Shelley Morgan 1984 murder unsolved But when she failed, uncharacteristically, to pick them up from school, the police were alerted. Her husband Nigel, 33, who had been away at the couple's second home, a cottage in the Brecon Beacons, when his fair-haired, blue-eyed wife went missing, was just as mystified. Shelley had been born in Iowa, her husband revealed, and had come to live in this country in 1972. A friend told the Bristol Post: 'She's a very capable and caring mother, and a cheerful person with no worries. Shelley took the children to school and home again every day She is not the sort of person to go off.' She added that she was not a callous person who would have gone off with a lover and left the children to fend for themselves. As 80 detectives tried to piece together the American woman's movements, it * emerged that she had caught a local bus from Bedminster's East Street to the bus station early that morning. She had then, they believed, got on the. 359 country service to Portishead. But an appeal for witnesses - including another woman who may have got on the same bus - fell on deaf ears. No one ever came forward. By late August, Inspector Martyn Shell, who was leading the inquiry, told reporters: 'It seems that she's joined the 18,000 people who go missing in this country every year.' But he added: 'We are always hopeful of tracing people.' For a while, after reports that a woman matching her description had been seen in Weymouth boarding a ferry, the hunt switched to the Channel Islands. Interpol were alerted but the search led nowhere - as did 3,000 other dead-end leads. By March 1985, the Nailsea-based incident room, led by Detective Inspector Lew dark, was closed down, although a team of six detectives remained on the case. Although information was fast drying up, 'the file on her murder will never close', the detective promised her family. It was not an admission of defeat, he added, and he was still anxious to trace the driver of a blue van seen speaking to Shelley on the day she disappeared at a bus stop near the entrance to Ashton Court. Two hundred street posters went up and then a final appeal to try and jog someone's memory was made on the BBC's Crimewatch programme. As well as a reconstruction other last hours, a recording of an anonymous call made to the police in the September after she had gone missing was played for the first time. The message stated that Shelley's body would be found in a 'watery grave' and gave a location - but eight police frogmen who subsequently searched the spot drew a blank. Police said that they thought it was a hoax and asked the caller to come forward. But they never did, any more than the person who saw a yellow lorry in Backwell Hill road with a woman in the passenger seat, or the occupants of a two-tone BMW car parked on the Portishead-to-Bristol road. Then some children out playing were horrified to discover the decomposing,skeletal body of the Windmill Hill mother-of-two in lonely woodland above the North Somerset village of Backwell. It had been nearly five months since that fateful day when she had dropped her children off to catch the school bus. An inquest revealed that she had been stabbed in the back 14 times. Her Olympus OM20 camera was missing and she was naked except for a pair of tights and her sandals. Although, at one time, Shelley's disappearance was linked to that of 17-year- old Bath schoolgirl Melanie Road - murdered just two days before the American went missing - nothing ever came of it and the artist mother's abduction and murder all those years ago remains a mystery to this day. It is a sad fact of life that some murders go unsolved and that sometimes killers get away. However, nowadays new scientific techniques such as genetic finger printing offer a way of tracing the killers. American mother-of-two Shelley Morgan went missing one fine day in the summer of 1984 and her near-naked body was discovered in woodland some five months later - But her movements that day - as well as the identity of her killer - remain shrouded in mystery. Shelley Morgan mysteriously disappeared on the morning of June 11,1984, after taking her young children, Liam and Charlotte, to catch the school bus from their home in Windmill Hill's Dunkerry Road. Carrying a distinctive multi-coloured carpet bag containing a camera tripod, she informed them that she was going to take photos of the Avon Gorge.