How Odile’s case proves it’s never too late

While giving interviews to the media on behalf of Locate International, there are a few questions we have become used to fielding. 

One of them is: can’t you just use DNA analysis to identify the unidentified? (The truth is, it’s a lot more complicated than that.) Another is: why can’t the police do this work? (What Locate International does is complement, rather than supersede, the police). 

But another is: is it not too late to solve this case after all this time? 

The answer to that is no. Because we will never cease to be amazed by how clear some people’s memories are, even after decades. And just one small recollection can help us solve a case. 

Take David and Barbara Liversedge. In 1972, they encountered a young woman hitch-hiking near their home in Hertfordshire and took her in to their home. Decades later, when a police appeal was launched to identify a young woman who had died on the A1 in Hertfordshire in 1975, they recognised her immediately. 

It was their detailed information to the police that provided the foundation for Locate International’s own investigation, which began not long after our charity was founded in 2019. The woman’s name was Odile, but she also used the name Anna. She came from the north of France. She enjoyed a cider, worked in a factory producing memorabilia, and had moved to Cambridge to study English.  

As much as we benefitted from the clear-eyed recollection of the Liversedges, who were kind enough to help with our own investigation, some dogged detective work and a bit of luck have also come in useful. 

Rory Geraghty, a member of a Locate team that has been looking into Odile’s case for three years, was at a library in 2025 investigating another unidentified case, and thought he would enter a search for Odile while he was there. 

"I nearly fell off my chair,” Rory said last year. “I just couldn’t believe it.” He had found a newspaper article from 1972 mentioning a house fire in Cambridge. One of the residents of the house was a 20-year-old French woman named Odile Ledoux. 

That led to a new public appeal – and, eventually, a new breakthrough. Months later, a woman named Jacky was idly Googling someone from her university days and came across an article mentioning the house fire. Odile Ledoux was her former housemate. And Jacky had more information: she probably came from the small town of Saint-Lô in Normandy. 

And so, today, we are launching a new appeal in Saint-Lô to identify Odile. To this end, we have partnered with Ludivine Laniepce, an investigative reporter covering the town for the La Presse de la Manche newspaper. 

If we do end up reuniting Odile with her true identity, and providing answers to those who have been seeking them for decades, it will be because of people like the Liversedges and Jacky, who remembered one small detail more than five decades later. 

It is never too late. 

Author: Roland Hughes, Head of Press at Locate International