late That morning.
[3:35] At 7:10, before Sophie had even noticed to have been missing,
[3:39] her body was found. 55 year old Jerry Davis was out that morning
[3:43] walking his two dogs along this kind of stretch of beach in
[3:46] London. And there's a kind of paddling
[3:48] pool area built onto this beach for children that might be too
[3:52] young to go into the sea yet. And so as he was approaching
[3:55] that he saw a kind of very pale bundle laid next to it.
[4:00] As he got closer to this bundle, he realized that it kind of
[4:03] resembled like a tailor's dummy or a mannequin type thing.
[4:07] However, he knew that something must have been amiss from the
[4:10] way that his dogs were behaving. Jerry says that his dogs are
[4:13] generally well behaved when they go out on walks, but as they
[4:17] were approaching this kind of mannequin looking thing, they
[4:21] started to whimper and bark and run away and just act really
[4:25] strangely, act how they'd never acted before.
[4:28] And so he approached this mannequin looking thing, and
[4:31] when he did, he realized it wasn't actually a mannequin at
[4:33] all. It was the naked body of a
[4:36] little girl. And he described it as marble
[4:38] white. And so Jerry took off his own
[4:41] T-shirt and laid it over the little girl so she wasn't
[4:43] exposed anymore. And he ran to the nearest phone
[4:46] box and called police. So Sophie's body was taken back
[4:50] to the police station for identification and a postmortem
[4:53] to reveal her cause of death. Sophie had been brutally
[4:57] attacked to the point where she actually had broken bones.
[5:00] Her upper right arm was broken. That same ankle was broken.
[5:04] Her body was covered in bruises from head to toe and they were
[5:07] consistent with gripping of the child by hand and there were
[5:11] bruises all over her head and all over her face which were
[5:14] consistent with kind of punching and slapping.
[5:17] Sophie had also suffered internal bleeding and had been
[5:20] raped and sodomized. All of Sophie's injuries had
[5:23] been sustained while she was still alive, and her volume and
[5:27] kind of severity of her injuries have been likened to maybe a
[5:31] victim of a major car crash. There was that many on her.
[5:34] During the attack, Sophie had been in so much pain that she'd
[5:37] actually bitten off the sides of her tongue, along the side of
[5:40] her teeth and the insides of her cheek and the bottom of her lip.
[5:44] Her actual cause of death was manual strangulation by
[5:48] someone's hands, which had lasted for at least three
[5:50] minutes. It appeared as though her body
[5:53] had been thrown from a Cliff into the sea somewhere else, but
[5:56] since the tide was in at the time, they must have thrown it
[5:59] in the middle of the night obviously.
[6:01] And so her body had washed up on the beach.
[6:04] So news spread like wildfire around the town.
[6:07] Everyone knew what had happened within about an hour of the body
[6:10] being found and so quickly police had a lot of witnesses
[6:14] coming in. So behind where Sophie's uncle
[6:16] lived there were quite a few houses on the street.
[6:19] And then behind all these houses was a kind of public footpath,
[6:23] like a little pathway with hedges down the side of it.
[6:26] And it was quite a popular path for people going walking, taking
[6:28] dogs for walks, just anywhere. And a lot of witnesses described
[6:33] seeing the same very, very tall man with brown hair and
[6:37] moustache riding his bike up and down this path at several
[6:41] different times during the day. One woman walking her dog even
[6:45] saw him crouching in the bushes directly behind Sophie's uncle's
[6:49] house. And if you remember, the
[6:51] children were out playing in the garden in their underwear.
[6:54] And so the woman walking her dog obviously felt that this man was
[6:57] doing something strange. So she asked him what he was
[6:59] doing and he said that he just dropped some money in the bushes
[7:02] and he was trying to find it. Like I said, this path had
[7:05] really tall hedges all along either side of it.
[7:08] And so it's thought that he kind of hid himself in this Bush
[7:11] outside of Sophie's uncle's house so that he could watch
[7:14] them all day. And from this path he would have
[7:17] been able to hear the children talking about how they were
[7:20] going to sleep in a tent in the garden that night, making his
[7:23] attack so much easier. Luckily, one of the people that
[7:26] had seen him on the path that day was able to identify him as
[7:29] 30 year old local man had Hughes.
[7:31] Police arrested Howard at the home that he shared with his
[7:34] mother at around 4:00 PM on the same day that Sophie's body was
[7:38] found. Howard Hughes was a very kind of
[7:40] well respected man within that town.
[7:42] He was a businessman, he was a civil engineer.
[7:46] However, his life hadn't always been quite so smooth.
[7:50] Howard was actually born with a chromosomal abnormality called
[7:54] XYY, meaning that he had a lot more testosterone in his body
[7:58] than the average human, and testosterone, when in excess in
[8:02] a person can cause aggression, violence.
[8:06] It also made him grow up physically very fast.
[8:09] By the age of 11 years old, Howard Hughes was already 6 feet
[8:13] tall and by the time he was an adult he leveled out at 6 foot
[8:17] 8, which is very tall. School life was very, very
[8:21] rocky. He suffered with learning
[8:23] disabilities, dyslexia, and due to his increased testosterone he
[8:27] had a lot of behavioral problems.
[8:29] His father paid for him to attend private schools which
[8:32] were supposed to help with this. However, after just six months
[8:36] of being in a private school, he was kicked out.
[8:38] They couldn't deal with his behavior.
[8:40] His father actually offered to pay twice the amount of the
[8:42] normal fee if they would just keep Howard on, but they said
[8:46] no, he's a dangerous to the other pupils.
[8:48] Howard was kicked out of a total of four schools in his life and
[8:52] left with absolutely 0 qualifications.
[8:55] When Howard was 16 years old, he lured A7 year old boy into an
[8:59] abandoned house. There he exposed himself to him
[9:02] amid indecent suggestions before attempting to strangle him to
[9:07] death. This 7 year old boy said he
[9:09] picked me off the ground and threw me down.
[9:11] He was a very strong man. He wound up astride me with both
[9:15] his hands around my neck. The seven-year old actually only
[9:18] survived this attack because he pretended to be dead and Howard
[9:22] Hughes believed him. And so he left believing that
[9:25] he'd actually committed murder when he hadn't.
[9:27] Howard Hughes faced absolutely no jail time for this attempted
[9:30] murder. He just got two years in a
[9:32] psychiatric hospital. By the age of 19, Howard Hughes
[9:36] had amassed over 17 convictions including assault, burglary,
[9:41] theft, threatening behavior, criminal damage and possession
[9:44] of weapons. In the 10 years running up to
[9:46] Sophie's murder, Howard Hughes was actually accused of sexually
[9:50] assaulting 3 young girls aged 35 and 9.
[9:54] And these were all on different occasions as well.
[9:57] Three different times he'd assaulted these young girls.
[10:00] However, all three of these charges were dropped against
[10:02] him. The 9 year old parents dropped
[10:04] it on her behalf just because they felt that it had been way
[10:07] too traumatic for her to relive it all and give evidence and
[10:11] stuff. And the prosecution dropped the
[10:12] charges on behalf of the three-year old and the five year
[10:15] old because they were too young to give reliable evidence.
[10:18] So anyway, skip forward to July 30th of 1995.
[10:22] Howard Hughes has just been arrested on suspicion of the
[10:25] murder of Sophie Hook. He was held there in custody at
[10:28] the police station for four days while police tried to gather
[10:31] evidence against him. But it was looking like it was
[10:34] going to be really hard. There was absolutely no
[10:36] forensics because obviously Sophie's body had been dumped in
[10:39] the water. Her clothes were never found.
[10:42] There was nothing to kind of directly link this man to Sophie
[10:45] Hook. And then after keeping him there
[10:47] for four days, on August 3rd, police decided to let Howard
[10:51] Hughes go because they just didn't have evidence against
[10:54] him. But when he was arrested
[10:56] initially on the day that Sophie's body was found, all the
[10:59] whose kind of electronics and things like that were seized so
[11:02] that they could be searched for evidence.
[11:04] And this was actually still in progress when they let him go,
[11:07] which is weird because this could have still found evidence.
[11:10] And they did. Just hours after they let Howard
[11:13] Hughes go, they found indecent images of children on his
[11:16] computer. And so they rearrested him again
[11:19] just a few hours later. Within just 7 hours of his
[11:23] second arrest, Howard Hughes was charged with the kidnap, rape,
[11:26] and murder of Sophie Hook. His child began in June of 1996
[11:30] and like I said, the prosecution had absolutely no forensics to
[11:34] link Howard to Sophie. However, they had a lot of
[11:37] witnesses, the first of which was Howard's own father, Gerald
[11:41] Hughes, who said that his son actually admitted to him on the
[11:45] day that he killed Sophie that it was him.
[11:47] The next witness was 30 year old Jonathan Carroll who actually
[11:51] saw Howard Hughes that night with Sophie Hook.
[11:54] Jonathan said that Howard was just kind of walking along the
[11:57] streets of the town with this big sack in his hands.
[12:00] And when Jonathan actually caught a glimpse of what was
[12:02] inside the sack, he said it looked like a naked human body.
[12:06] And Jonathan actually got a prison sentence from coming
[12:09] forward with this witness statement because the reason
[12:12] that Jonathan even saw Howard that night was because he was
[12:15] stealing items from a local garden when he looked across the
[12:18] road and saw Howard Hughes walking with this sack.
[12:21] And so in order for him to be able to go to police and give
[12:24] this information to help get Sophie justice, he had to give
[12:27] himself up and say that he was stealing things from a garden.
[12:31] And so he was sentenced to some prison time.
[12:34] But Jonathan felt like it was worth it to get Sophie some
[12:36] justice. He felt like maybe if he didn't
[12:39] give his witness statement, Howard might not go down for the
[12:42] murder of Sophie. And the third witness was
[12:44] convicted child sex offender Michael Guidey.
[12:48] Michael said that he'd been friends with Howard Hughes for
[12:50] years, way before he was sentenced to anything for his
[12:53] sex crimes. He said that years before this,
[12:56] the two of them had actually been having a conversation where
[12:59] how I would turn to Michael and said that he wanted to rape a
[13:02] girl of four or five years old. Then in July of 1996, Howard
[13:07] Hughes was found guilty of the kidnapping, rape and murder of
[13:11] seven-year old Sophie Hook. He was given three life
[13:14] sentences and a whole life tariff, meaning that he was
[13:17] supposed to be in prison all his life, but then he appealed it
[13:20] with some success. So with a whole life tariff, you
[13:23] just in prison for life and that's the end of it.
[13:26] Whereas after he appealed it, he was actually given a few 50 year
[13:29] minimum sentence, meaning that the earliest he can be released
[13:33] from prison is when he's 80 years old.
[13:35] However, no one believes that that is ever going to happen.
[13:38] People just think that Howard Hughes is going to be in prison
[13:40] for the rest of his life. But yeah, that's it for this
[13:43] case. I'm sorry that it was quite a
[13:45] short one, but there's not an abundance of information about
[13:48] this one online. Obviously, because they found
[13:51] him pretty early and everything and there was no forensics.
[13:54] There's really not much kind of facts to this case.
[13:57] It just kind of is what it is. Thank you so much for listening
[14:04] to usual disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[14:06] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[14:09] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[14:12] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[14:15] like this one, make sure to follow usual disclaimer on your
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[14:22] And if you really enjoyed, I'd love it.
[14:24] If you could. Leave a rating and a review too.
[14:27] Usual disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[14:30] production. See you next time.

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