The murder of candy floss queen Miriam Culine gripped the North-East during the summer of 1978. Twenty-six years later, the man arrested for her murder has been found dead in his van. The Northern Echo looks back at one of the region's most sensational murder cases.

A PIECE of twisted wire from an ear-ring, a gold crucifix and fragments from a gold necklace were all that remained to identify Miriam Culine when police found her remains.

The 33-year-old wife of fairground showman Fred Culine had been burnt alive in her gold Austin 1800.

She had been drugged with ether or knocked unconscious before being bundled, naked except for a bra, into the saloon and driven to allotments at West Cornforth, in County Durham.

There, her murderer set fire to the car using a crude mixture of oil and paraffin.

The terrified woman was alive for 15 minutes as the vehicle blazed.

The burnt-out car was discovered between the allotments and pigeon lofts in the early hours of Tuesday, August 22, 1978.

Mrs Culine - nee Crawford - was the daughter of a Tyneside Pentecostal Church pastor. She enjoyed a private school education and could speak French.

But when she was 17, she gave up her cosy life to travel with Fred Culine - a man 40 years her senior.

She worked on the candy floss stall, where her good looks and easy smile made her popular with showgoers and earned her the nick-name, the Candy Floss Queen. She also worked on the books and soon her husband came to trust her more than his own family.

Mr Culine ran the fairground rodeo, the show's main attraction, and booked pitches on to the site. His family had been in the circus and fair business for nearly 500 years.

The pair married at a register office in Chester-le-Street, in front of only two guests, 18 months before the murder. After the brief ceremony, the party went to Binns, in Sunderland, for a celebration meal.

At the time, the fair occupied a permanent site off Cheapside, in the County Durham town of Spennymoor. Later, it became an itinerant touring attraction.

Lawrence Wood was an out-of-work horse dealer. He lived with two sisters and a younger brother in Front Street, Wingate, County Durham. Both his parents were dead and he was the de facto head of the family.

Mr Wood described Mrs Culine as: "An attractive woman - the sort who turns a man's head in the street."

The dark haired Romany was riding a horse the day the Culine fair drove into Wingate.

The pair soon got to know each other. Mrs Culine used to exercise the horses every day and often stopped to speak to Mr Wood. Not long after this, fairground workers spotted the couple sharing a snatched kiss by the candy floss stall but none of them realised the pair were also enjoying nights of passion in her caravan at West Cornforth.

As Mr Wood said: "Everyone in Wingate wanted her, but there was only me for her."

During the murder trial, during the summer of 1979, Mr Wood denied murdering his fairground sweetheart. He claimed he had finished their affair months earlier when Mr Culine found out.

He did confess to helping Mrs Culine's plans to get away from the fairground.

She thought they were planning to escape together - but he had found another love and had no intention of leaving.

Mr Wood said some of Mrs Culine's things he sold shortly after her death had been given to him because she needed money for her new life.

The court also heard how Mr Culine had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife, for a term of only six months, shortly before the killing. Her death came weeks before the policy was due to expire.

It took the jury at Teesside Crown Court three-and-three quarter hours to find Mr Wood not guilty of murder. Outside the court, he said: "I always knew I would be found not guilty - but the waiting was terrible."

The verdict cast a long shadow over Mr Culine. The fairground impressario, who had fallen out with his family over his marriage, felt the trial had unfairly cast a stain over his character. He died broken-hearted months after the end of the trial.

After the acquittal, police never charged anyone else with Mrs Culine's murder. The girl who chose a gipsy life left the world in the traditional gipsy manner, burned with some of her treasured possessions in the gold car that had been her caravan.