The line snakes around the block, hundreds of people wrapped up against the early autumn chill. The crowd waits patiently as a sensibly-dressed, middle-aged woman wanders along the queue, handing out flyers and apologizing for the delay.

"He's been waiting hundreds of years," says one woman, gesturing towards the archway up ahead with a smile. "It won't kill us to hang on for half an hour."

"He" is Richard III, one of the most famous kings of England, remembered by school children and Shakespeare aficionados alike as a notorious villain, hunchbacked and hateful, accused of killing his own nephews, the "Princes in the Tower," to usurp the throne, and whose whereabouts were, until recently, a complete mystery.

The history books record that in August 1485, Richard - the last English king to die in battle - rode out from Leicester, in central England, to the Battle of Bosworth Field. There he met his end; his body was returned to the city days later, ignominiously lashed to a packhorse.

While other monarchs might have been granted all the pomp and ceremony of a state funeral, as a defeated warrior, Richard was accorded no such regal treatment. Instead his naked remains were put on display to prove to supporters and opponents alike that he really was dead, before being hastily buried in a nearby church.

Which is why, more than 520 years on, a crowd has gathered in this municipal car park, though there's little to explain their excitement - at first glance, the most remarkable thing seems to be the lack of vehicles in the worn white parking bays.

Overlooked by the spire of the nearby cathedral, fluorescent overall-clad archaeologists and historians gather near a hole in the ground. It looks like any other set of roadworks, the surface scraped back to reveal layers of earth.

But at the far end of the trench, a laminated copy of a priceless portrait offers a hint as to why so many people have chosen to spend their Saturday morning in a parking lot: Experts believe this uninspiring gray square of tarmac was once part of the Greyfriars Friary -- and might, therefore, be the last resting place of Richard III.

Some of them weren't so sure at first, however. "It seemed like such a harebrained scheme," Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the project, tells CNN. "We didn't expect to find anything."

Applying for permission to dig at the site, and potentially exhume a body, or bodies, Buckley says he wrote: "In the unlikely event that we find the remains of Richard III.."

Nonetheless, at the tail end of last summer, a team of experts dug three trenches across the site and began hunting for evidence of the long-lost friary, where Richard III was recorded to have been buried.

The search turned up traces of the building, and then something altogether more exciting: A human skeleton, complete with evidence of battle wounds -- a blow to the head, and an arrow in the back -- and scoliosis, or curvature of the spine.

"I didn't think it was likely to be him at first," explains bioarchaeologist Jo Appleby, who excavated the remains. "The skull didn't seem to be in quite the right place -- now we know that's because of the scoliosis -- but it didn't seem to 'go' with the legs.

"When I lifted the skull and saw the injury, a little alarm bell started to ring, but I told myself perhaps someone had dug into the grave at a later date and hit it with a spade, so I thought 'Don't say anything yet.'

"I cleared the arms and legs, and then went up the spine, hunting for vertebrae, [but] they weren't there, they weren't where I expected them to be. Instead they went in completely the wrong direction. At that point, I thought 'Hang on!'"

"Someone came over and said 'I think you need to see this,'" Buckley says. "We were looking at something else, so I said 'I'm a bit busy at the moment,' and they said 'No, no, you really need to see this.'"

They were stunned to discover the remains were in surprisingly good condition - particularly given the fact they were apparently laid to rest in a simple shroud, with no coffin to protect them.

"There have been so many changes to the site over the years that the chances of finding the remains were so slim," says local historian David Baldwin. "It wouldn't have been at all surprising had they been destroyed."

As a shiver of anticipation spread across the site, one figure sat, deathly pale and shaking, at the side of the trench.

Philippa Langley had spent years trying to convince archaeologists and authorities alike to allow the dig for Richard III to go ahead. Now she watched, in shock, as the search she had championed for so long reached its climax.

"It's been a real labor of love," she told CNN. "Three years of hard work and tough graft, of people saying we'd never find him, but it looks like it may have paid off."

Langley, a screenwriter, became intrigued by Richard III after reading a book about him on holiday, and quickly decided he would make a perfect subject for a film.

"His story absolutely blew me away," she says. "I asked myself 'Why has nobody written this? Why has nobody told this guy's story?' Robin Hood has had his moment in the cinema, now it's time for Richard III to have his time on the big screen too.

"I decided I needed to do some research -- I needed to know who he was, what he was about, I needed to get inside his head, talk his talk, walk his walk, so I went to Leicester and to Bosworth, but I felt there was no fitting conclusion to the story."

So she decided to help create one, by forcing historians to look again at his story, to find "the real man, and not the myth," because, she believes: "With the truth, he'll finally be able to rest in peace."