CRUCIAL new DNA evidence could be about to solve a murder case that has baffled police for 20 years.

Thames Valley Police yesterday held a press conference with the family of Janet Brown where they announced new DNA technology has allowed them to build a profile of someone who was there the night she was killed.

The Oxford University research nurse and mother-of-three was found lying naked, handcuffed and gagged at the bottom of the stairs on the morning of Tuesday, April 11, 1995.

Police said the 51-year-old had been bludgeoned to death on her head by someone using a heavy object like an iron bar.

But despite statements from more than 2,000 people and a Crimewatch appeal which prompted 80 calls to Thames Valley Police, the case was never solved.

Now police plan to get DNA samples from some of the those people originally spoken to.

The force has offered a £20,000 reward for information which leads to an arrest, but also warned it could resort to mass DNA screening of the area if necessary.

If you have any information about the death of Mrs Brown, please call police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

Also unsolved

  • Boars Hill couple Warren and Elizabeth Wheeler, 83 and 79, were found battered to death in the living room of their cottage in October 1973. Both had been beaten with a weapon but it was never found.
  • Finnish hitchhiker Eila Karjalainen’s decomposing body was found dumped in a wood on the Blenheim estate in November 1983. The 23-year-old had been strangled and her body lay undiscovered in Kings Wood, Woodstock, for three months.
  • Taxi driver Leonard Gomm was stabbed to death in a country lane in Bletchingdon four hours after he set out to pick up a customer in June 1990. A lorry driver found the 75-year-old dad-of-three on a grass verge with a stab wound to his heart.
  • Oxford University research scientist Michael Meenaghan was shot dead through the window of his Blackbird Leys home in 1994. Police never established an obvious motive for the killing.
  • Oxford mother-of-four Nasreen Akhtar was strangled at her home in Cobden Crescent, Oxford, on March 30, 1995. A £10,000 reward was put up six years after her death but the 29-year-old’s murder remains unsolved.