This case is one of the most unusual in British criminal history. Two men committed a series of rapes, then one of the men began to rape alone. Eventually the violence culminated in three murders – known as the Railway Murders because of their locations – and John Francis Duffy was forensically linked to two of them and given life imprisonment in 1988. More than a decade later, he began to hint to his prison therapist that he’d committed the murders in conjunction with another man. When the police questioned him, he named his accomplice as David Mulcahy, his erstwhile best friend.
Early writers on the case wrote singularly of ‘the railway rapist’ and ‘the railway murderer’ though some knew that several of the rapes had been committed by two men, one of whom had never been identified. Later, when David Mulcahy was convicted, most journalists simply reiterated the John Duffy story and added David Mulcahy’s name, despite the fact that only John Duffy’s belated testimony links David Mulcahy to the three deaths. These press accounts also left out the pieces of the puzzle which didn’t fit. Rather than do likewise, this case study tries to give every side of the story, even when some of the information is contradictory.
John Francis Duffy was born in Ireland on 29th November 1958 but his parents soon relocated the family – John and his five siblings – to London. Not only were his first and middle names that of saints, but he was persuaded to become an altar boy. He wasn’t a popular pupil at Haverstock school and before long was being picked on by the bullies. At age eleven he made friends with another boy who was also being bullied, David Mulcahy.
John was small in stature with reddish hair. By his early teens he had particularly bad acne, which would leave him with a permanently pock-marked face. He also suffered from very low self-esteem. David was much more outgoing and confident than John, was of normal height, with dark hair and an easy smile. He was somewhat hyperactive and outwardly confident but needed to be liked. Like many bullied or abused children, the boys looked for smaller victims and were witnessed being cruel to animals.
The friends left school at sixteen and took various forms of employment, such as painting and plastering. At one stage David Mulcahy was a minicab driver and John Duffy trained as a carpenter with British Rail. He was to become so familiar with the railway network’s more isolated locations that he eventually chose them as his murder sites.
The teenagers continued to socialise together, though they looked an unlikely duo, David being five foot eleven whilst John was five foot four. They bought air rifles and took them out on Hampstead Heath, shooting out windows. They eventually joined a martial arts school and became devotees of kung fu films.
In June 1980 John Duffy married Margaret Byrne against her parents’ wishes. The couple wanted to start a family but no child was forthcoming and eventual tests showed that the problem was John’s as he had a low sperm count. Most people would have settled for a good, childfree life or perhaps adopted – but infertility was a bitter blow to a man who already had such low
self-esteem
.
Meanwhile, David Mulcahy also married and started a family. He and his wife Sandra would have six children together, two of which would eventually die of cancer and one which was stillborn. Perhaps needing a focal point in their own relationship, John and Margaret bought themselves an Alsatian puppy, but it somehow fell off the flat roof of their house and died, leaving Margaret deeply upset.
Duffy began to rent videos in which women were humiliated and raped, and he told his wife and her friends that rape was ‘a natural male instinct’ (whereas in truth many men’s first instinct is to feel protective towards women) and generally talked and acted misogynistically. On another occasion he suggested that he’d raped a girl due to Margaret’s supposed frigidity. During this period he tied his wife up – but these weren’t harmless reciprocal bondage games. Instead, he terrorised her and only became aroused when she was genuinely afraid.
Within two years the marriage had become so unstable that Margaret left John. This coincided with a series of London rapes.
The first rape took place in June 1982, when a
twenty-three
-year-old woman walking near Hampstead railway station was dragged into a derelict building by two men who bound and gagged her. After the rape, they escaped via the North London line.
There were another four rapes carried out by two men that year, and thirteen further rapes in the first six months of 1983. The men always ordered their victims not to look at them or they wore balaclavas which they partially removed during some of the sexual assaults. The women were sometimes threatened at knifepoint and ordered to remove their clothes. Some of the assaults stopped short of rape when the victims screamed or when the rapists heard other people nearby.
But if a rape
was
completed, the men would order the young women to wipe out their vaginas with tissues – tissues which the duo took away from the scene. This wasn’t a fetishistic quirk, simply an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. At that time, however, the police weren’t doing DNA testing in forensic work.
Meanwhile, John Duffy was sacked from British Rail for poor timekeeping and took to wandering around the neighbourhood for hours at a time. (Police would later speculate that he used these hours to suss out ideal locations at which to rape future victims.) Sexual fantasy and rape-planning was becoming more important to him than everyday life…
On Sunday 15th July 1984, two Danish au pairs were walking near Hampstead Heath at 2.30am, having become
lost after a night out in the West End. Two men walked past them, one tall and one of average height. One of the au pairs thought that both men were black. Moments later the men donned dark blue woollen masks and walked alongside the girls before manoeuvring them up a grassy bank. The men separated the girls and the tall one told his victim ‘Now you have to be real nice to me. Okay?’ He moved the mask halfway up his face to kiss her and she noticed that he had thick lips.
He told her to take off all of her clothes and lie down, adding that he’d do the same. The man then raped her for a few seconds before requesting oral sex.
Meanwhile her friend was raped by the other man, after which their attackers robbed them of two pounds. The girls were found in a distressed state by a mini cab driver who took them to Hampstead police station.
This pattern was to be repeated, albeit more usually with one victim rather than two. The women sometimes found it difficult to give a detailed description as it was dark and they were often blindfolded. And terror made some of them overestimate both rapists’ heights. But several of them described one attacker as being five foot four with reddish hair and piercing eyes and the other as being around five foot ten with a tanned complexion and dark hair. The dark haired man sometimes apologised to his victim before fleeing the crime and on one occasion he burst into tears. The victims noted that he often failed to get an erection and that when he did, he sometimes failed to ejaculate. The man later identified as Duffy often raped and sodomised the victims whilst the other man (who on
at least one occasion was described as being shorter than the five foot four Duffy) performed oral sex or demanded fellatio.
As the men became more confident about their ability to control the situation, they spent longer with the victims, ordering them to commit specific sexual acts.
The rapes abruptly stopped for a time in the second half of 1983. In the same period, John and his wife Margaret briefly got back together and tried to have a baby – but, fearful of his brooding temper, she soon left him again. Other trial reconciliations would follow but fail and she saw her once quiet husband turn into a cold-hearted man with staring eyes.
By 1984 some women were being raped by two men and others by a solo rapist. One July evening, three separate women were sexually assaulted by a man, and their statements showed many similarities and included a description that could have been John Duffy. That November, acting alone, he raped a woman at knifepoint on Barnes Common.
In June 1985, Margaret left John for good. By now she had a lover (by whom she would have a child), something which incensed her estranged husband. That August he viciously attacked and raped her and also assaulted her lover with a knife. The police arrested him and noted that he lived in Kilburn, the area of many of the sexual attacks so they added him to their long list of possible rape suspects. He was only 1505 on a prioritised list of over 2000 suspects as in those days domestic violence wasn’t taken seriously.
At the start of December 1985, John Duffy went to Hendon Magistrates Court to answer these domestic
abuse charges. Whilst there, he recognised one of the women he had raped. She didn’t recognise him, but it was a close call and Duffy knew that the next time he wouldn’t be so lucky. He saw his options as ending the rapes – or killing the next victim. Twenty-seven days later, he murdered for the first time. (And twelve years later, in late 1997, he would suggest that he did so in tandem with David Mulcahy, his one-time friend.)
During the rapes, Duffy and his co-rapist had trawled an area close to home – but Hackney Wick in East London was the locale for the first murder. Duffy would later say that this was a deliberate ploy to stop the police associating the murder with the rapes.
On 29th December 1985, a nineteen-year-old secretary called Alison Day was grabbed and subdued on a quiet railway path. She was dragged into a derelict garage where some of her clothes were cut off with a knife. These pieces of cloth were then used to gag her, though there were few people in earshot on that quiet Sunday night. Her arms were bound behind her back with coarse string and police would later note that the teenager’s thumbs were tied together and her hands were bound in a praying position, forms of bondage that John Duffy had used on his wife.
The teenager was raped and battered unconscious with a brick. Thereafter, a strip of cloth torn from her blouse was made into a ligature with a piece of alderberry wood. Again, police would later note that Duffy was familiar with ligatures and had once tried to commit suicide by using one. This Spanish windlass was used to slowly strangle Alison Day to death.
Her corpse was weighed down and dumped it into the River Lea, where it wouldn’t be discovered until the following month. The only remaining forensic evidence would be some fibres from a tracksuit – and Duffy often wore a tracksuit whilst stalking victims as it made him look like a jogger rather than a predator.
The second murder – four months later in April 1986 – was even more fiendishly planned, taking place beside a lonely footpath near Horsley which was clearly used by cyclists. Someone stretched a piece of rope across the path, knowing that a cyclist would either run into it and be thrown from their bike, or else see it and have to dismount. Either way, the person who tied the rope would have access to a vulnerable female but could just remain hidden amongst the wild bluebells and bushes if a male cyclist came along.
Sadly, fifteen-year-old Maartje Tamboezer was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The schoolgirl cycled through the sunlit woods that lunchtime, straight into danger. She too was tied in an unusual way, stripped, raped, brutally beaten and strangled with a Spanish windlass. Burning paper tissues were stuffed into her vagina
post-mortem
to burn away any semen. Her body was found in the midst of hundreds of bluebells, so the police named the case The Bluebell Enquiry.
John Duffy now went out trawling for another victim, finding a fourteen-year-old girl at a train station. He put his razor-sharp butterfly knife to her
throat, dragged her to the nearby woods and raped her. But for some reason he let her live.
A month after the second murder, the third sexual killing took place. The date was 18th May 1986, the place another quiet railway spot, Brookmans Park in North London. The victim was twenty-nine-year-old Anne Lock, a
recently-married
secretary who had caught the late train home. She entered the station bike shed to collect her bicycle but was pounced on and dragged to a remote part of the railway line. One of her socks was used to gag her and the other to blindfold her. She was raped and terrorised – many years later Duffy would suggest that she was made to walk along the outside of a bridge, so that, if she fell, she’d plummet into the freezing water to her death.
Anne Lock was eventually strangled and her genitals were burnt post-mortem in an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. It would be ten weeks till her decomposing body was found, weeks in which her completely innocent and grieving new husband was regarded with deep suspicion by the police.
The police interviewed Duffy again as semen traces found on Maartje Tamboezer’s body indicated that he was the right blood group – in those days the police couldn’t actually match semen samples. He must have realised that the net was closing in so came up with a plan, persuading a martial arts friend, Ross Mockeridge, to beat him up and slash his chest. (Mr Mockeridge would later deeply regret this act.) Afterwards, John Duffy staggered into a police
station claiming that he’d been mugged and had lost his memory. The police took him to hospital, where doctors believed he had amnesia and admitted him.
Later, when the police came round to interview him about the rapes, the medics turned them away, explaining that their patient mustn’t be subjected to further stress. But Duffy recovered enough to be treated as a part-time patient – and whilst out for the day he raped a schoolgirl. Unfortunately she was too traumatised to give a clear description of him.
The memory loss man was let out on bail in September, and his release coincided with another rape, this time in Copthall Park near Barnet.