Authors: Paul Britton
The management committee had decided to go public because a graphite test had discovered a message imprinted on one of the envelopes sent by the blackmailer. It had probably been beneath a sheet of paper as someone jotted down the words, ‘Mavis, will not be in Tuesday, Phil.’
There was no way of knowing if this was fabricated or genuine but Bob Taylor went public hoping that somebody would recognize the names and call the police. It triggered thirty new leads that had to be followed up.
Meanwhile, the blackmailer had gone quietly to ground, although I knew that he’d be back. He loved the game too much to let it die. Throughout September I had regular calls from either Taylor or one of his sergeants. I actually bumped into a couple who were trying to trace a particular car.
Several new leads were being followed, including the sighting of a suspect red Suzuki car in a lovers’ lane in Barnsley. Detectives were also tracing the origins of the white-painted bricks used as markers on the ransom trail and had linked them to a now defunct brick company.
The silence was broken on 15 October when a letter addressed to British Rail arrived at Euston Station in London. A second envelope inside was marked, ‘For the attention of a senior executive only.’
Unless we receive a cash payment of Ł200,000 we shall cause the derailment of an express train, either the D. T. V. of an East coast 225 or the D. T. V. of a West coast push-pull. A high speed section has been selected and some materials already concealed nearby, below is a drawing of how we intend.
We are extreemly serious about the course of action should you ignore this letter or no money is forthcoming. We expect you shall cal the police, but any publicity or visible police action will result in us not communicating again. Should you ignore this letter then you will be able to see how serious we were.
Should you also pretend to go along with our demands but do not deliver any money then this will make us even madder than ignoring the letter…
It went on to give precise instructions on denominations of money and how it should be bundled, packaged and eventually put into an unlocked case. British Rail was to insert an advertisement in the personal column of the London Evening Standard on the following Monday, which would read, ‘The train is ready to depart.’
Two days later, on Wednesday 23 October, two female employees of British Rail had to drive to Crewe Station with the money. One woman was to stay in the car at all times while the other waited for a phone call on platform three at about 7.00 p.m.
She had to answer, saying, ‘This is Amanda speaking’ and would be given the name of another railway station that she had to travel to and await further instructions.
The person receiving the calls must wear a skirt and shoes with heels, we want no Olympic sprinters in trainers, the women must have a good road atlas and have good road direction sense…
Note. As security against a police ambush we have an ace card to be played at the time the money is picked up, this you will learn of later. But your females will not be harmed in any way if they attempt no heroics, there will be a firearm trained on the driver at the time of the pick up, but she will not see anyone.
The letter was initially investigated by British Rail Transport Police and then handed to Scotland Yard. An old acquaintance from the Heinz baby food investigation, DCS Pat Fleming, was put in charge and had to decide if the threat was genuine and how to react. At that stage, he had no idea that West Yorkshire police were tracking a killer and blackmailer.
Meanwhile, Bob Taylor also had a letter, this one addressed to ‘The Chief Constable West Yorkshire Police, Millgate, Leeds’. The misspelling of ‘Millgarth’ would later become a vital piece of evidence.
Re Julie (with no hair)
As you are no were near on my tail the time has come to collect my Ł140,000 from you. I do not get any bigger sentence for 2 murders and prostitutes are easy to pick up but as this time you know I mean business I don’t need to pick one up until Monday & I have purfected the pick up. The money to be the same as before.
On Wed 21 Oct the same WPC will be at the phone box on Platform 3 of Carlisle Station (bottom of ramp) at 8 p.m. for message (recorded) at 9.15 p.m. approx.
I believe you will deliver the money as you will not risk life of WPC or prostitute. …
Within days Scotland Yard and the Leeds murder team had established the link and I compared the letters. I had no doubt that they were written by the same man, despite his attempts to conceal the fact. There were numerous clues - the poor grammar, addresses written in upper-case, the relatively small cash demands, the use of railway stations and the shopping list of precise instructions about how the money had to be bundled and packed. These far outweighed the dissimilarities.
The second letter specified an incorrect date - ‘Wed 21 Oct’ - for the ransom drop. The Wednesday fell two days later on the twenty-third, the same date as the British Rail drop. Was it a deliberate mistake or, more likely, an attempt by the blackmailer to stretch police resources by forcing them to run two different surveillance operations simultaneously 150 miles apart. Hundreds of policemen from different Regional Crime Squads would be tracking the same man and risking arresting each other in the mayhem that followed.
I suggested a third possibility - he wouldn’t call either courier. Maybe he simply wanted to sit back and laugh, knowing that each time the police were frustrated and disappointed, their enthusiasm and resolve would be worn down.
The BR threat included a drawing of how the high speed express would be derailed using two rigid steel joists (RSJs) dug into the tracks. An expert confirmed that such a device could indeed lift an express train off the rails and send it hurtling into the air at more than a hundred miles per hour. Multiple fatalities were almost inevitable.
Pat Fleming then made a brave call and chose not to follow the demands. He wanted to stall for time and to hopefully communicate with the blackmailer through the newspaper columns. At the designated time, WPC Susan Wooley answered the call at Crewe Station but instead of saying, ‘This is Amanda speaking’, she pretended to be a commuter who simply picked up the phone when it began ringing. Meanwhile, at Carlisle station, Anna waited in vain for a call and the surveillance operation was stood down.
On 28 October a second letter arrived at Euston Station.
Congratulations, you have now qualified for retribution. Within a week or so a small penalty will be imposed in the form of the removal of an electric locos pantagraph, and with a little luck the downing of a section of line, a suitable place has not yet been located, but studies are under way. This is the small demonstration I wished to perform initially to prove our determination.
Five days later a British Rail track inspector on the main West Coast line at Wolverhampton not far from the village of Millmeece, found several blocks of sandstone lying directly under a railway bridge. The words, ‘To the chief executive of BR’ had been written on one of the blocks. Close examination showed that the sandstone had been drilled with holes and had initially been suspended using rope and wire from the bridge.
It was a booby trap designed to destroy a train’s pantograph - a device that extends from the cars to the overhead electricity lines. At best such damage would simply stop the train within a few hundred yards; at worst it would bring down the high-voltage cables and risk electrocuting passengers. In this case the device had failed because the draught generated by the train had probably blown the suspended blocks out of the way and sent them crashing onto the track.
However, the blackmailer had again illustrated his knowledge of trains and his potential for destruction. He wasn’t just a trainspotter with a bad attitude, the railway system was like a framework that rumbled beneath all his plans.
It had been nearly four months since Julie’s murder and the police felt they had come close to catching her killer at least twice. All they could do until he began playing again was to follow up every lead and gather the forensic evidence that might one day help to convict him.
After a typically quiet Christmas when the snow rarely threatened and the mist didn’t lift off the hills around the village, I returned to work at Arnold Lodge. On 24 January I was conducting an outpatient clinic at an old gatekeeper’s house that formed a small outpost of the forensic unit, when Diane my secretary interrupted.
‘A Detective Chief Superintendent Mike Jenkins from West Midlands CID wants you to call him straightaway. It’s urgent.’
The note in my diary for that afternoon reads: ‘West Midlands - some sort of crisis’.
Jenkins told me that a young estate agent, Stephanie Slater, had been kidnapped and a ransom letter received. As he spoke, the image of Julie Dart bundled up, dead in a muddy field, immediately flashed in front of me. He’s back, I thought.
Throughout the drive to Birmingham, although I didn’t know Stephanie, I kept imagining a young woman imprisoned somewhere, probably exhausted, possibly injured and almost certainly overwhelmed with fear and disbelief. The sense of immediacy this created was unlike anything I’d confronted in past cases. Someone’s life was in immediate danger and depending upon which way the police reacted, Stephanie could live or die.
It was 5.30 p.m. when I arrived at Lloyd House in Birmingham to be met by Jenkins, an old-style copper who had risen through the ranks, and the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime), Phil Thomas. I’d interviewed Thomas for the Home Office Review and found him a big and bright man with a voice that matched his frame. Since then he’d undergone some sort of throat surgery and his voice had lost much of its authority.
They outlined the situation. Two days earlier, Stephanie, aged twenty-two, had left the Shipways Estate Agent’s office in Great Barr at 10.30 a.m. to show a man around a three-bedroom house in nearby Turnberry Road. The customer had given his name as Mr R. Southwall of Wakefield when he rang the agency a week earlier to inquire about buying a house and also when he dropped in to collect the details of twenty vacant properties.
Several neighbours saw a man waiting near the door of the vacant house before Stephanie arrived and described him as being in his forties, around five feet eight inches tall with dark collar-length hair and wearing black-rimmed Michael Caine-style glasses. Half an hour later one of them saw a bright red van in an alley behind the house. A sign along the side windows said, ‘BLOCKED AND BROKEN DRAINS’.
At midday, Sylvia Baker, another employee of Shipways, took a telephone call for the manager Kevin Watts. The male caller said Stephanie had been kidnapped and a ransom letter would arrive in the following day’s post. He ended with the warning, ‘Phone the police and she’ll die.’
The agency quickly established there was no Mr Southwall at the address supplied and the telephone number he’d given was a phone box on the A1 in Nottinghamshire. Stephanie’s car was found outside the vacant house and inside, at the top of the stairs, was a small spot of blood on the wall.
‘Let’s get you over to the incident room,’ said Jenkins. ‘Then you can see the maps and photographs of the scene. You can also talk to the lads on the ground.’
We drove in a fast but discreet car from the brightly lit city centre through a tangle of residential and commercial areas until we squeezed into a small overcrowded carpark behind the two-storey police station in Nechells Green. Behind the blinds every light was burning and each room in the building had been temporarily labelled for some particular use by the task force - SIO, Briefing Room, Incident Room,
etc.
- all the specialist functions employed by a major inquiry.
Having introduced me to the SIO and the other senior operational detectives, Jenkins handed me a photocopied page. ‘We intercepted the ransom letter and a cassette tape at the sorting office,’ he said.
Again, the spelling and grammatical errors belong to the abductor.
Your employee has been kidnapped and will be released for a ransome of Ł175,000. With a little luck he should be O.K. and unharmed, to prove this fact you will in the next day or so receive a recorded message from him. He will be released on Friday 31 January 1992 provided:
1) On Wednesday 29 January a ransome of Ł175,000 is paid, and no extension to this date will be granted.
2) The police are not informed in any way until he has been released…
The money must be carried in a holdall and made up as follows precisely: Ł75,000 in used Ł50. Ł75,000 in used Ł20. Ł25,000 in used Ł10 packed in 31 bundles. 250 notes in each.
Kevin Watts (if not the hostage) must be the person to receive all messages and carry the money to the appointed place. However, please note that all messages will be prerecorded, and no communication or negotiations can be made. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. HIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS.
A plain audio-cassette was clicked into a machine on the desk. Stephanie’s voice filled the room sounding apprehensive but not fearful. She recited a prepared message from the kidnapper. In the silence that followed I could almost hear the questions before they were asked. However, before I could answer them, I needed a quiet space to look for the writer behind the letter.
I knew that each hour that passed increased the risk to Stephanie and made the news blackout more difficult to sustain, yet I couldn’t afford to rush. The experience of others had already shown me the dangers of giving advice to the police that was so wide of the mark that it could point them in completely the wrong direction. Even a small error at this point could lead to Stephanie being murdered.
Unwilling to take such a risk, I sat down and began studying the letter, confident that the author would reveal himself, not only on the page but in the structure of the crime itself. I had to absorb his method in as much detail as I could, and map it onto the psychological understandings we have of personality and motivation. It took several hours, going over the chronology again and again but finally I was sure. I had met this mind before. The author was the same man who had murdered Julie Dart and tried to extort money from British Rail.