Police search Sharnbrook for body parts after discovery of a severed human head

The body part was found yesterday afternoon at a quarry in Ely, Cambridgeshire, which is 40 miles away.

But it is believed it may have been transported in landfill from the Sharnbrook site, where a Network Rail building project is taking place.

Missing mum Natalie Hemming, 31, lived in Milton Keynes, next to the large Bletchley landfill site.

She has not been seen since May 1 and her partner Paul Hemming has been charged with murder.

Police dealing with her case are now speaking to Cambridgeshire officers about the discovery of the head, which has not yet been officially identified as male or female.

A quarry worker, who asked not to be named, claimed his colleague spotted the head lying on top of a skip and believed it to belong to a woman in her 30s or 40s.

He said: “My colleague collected the skip where he saw nothing out of the ordinary, and put a cover over the top to stop anything falling out during transit.”

“When he got back to our site, he took the cover off and spotted something straight away.

“He said: ‘What on earth is that’, and his first thought was that it was a manikin’s head.

“But then he realised it had eyebrows and hair, and suddenly clicked that it was actually a woman’s head.

“He described the features of the head looking female and said she looked in her 30s or 40s, but he couldn’t be 100 per cent.

“He thought she had dark hair but it could have been dirty blond and just covered in so much muck.

“He called the managers and it was all passed over to the powers that be.”

The man described how the quarry is used for waste disposal and said earthy materials are transported in and out of the site to and from locations right around the UK.

Specialist forensic teams are today scouring Network Rail land at Sharnbrook for other body parts. A JCB digger can be seen searching a landfill site beneath the village’s historic viaduct.

Police have now launched a public appeal for any information to help solve the macabre mystery.

A spokesman for police leading the Natalie Hemming investigation said: “ We are speaking with Cambridgeshire Police. We are not currently linking the two investigations but are keeping an open mind.”