Читать книгу Innocents - Jonathan Rose - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe work of Gee and Outteridge was, of course, limited to the materials already gathered from the scene of the crime and from Lesley herself. Clearly there was a great deal of available information which had to be obtained, and to this end Dibb, who had been appointed head of the enquiry, and Holland, his deputy, set in motion information ‘seeks’ on the Turf Hill Estate and the A672 near to the lay-by, searching for the elusive clues as to the identity of the killer.
High up on the moors officers were combing the grasses and shrubs around the site where the body was found, using metal detectors and electronic probes to try to find the small knife which had so cruelly slashed the child, and police scenes of crime officers took photographs of the still-untrampled area. At the direction of the supervising officers, other uniformed officers set up blocks at the Junction 22 exit of the M62 to ask questions of every motorist leaving the motorway at that point. Similar questions were asked of motorists passing the lay-by. Had they driven that route the preceding Sunday? Had they passed by the site? Had they seen a girl, a parked car, a man – alone or with a child – anything? A list of questions designed to squeeze information from people who might have seen something, yet not paid close attention or even noticed that they had seen something. A car parked up on the moors is not so rare a sight that it would be regarded as noteworthy, but if later asked perhaps the question will cause the brain to yield up that sighting, stored somewhere in the subconscious.
Professor Gee’s findings tended to suggest that the police would be well advised to confine their questioning to the Sunday, since that, he believed, was most probably when Lesley was killed. But even if that were correct, it could not be taken as conclusive, since it is not unusual for a killer to return to the scene of the crime, particularly when the body has not been discovered immediately.
There are two notable aspects of this questioning of dozens of motorists (and, indeed, of the door-to-door questioning going on in Rochdale): the vast number of man-hours involved, and the enormous volume of information gleaned. The resource problems are, perhaps, obvious, but the difficulties caused by the sheer quantity of information gathered are perhaps less glaring. They would be painfully illustrated towards the end of the decade and the beginning of the eighties with the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, when information gathered by dozens of police officers involved in a lengthy investigation was stored on thousands of cards in a file index, as one might find in a library. Each witness interviewed in the Molseed case had his details entered on to a card, and the card duly filed by name or date or some other point of reference. But the cards provide only a limited system of cross-reference. The facility did not exist to cross-reference all relevant aspects and, although there were different indices created according to names of persons and streets, type of motor vehicle, suspects etc, the time to carry out a manual cross-reference (and the obvious and real probability of human error both in filing and in making cross-references) made detection with such a system difficult and, occasionally, haphazard. The Ripper enquiry revealed this starkly: Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed on no less than six occasions before he was finally (and quite by chance) arrested. It is obvious now that a computerised system would enable cross-reference to take place, literally, at the push of a button. One beneficial effect of the errors of the Ripper enquiry was the bringing into use of the ‘HOLMES’1 computer system, which now plays a vital function in complex criminal investigations. But Lesley Molseed’s death preceded the advent of HOLMES by several years, and so the investigation of her death was carried out in the time-honoured fashion. All information was duly recorded on file cards: an army of paper for the death of a tiny child.
Although already effectively eliminated from the enquiry, Greenwell and his yellow Mini van were ‘assisted’ by a number of witnesses, including Ralph Holden, who actually described seeing the shopfitter scrambling up the embankment at 7.30 a.m. on the day Lesley’s body was discovered and Police Constable Robert Sendall, who, as a road traffic officer, had spoken with Greenwell in the lay-by at 9.30 p.m. the previous Thursday evening, confirming Greenwell’s account that the lay-by was his usual sleeping area.
Amongst the plethora of witnesses who did come forward for elimination were Derek and Doreen Hollos from Blackley, Manchester, who had driven past the scene at 2.15 p.m. and 7.15 p.m. on the Sunday, on their way to and from visiting relatives in Halifax. Their assistance to the police at that time was regarded as minimal. But their vehicle was a red Renault 16TL, registration ADK 539 L, and those innocuously recorded details would, in due course, become of crucial importance.
As the questioning of motorists continued, so police activity in the town escalated. On the afternoon of 8 October a joint operation of West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester police officers was coming into effect, with a hundred officers involved in the investigation from the outset. Come the following day, they and others joining them would go out on to the streets of Rochdale to begin the house-to-house enquiries essential to such an investigation. Pounding feet along residential streets. Knocking on doors. The traditional methods of British policing.
The decision to base the incident room, the ‘nerve-centre’ of the investigation, at Rochdale had not been difficult to make, even though the operation was, strictly speaking, a West Yorkshire matter. Discussions between Dibb and a detective chief superintendent of the Greater Manchester police confirmed what was already known, namely that the majority of enquiries would take place within the Turf Hill Estate. It made practical and logistical sense to have the incident room as close to the main area of investigation as possible.
Dibb and Holland then addressed the practical needs of the investigating team: staffing needs, hours of work for the enquiry team and the incident room staff, an indexing policy for the card system and a documentation registration procedure suitable to officers from both forces. Usually each police force used its own system for the logging and filing of index cards. But now a ‘common language’ was essential.
Dibb decided that the enquiry officers and incident room staff would operate on shifts covering at least 8 a.m. and 11 p.m. each day in the initial stages, and longer if required, as the several lines of enquiry were identified and pursued. This was to cause problems for the incident room staff, since it meant that different people might be responsible for reading and collating incoming information to those responsible for directing officers to make further enquiries (which are known as ‘Actions’) resulting from that information. Pieces of information came in, from officers on the enquiry, officers not on the enquiry and from members of the public. The information was then analysed and, if appropriate, a further action was prescribed. That action would be allocated to a team, led by a detective inspector, who would allocate actions through a team leader to a pair of detectives. It was a chain of command with inherent potential for breakdown, and this would be amplified if there was a turnaround of incident room staff in between the receipt of the first information, the decision to action and the subsequent allocation of that action.
Dibb made a policy decision to adopt the West Yorkshire force’s practice of taking full written statements from all persons interviewed. This would avoid the loss of pieces of information jotted down in an officer’s notebook or on scraps of paper, but it carried with it the obvious difficulty that it would generate substantial amounts of documentation, requiring reading, analysing and indexing. The volume of paperwork would be large. Even so, it is obvious that both the brief note method and the full statement method carry a risk that information recorded, perhaps at the time without an appreciation of its importance, might be lost. Dibb’s policy also added to the difficulty mentioned above, namely that the person reading and analysing a statement might not be the same person who would then decide an action on that statement, with a further opportunity for a breakdown in communications and a loss of continuity.
The investigation was not entirely dependent on the police seeking out information for themselves. The public were not slow to respond to the horror of this crime. By Friday, 10 October, with over 200 officers now involved, the investigators had received more than 400 telephone calls from members of the public who believed that they had seen something of importance. Not one of those calls could be overlooked, however trivial the information given might at first have seemed. The information may be fresh information, or a repetition of what an earlier caller had given, or a slight variation on such earlier-given information. The latter two types of call enable detectives to develop the picture as more detail is added to initial rough sketches. Each call required and received a follow-up.
Those telephone calls from the public were beginning to generate some sort of a pattern. There was what was described as a ‘flood’ of calls from a number of parents concerning a kerb-crawling driver, who, it was said, had accosted several girls under the age of 14 on Rochdale housing estates in the week preceding Lesley’s disappearance. No child had got into the man’s car, and no reports had been made to the police whilst Lesley had been missing. With no harm done to their own child (if the child had at that time told its parents) and with Lesley’s disappearance still open to any number of explanations, parents chose not to involve the police, but to be thankful that their own children were safe and well. With a child now dead – consciences were pricked, and the calls came in.
Suspicious motor cars became a topic raised in a number of calls, made by members of the public anxious to assist the police. Had these calls referred with any consistency to a single make, type or colour of vehicle, the common thread might have been of use. As it was, the genuinely made phone calls proffered a variety of descriptions of vehicles.
One car seen frequently in the two weeks preceding Lesley’s disappearance, on and around the Turf Hill Estate where she lived was described as a yellow or cream-coloured van.
Another vehicle generating a number of reports was a cream car with grey primer paint on one door which had been seen twice on Sunday, 5 October in Well-i’-th’-Lane, Rochdale. The second sighting had been by two men, Martin Wellburn and Stanley Russ, who had identified it as an old – possibly 1965-Vauxhall Viva, but the men had been unable to say whether there were any people, or children, in the car. The first sighting was by an elderly lady who was unable to give much detail beyond the car being a cream-coloured four-door, with red primer on the passenger side doors. This witness claimed to have seen a girl in the car who she thought looked exactly like Lesley. A light-coloured vehicle with red primer paint on the bodywork had been seen at the lay-by between 6.15 p.m. and 6.45 p.m. by Sandra Chapman and by Colin Sutcliffe.
Yet another vehicle was also spotted parked in the lay-by. This was described as a dirty blue-green 5cwt Morris van, which had had a green check blanket draped over the windscreen and driver’s window. It had been seen by a couple driving past on the Sunday of Lesley’s disappearance, at 2 p.m. and again at 3.30 p.m. This vehicle was subsequently described as being a Morris Minor-type van, hand-painted in turquoise or light green. No fewer than fourteen people came forward to speak of this van, covering a period between 1.30 and 6.30 p.m. Press reports at the time indicated that the police believed that this vehicle was being used by a courting couple, although the failure of the driver to come forward to police appeals made the police proffer the opinion that the couple involved a man and ‘someone else’s wife or girlfriend’. The police so wanted to identify the driver of this vehicle that they were prepared to offer him anonymity should he come forward voluntarily, but the tone of Detective Chief Inspector Bill Little gave away the anxiety of the police when he said, ‘Come forward, there will be no embarrassment and the matter will go no further,’ before adding the warning, ‘If [this] man does not come to us we will eventually find him and we can’t make the same promises then.’ It does appear that the police initially believed that this vehicle contained potential witnesses, rather than the abductor(s) and killer(s) of Lesley, but so determined were the investigating officers to move the enquiry along expeditiously, that they were not averse to making open threats. If the police did initially think this van contained an innocent courting couple, that view subsequently changed dramatically when DCS Dibb spoke to the press in these terms: ‘[This van] has got to be found even if we have to check every Morris or Austin five hundredweight van in this part of the country. It might well be a major breakthrough if we can trace this vehicle,’ which was believed to be a 1967 or 1968 model.
The threats were replaced by a sense of urgency. DCS Dibb regarded it as ‘absolutely necessary’ that the van be traced, although he was concerned that the van had been disposed of in the used car trade, or resprayed. He had assembled a team of twenty officers, lead by Detective Inspector Brian Sidebottom, to work full-time on this one aspect of the enquiry, with motor taxation officers helping the search by covering scrap yards and garages. The details of over 6,000 vehicles were considered. But by the end of October 1975, although the police had somehow managed to trace every other vehicle seen in or near the lay-by, the blue-green van had still not been found.
A further car was sighted and referred to, this time a sports car of the Triumph Spitfire or MGB type. It had allegedly been seen, again in a lay-by not far from the moorland grave. This car had been parked at right-angles to the road, with two men standing not far from it, upon the moors themselves. The seemingly innocuous part of the description ‘parked at right-angles to the road’ barely concealed an obvious element: a car parked with its boot away from the road was perfectly positioned for unloading a body from the boot, without it being visible to motorists speeding past.
When officers set about taking statements from motorists who had driven along the A657 on Sunday, 5 October, and, in particular, from those who had seen anything at or around the lay-by, they were to obtain a plethora of information such that, had the investigation centred or been dependent upon finding a particular car, it would have rapidly foundered. Forty-six witnesses came forward to give statements concerning cars or vans seen in the lay-by between 1.20 p.m. and 11.45 p.m. on Sunday, 5 October. There was little or no unanimity, as to make, colour or the number of occupants. Indeed, a number of witnesses would claim to see different cars in the lay-by at any one time, so that, for example at 3 p.m., one witness claimed to have seen a dark Triumph Spitfire and another said that there was a pale-blue Mini in the lay-by. At 5 p.m., an orange Mini and a cherry/maroon Vauxhall 101 are described by one witness, but another witness claimed to have seen only a pale-green small van, whilst a third described having seen a green Bedford van. Between 9.55 p.m. and 10.15 p.m., a red Viva, a dark-red Mini and a dark Cortina were described by three separate witnesses as being the only car in the lay-by at the time of their sighting. At least five witnesses claimed to have seen something like a dark-coloured Morris 1000 van, possibly a shade of blue, but, again, there was no consistency. There can be no question but that these witnesses were doing their best to be helpful but, in providing the police with such a variable selection of information, they inadvertently added to the confusion and to the amount of police time which would have to be devoted to tracing and eliminating the vehicles mentioned.
DC Michael Roberts drove three possible routes from Rochdale to the lay-by. The three routes were of 9.6, 9.8 and sixteen miles and the police officer’s journeys took between fifteen and twenty-nine minutes. If Lesley disappeared at a time between 12.30 and 1.30 p.m., then she would have arrived at the lay-by at some time between 1 p.m. (fifteen minutes maximum from leaving home to being abducted + the shortest journey time to the lay-by, being fifteen minutes) and 2.15 p.m. (fifteen minutes + longest journey time, taking 1.30 as the time of leaving home) or 2.30 p.m. The possible car sightings within that time are:
| 1 | 13.20 | Light-blue/green Ford |
| 2 | 13.20 | Light-blue Hillman Hunter Estate |
| 3 | 13.30 | Dark saloon |
| 4 | 13.30 | Dark-blue or green Cortina or Vauxhall |
| 5 | 14.00 | Dark, similar to a Cortina |
| 6 | 14.20 | Light-cream or grey 1100 |
| 7 | 14.20 | White car |
| 8 | 14.30 | Cream or white Sunbeam Alpine |
| 9 | 14.30 | Pale-yellow Hillman Minx |
| 10 | 14.30 | Light Hillman Hunter |
| 11 | 14.30–15.30 | White car |
| 12 | 14.30–17.30 | White Transit Van |
Of those twelve cars, perhaps only numbers 3,4 and 5 allow of the possibility of confusion with the car owned by the man they would eventually charge: a bronze-brown Avenger. The best that the police had would have been the description ‘dark, similar to a Cortina’.
It would therefore appear that there was virtually nothing which the police could usefully glean from the many statements regarding cars sighted at or near the lay-by, provided by members of the public in good faith. Eighty-four different vehicles and a number of people were made the subject of reports, but after three weeks Dibb had narrowed the field down to three which were of interest, could not be eliminated and had to be pursued. The white car with primer paint on the doors, the cream van and the blue/green 5cwt Morris 1000 van.
At 1.45 p.m. on the Sunday Christopher Coverdale, a self-employed contractor from Rochdale, drove past the scene. As he approached the lay-by he saw a man and a little girl on the embankment above the lay-by. His attention was on these people, so that he had not noticed any car, he thought it foolhardy to be on the moor in poor weather conditions, especially with a child. He recalled the child was wearing a blue, hip-length gabardine coat with the hood up. He believed the child to be a girl, because he could see uncovered legs. The man was facing towards the road, reaching down the embankment and pulling the child up by the hand. Coverdale described the man as being a 30- to 35- year-old white male, with light-brown or fair hair cut short and giving the appearance of being receding. He was five feet six to five feet eight, plump and dressed in a mid-brown jacket with a check pattern, matching trousers and a beige or mustard-yellow cardigan.
This was the first description obtained of a man and a child. Dibb was anxious to act, and he personally took Coverdale to the lay-by. It was not the cold which caused Jack Dibb to shiver when, asked to show the place where the man and child were standing, Coverdale pointed out a spot within yards of the place where Lesley had been found.
Within a week of the investigation commencing, police had obtained the names of, and were taking statements from, over 14,000 people using a team of 300 officers. The names had been taken at the road stops on the M62 and from door-to-door enquiries on the Turf Hill Estate. But such a volume of information had its problems. In the absence of any computerised system which could scan the field of information and draw from it any repetitive concept (be it a type or colour of car, or a description of a person or persons) which might lead to a single identifiable source, it was virtually impossible for the police to use the information gleaned to assist in identifying a suspect. Whilst the information might be used after a suspect had been identified, to confirm the identification, it was apparent that the police needed assistance from some other source to find the man they were looking for.
The police had quickly formed the view, and DCS Jack Dibb had expressed that view in the media, that the motive for the killing was ‘definitely sexual’ and that the killer was a local man. Moreover, they believed the man to be ‘mentally deranged with sexual deviations’ and being in need of urgent treatment. This theory is, with hindsight, of great interest. The police, at an early stage, were speaking of a man whose sexual urges went beyond mere perversion. If there exists such a thing as a ‘normal’ paedophiliac, it appears to be quite clear that the person whom the police sought was regarded as being beyond that range of normality. He was mentally ill, to the point that his illness was in need of treatment.
The flow of information from the public related to a wide range of incidents considered suspicious and the geographical spread of these reported incidents was also enormous.
On Tuesday, 7 October 1975 a 6-year-old girl in Denton, Manchester, was lured into a car and given sweets, before the driver of the vehicle indecently assaulted her. The car had been driven on to an unmade road, only yards from the girl’s home, and she had screamed and run away after the assault had taken place. This incident took place only two days after the abduction of Lesley, and a day before her body was found. The fact that Lesley’s body had not yet been found, and so had not yet been publicised, tended to militate against the Denton attacker being of the ‘copycat’ variety. Conversely, the fact that the child in Denton had escaped from her attacker, apparently uninjured, represented an argument that it was a wholly unconnected attack, and a mere coincidence. Nevertheless, Denton is only ten miles from the scene of Lesley’s abduction and, with the evidence being equivocal as to whether the two attacks were linked or not, DCS Dibb understandably expressed the view that, ‘It would be foolish to disregard the possible links.’ He was speaking, of course, with the benefit of the full police report on the circumstances of the Denton assault. He had been provided with a sketchy description of the attacker: 30 to 40, tall and thin with short brown hair.
Of more interest was the description of the car involved. The young girl could only say that it was brown, but a local resident gave a more full description of a car which the police believed was involved. It was a four-door brown Cortina with patches of primer on the front offside wing and the driver’s door, J or K registered.2
The report on the Denton attack was quickly followed by an alleged attack on a 13-year-old girl in Stockport, Manchester. An attempt was made to entice the girl into a car, and, when that failed, the man concerned had grabbed the girl and tried to drag her into the vehicle. She was able to escape and run away.
A further incident was then reported in Eccles, Greater Manchester, when a man, said to be aged about 30, drew his car alongside a 13-year-old girl as she walked along the street. He had opened the passenger door and attempted to drag the girl into the car, but she had struggled and freed herself before running off.
Although experience has told the police that a few murderers – particularly serial offenders – do travel about the country, it is clear that the vast majority live within a few miles of the victim or the scene of the killing.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that Dibb concentrated his initial enquiries on the Turf Hill Estate, from where the majority of calls were received. Naturally, there was no structure or format to the flow of information, and Dibb was anxious not to miss a potential witness. He had already seen, with Coverdale, that many witnesses were, until ‘prodded’ by police investigators, unaware of the significance of what they knew or what they had or had not seen. In this latter respect, those people who were on the estate on Sunday, 5 October, who knew Lesley, and had not seen her, particularly between twelve noon and 1 p.m., were of significant relevance to the investigation, for they reinforced the belief held by the police investigators that Lesley had already been abducted by 1.30 p.m., that is, before the Molseed family began their search for her.
Dibb would use the information from these people both to trace the last movements of Lesley and, he hoped, to trap the suspect or at least to create a list of potential suspects which might then be cut down. To tap the source of information which the estate represented, Dibb deployed teams of officers on the estate, some to conduct house-to-house enquiries and others to set up roadside check-points, questioning all motorists and pedestrians passing through the estate. Each officer was supplied with a carefully prepared pro forma questionnaire, thus ensuring continuity in questioning. Every house on the estate and the surrounding area was visited, as was every business, and every resident or employee was questioned. It was difficult to believe that, on such a close-knit estate, even on the Sabbath, not a single person would have seen the abduction of Lesley. Whereas houses had been visited before, during the search for Lesley, now their occupants and the business employees were being questioned in a desperate search for clues. Dibb had to know who was on the estate, including visitors, that Sunday, for each such person was a potential witness and, until eliminated, a potential suspect. This included women, although the findings of the post-mortem and early forensic investigations made the police more interested in adult and teenage male suspects. Details of their names, ages, dates and places of birth together with a full physical description were recorded on Personal Description Forms (PDFs). They were asked to account for their movements on that Sunday and, in certain instances, up to the morning of the day when the child was found. Where possible the accounts were independently verified or submitted to the incident room for further checks to be made. The killer was believed to be a driver, so details of any vehicles they owned or had access to were obtained. All this information was channelled into the incident room where specially trained staff carefully compiled indices, whilst others analysed the information received, comparing it with reported sightings of persons or vehicles at the scene or on the estate. Checks were made into the criminal records of those interviewed for, it has been found, sexually motivated murderers have often been found to have previous criminal convictions for other forms of violent behaviour.
Dibb wanted no person eliminated from the enquiry until the last piece of information had been drained from them, and until the research had proven them to be unconnected with the crime.
Dibb’s first objective was to establish a picture of Lesley’s last movements. Far from having insufficient reported sightings Dibb was now faced with a plethora of often conflicting sightings, and he needed to eliminate those which were false or inaccurate. To do this he needed to trace everyone who had seen Lesley on her last errand, for confirming genuine sightings is often less time-consuming than eliminating false ones. However, the latter not only complicate and slow down enquiries, but can, if not disproved or eliminated, seriously damage a prosecution.
Two teenage girls, Julie Cooper and Ann Jones, who both knew Lesley from the estate, told police that they had seen her off the estate, on Oldham Road, between 8 p.m. and 8.15 p.m. that Sunday. They described how they had spoken to her as they waited for their boyfriends near a local supermarket, and how she had walked off towards Rochdale town centre.
This simple tale could have had gross repercussions for the investigation:
it significantly altered the time of the last sighting of Lesley;
it therefore opened a further time period of up to seven hours during which her movements would have to be discovered;
it significantly altered the geographic location of Lesley’s abduction, from a relatively small housing estate to an area substantially larger, from Oldham Road up to and including large parts of Rochdale;
it raised substantial questions as to the type of girl Lesley really was, changing her from the quiet home-loving obedient child, to one who would strike out to a (to her) major town. In doing so it may have altered the profile of the killer from an abductor who had lured the child with, say, sweets or the promise of finding the cat, to any range of possibilities of a more malevolent kind;
it negated much of the investigation which had taken place as to the movement of vehicles in the lay-by, by dramatically altering the possible times at which the child could have been brought to the lay-by.
In the event, the girls, naturally, were re-interviewed and they completely retracted their previous statements. Cooper said that she thought she had seen a girl with Bay City Rollers socks, but knew it was not Lesley. Jones admitted the story was totally false, but neither she nor Cooper would ever say why they had invented their story. The phenomenon of children making up false accounts with no apparent motive save, perhaps, to involve themselves in the ‘excitement’ is further illustrated by three young boys, Philip Hinchcliffe, Mark Kirkham and Andrew Fletcher, who said that they had spoken to Lesley near to the Spar shop at 2.30 p.m., and that she had put her tongue out at them. The boys later admitted that they had made this story up.
The false and inaccurate reports were not restricted to the estate or to the Sunday. The incident room received a number of calls from the Greater Manchester and Yorkshire areas, with callers’ memories having been triggered by photographs of Lesley released to and published by the media. There were sightings of Lesley, or at least lone little girls fitting Lesley’s description, in vehicles, taxis or on the street accompanied by men, and these sightings were believed (usually genuinely) by the callers to be suspicious. Reports were even received of sightings of Lesley up until the Tuesday night. The fact that Lesley wore the distinctive Bay City Rollers socks became more of a hindrance than a help, since the group was one of the most popular of 1975, and was adored, in particular, by girls in the 10 to 15 age group. The socks featured in many of the calls. Each sighting had to be investigated: it was simply not possible, not safe, to overlook any call, and so Dibb was obliged to place officers on each call, to check and, where possible, eliminate the sightings. This increased the burden on police resources and enabled the ‘trail’ from the genuine sightings and the body of Lesley, to the true killer, to go cold.
Another approach taken by the police in their interviews was to ask whether the interviewee had any suspicions as to family members, neighbours, relatives, friends or acquaintances. Any such suspicions would be pursued with total confidentiality as to the source of the information. Dibb’s need to glean information about any suspicious event in the area on or around 5 October made this an appropriate approach. He was particularly concerned where there were incidents of drivers of vehicles accosting women or children or attempting to entice them into cars, or where there had been minor sexual offences which had not been reported to the police, and he was particularly interested in any such case where a knife had been brandished. Results were forthcoming. In scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, people did ‘inform’ on individuals with whom they were acquainted, simply because of suspicions concerning their behaviour, lifestyle, or previous sexual behaviour. The number of these reports was such as to make the investigating officers wonder how so many incidents could take place in so small a geographical area.
There were numerous reports of men in vehicles following children and lone women. A yellow van, a bronze Cortina, a light-coloured Vauxhall Viva and a light blue-green GPO-type van figured prominently in these reports. The first two vehicles were traced and eliminated (elimination being achieved by forensic examination of the vehicles) but the Viva and the GPO-type van were never traced. None of these reports, however, involved the driver attempting to force the person accosted into the van, they merely involved offers of lifts. There were reports of an indecent exposure by a driver, and even of a man masturbating, but in each case some element of the report enabled elimination to take place.
Local schoolteachers reported to the police a man who had been disturbed on several occasions taking photographs of children in school playgrounds. When confronted he spoke English with a foreign accent, and purported to be a Canadian on holiday. He was 35 to 40 years old, six foot two, slim build with collar-length sandy hair. It is not believed that he was ever traced.
Thus the enquiry team was supplied with a steady stream of suspects. Just as any purported sighting of Lesley had to be investigated, just as any suspicious incidents had to be compared to what was then known, just as in all these cases there were mistakes, errors and complete fabrications, so too did the police have to investigate and eliminate any individual at whom the finger of suspicion had been pointed. In some cases this was difficult, when individuals were unable to provide information as to their movements that could be corroborated: how could a single man, living alone, ‘prove’ that he had spent Sunday, 5 October alone at home? In many cases, arrests were necessary to enable clothing and vehicles to be subjected to forensic examination, and this was particularly so where the index of suspicion was raised by previous convictions, type of vehicle or current unusual behaviour.
Professor Gee, having considered the results of his findings more carefully, contacted Dibb and Holland with information which was to open up a further avenue of investigation. He had come to the conclusion that the killer could have cut his own hand in the attack. The knife had struck underlying bones with force, and this might have caused his hand to slide off the handle on to the blade. Thus the enquiry team carried out checks with local hospitals, for men attending for treatment for any such injury. Professor Gee also thought that the killer’s clothing might have been stained with either his or Lesley’s blood. Dibb therefore circulated surrounding police forces requesting enquiries be made of dry cleaners, a method which at one time was frequently utilised in murder enquiries.
Ronald Outteridge was also keeping the police abreast of his investigations, although, as yet, he had little to offer by way of assistance. He had found no traces of foreign blood on Lesley’s clothing and the semen staining was of insufficient quantity to enable blood grouping to take place. He had, however, found traces of white powder on the clothing, and this was found to contain maize starch, which is an ingredient of wallpaper paste. The investigating team had been informed that workmen employed on local housing renovation were associating with and befriending local schoolgirls, who would visit the redevelopment site. All of these men were therefore interviewed, as were the employees of a local firm connected with painting and decorating.
As it was believed that the killer could have committed sexual offences previously, it was necessary for police records in surrounding areas to be searched for ‘MO Suspects’, that is persons who had committed offences with a modus operandi similar to that in the instant case. A similar search went on where the police held records of unsolved sexual offences or violence against children. Local mental hospitals and psychiatric units were checked for absconders and people on weekend release. ‘Normal people would not do this’ is such a common expression in the face of the killing of a child, that somehow great comfort is taken from the assertion that the killer must be mentally ill. It is an untrue proposition, and, like many propositions in the Molseed case, was to prove unhelpful. All that the sweeps and searches and enquiries achieved was an increase in the number of persons to be eliminated and in extra work for the police.
The senior officers held private meetings on a regular basis to assess progress and evaluate the direction being taken and what new lines were developing. From these private debates emerged the view that the killer, whether as a result of being injured in the attack or disturbed by the realisation of what he had done, had stayed off work, not attended school or college, or even moved away from his home temporarily, perhaps even moved out of the area. They also considered that local traders, ice-cream men, milkmen or a person who had worked at or near Lesley’s home could have befriended Lesley, as could taxi and minibus drivers who were involved in taking Lesley and her school friends to their special school.
More interviews, more eliminations, more overstretched resources subjected to further strain, but nothing was discovered. For all the manhours invested in the case, for all Dibb’s wish that no one be eliminated from the enquiry until the last piece of information had been drained from them and for all his intention to trace everyone who had seen Lesley on her last errand, Jack Dibb failed in his objectives. He was never able to trace a single witness who saw the abduction of Lesley that October day.
At the same time as the net of enquiry was swept across large sections of the community, those responsible for the investigation also turned their attentions to the central figures, Lesley Molseed’s family. Lesley may have been known to many as a happy and friendly child, who would talk to passers-by, although there was also strong evidence to support the contention that she would not go off willingly with anybody that she did not know, nor would she get into a stranger’s car. But unpalatable though it may have been, the enquiry had to look at the converse picture: that she had gone, not abducted by a stranger, but willingly with someone she knew, and that included her family. It is an unpleasant but true fact that over ninety per cent of murders in Britain are committed by persons who know the victim. The vast majority of those murders are committed in domestic or family circumstances. With those figures very much in mind, Dibb had little difficulty in ordering that the family would have to be considered, they would have to be eliminated, and this applied even to Lesley’s sister Julie’s former boyfriends and to Danny Molseed’s best friend, John Conroy.
Officers were allocated to research the family, and Detective Constable Jim Butterworth was appointed family liaison officer. His function, besides attending to the family’s welfare needs, was to obtain intimate details of their daily routines and relationships. The house-to-house team had reported the public face of the family, which portrayed Lesley as a friendly, happy-go-lucky child who came from a stable family background. The picture obtained by the family enquiry team was significantly different.
Lesley Molseed and her siblings were still, legally, called Anderson, and had assumed the name Molseed only when April began to live with the then-married Danny Molseed. The four children were the issue of April’s marriage to Frederick Anderson, a marriage which was celebrated in Anderson’s home town of Glasgow on 10 October 1958. Julie Jane Anderson was their first child, born on 2 July 1959. Next came Laura Agnes in December 1961, Frederick Augustin in August 1963, and Lesley herself on 7 August 1964.
Lesley had been born with a heart condition which caused her to be a weak and frail baby, who, at the age of 3, required an emergency pulmonary valvotomy operation. The Anderson family lived in the Springburn area of Glasgow, despite April being a Londoner by birth. Life in the household was far from tranquil. Frederick Anderson, six years older than his wife, was an acknowledged ‘man’s man’, who did not adjust well to the role of being a father. The constant crying and demands of four children, and the extra attention required by Lesley caused friction, which invariably resulted in him storming out of the house in a temper.
In a not-atypical fashion, April, lacking the support of her husband, found both care and succour from another man, 31-year-old Danny Molseed, whom she had met in 1965. As their relationship developed, April was pleasantly surprised to find that Danny not only paid her unaccustomed attention, but that he also had a genuinely caring attitude towards the children, and in particular to Lesley. For April, life with Anderson continued to deteriorate whilst her relationship with Danny Molseed intensified, so much so that, in February 1966, when Frederick Anderson went on a government training course in Gloucester, April and Danny took Lesley and her brother Freddie and ran to Rochdale. Julie and Laura were left in Glasgow with their paternal grandparents. When Anderson returned to Glasgow to find his family disintegrated, he travelled to Rochdale in an attempt to effect a reconciliation. This failed, and he went back to Glasgow where he placed his two daughters in local authority care. This did not prevent him periodically visiting April to make further attempts to patch up their still-extant marriage, and in 1967 he took employment at Carrier Brothers in Rochdale and moved to the area, thus being able to be near to April and to Lesley and Freddie.
Whether the presence of Anderson caused April to become unsettled, she became unsure of her relationship with Danny Molseed and, in due course, she moved out of the flat she shared with Danny and set up home at 11 Delamere Road with her husband and their four children.
Unfortunately, April was pregnant with Danny’s child, and even though Anderson believed there was a chance that the child was his he insisted that it be adopted, a course which was followed when a boy was born in May 1967. The relationship with Frederick began to break down again within five weeks of their reunion, and all attempts at reconciliation eventually failed when April was admitted to Birch Hill Hospital for psychiatric treatment. On her release, Danny moved into the house to look after her, and as the tenancy was in April’s name Anderson had little choice but to move out, although he was to remain in touch with the children. This caused an unsettled environment, especially for Lesley and Freddie. Anderson responded to this by restricting his contact with the two older girls. Julie, Anderson’s favourite, did not like living with Danny Molseed. It mattered little for Lesley: she had had little contact with Anderson and had come to regard Danny as her natural father. He had seen her in hospital immediately after her operation and had adopted a protective and fatherly stance towards her. April later said she believed it was Danny Molseed’s paternal affection towards Lesley which motivated him to live with her.
Lesley’s condition required ongoing treatment, and she was under the continuing care of Dr Watson, a consultant paediatrician at the Royal Manchester Hospital. At her last appointment in July 1975 she complained of feeling tired, and the doctor felt that this was due to a narrowing of the heart valves. But he decided the repair could be held in abeyance until she was older. Lesley had a particular syndrome which gave her an ‘elfin-like’ appearance, particularly facially, and a pleasant and very friendly disposition. She had a low IQ and attended High Birch Special School, for educationally disadvantaged children. There, despite her physical deficiencies, she took part in all normal recreational activities, including games, PE and swimming. At home she was equally active, regularly playing in the street with other children and attending the local youth club held in Kingsway School. Lesley Molseed had inadequacies, both physical and mental, but she quietly and without bother or drama dealt with them with the assistance of her family. In every other respect she was as a normal child: enjoying her schoolwork, enjoying her play, enjoying her innocence in the summer of 1975.
April and Frederick Anderson had finally divorced in September 1972, but April did not marry Danny until February 1975, an event which caused some surprise in the Turf Hill community, who believed them to be already man and wife. Despite the marriage, tension and turmoil remained substantial features of the family’s life, particularly between Danny and Julie. Theirs was a relationship built on mutual dislike, particularly when, as he often did, Danny would express his disapproval of Julie’s boyfriends. Domestic circumstances deteriorated still further as both parents became heavy drinkers, alcohol being the mainstay of their social life, and further disharmony was inevitable when April, unable to derive sufficient comfort and love from Danny, began to seek the attentions of other men. The family was distant from other relatives and April made only occasional visits to her brother in London when circumstances in the family home became unbearable.
By 1974 the home was in turmoil. Danny had lost his job, the family was heavily in debt and rent arrears were beginning to mount up. As a result of allegations made by various neighbours about the welfare of the children, the social services visited the family, on one occasion finding Lesley and Freddie in the care of their 12-year-old sister Laura while Danny and April were in the pub. Julie had moved out to live with Fred Anderson. She had run away from home, and when interviewed by the police it became clear that she was petrified to return home. She cited violent arguments with Danny over her boyfriends as the reason for her running away.
Danny Molseed was not to find employment until November 1974, a job he was still holding at the time of Lesley’s disappearance. Even this work, however, and the assistance of welfare agencies with financial help, did not alter their state of indebtedness. It appears to have been common knowledge that the Molseeds were in debt, so much so that Brent Davies, who had a bread round on the estate, refused to give April Molseed a loaf of bread ‘on tick’ on the Saturday afternoon preceding Lesley’s disappearance, because he was owed money by her. Davies would later blame himself for Lesley’s death, for it was his refusal that necessitated April sending Lesley to the shops on the Sunday.
Given the volatile relationship in the household, the assertions by Julie of Danny’s temper, and the depth of affection which he had for Lesley, DCS Dibb considered it essential to add Danny Molseed’s name to the ever-growing list of persons to be considered and eliminated. Dibb also ordered all of Lesley’s clothing to be taken for forensic examination, to eliminate any question of previous sexual abuse on her.
By the end of October 1975 Dibb had so much, and so little. He had dozens of vehicles, cars and vans, hundreds of statements of sightings, movements, actions and circumstances, a plethora of exhibits, and only two really valuable pieces of information.
One was from Mrs Emma Tong who had seen a small girl in a cream car, parked on Well-i’-th’-Lane, Rochdale – some 800 yards from the Turf Hill Estate – on Sunday, 5 October at 1.30 p.m. Mrs Tong became convinced that the child was Lesley.
The other was Mr Coverdale’s statement regarding his sighting of a man with a girl in a blue gabardine coat, at about 1.45 p.m. on Sunday, 5 October, climbing the embankment above the lay-by. Apart from her killer, he was, quite possibly, the last person to see Lesley Molseed alive.
Both of these statements illustrate the merits of turning the sweeping net inward on the Molseed family. The child in Well-i’-th’-Lane was sitting in the car, looking down. She was not struggling to get out of the car or otherwise make good her escape. She smiled at Mrs Tong, she did not open a car window and scream for help. The child at the lay-by was being helped up the embankment, she was not being dragged against her will. At worst these two statements show nothing more than that the child was being lured, duped and deceived into taking the car journey which lead to her death. At best, they showed that the child knew her killer, and had nothing to fear from him. The latter may not mean that the killer could only come from her immediate family (meaning Danny Molseed or Frederick Anderson, since the children had no contact with other relatives) but it would narrow the field to the family, to neighbours, to schoolteachers or youth group assistants.
But there was little to go on, despite the mass of information which was overwhelming the incident room. It had become apparent that a quick result to the enquiry would not be found. All the most obvious and common solutions to murder enquiries had been followed with no result.
In truth, there was little substantial evidence to pursue, apart from the enquiries flowing from the Tong and Coverdale statements and the suggestions of the car involved. Twenty-two vehicles had been swept and subjected to Sellotape lifts, fifteen suspects had had their clothing subjected to forensic examination, 335 other articles had been examined forensically, including fifteen knives which had been found on the moors or the estate, or in the possession of suspects. Nothing had been found.
Substantial numbers of men had been eliminated, including Danny Molseed and Frederick Anderson, family friends, local traders and other local suspects, but it had not enabled progress towards a positive identification. All that it had done was to create a profile of the murderer, a man who was believed to have used a knife which had a blade three and a half inches long and seven sixteenths of an inch wide. The police believed that the offender was a man who was sexually active and with a liking for children. He may have come to the attention of the police or other bodies in the past for sexual or other peculiar behaviour. He would be able to drive and would have access to a vehicle which might be a turquoise Morris 1000 van or a light-coloured Ford Anglia or Cortina – cars sighted at the lay-by but still not traced by police. He might be in his thirties and approximately five foot six inches tall, and it was also believed that he would be unable to verify his movements between twelve noon and 3 p.m. on the Sunday, and possibly for a longer period. He may have cut his hand and his clothing may have been stained, certainly with traces of Lesley’s blood, possibly with wallpaper paste remnants. It was also felt, at least by the senior officers, that the person they were seeking had not merely behavioural problems, but mental health problems, too.
The officers thought the identity of the killer might be revealed by tracing the persons responsible for the numerous sexually related incidents reported to them, especially those of indecent exposure on the estate. They prioritised these enquiries and restructured the investigations in line with their review.
And then Dibb was called back to West Yorkshire to head another murder enquiry in the Bradford area. He would retain an overview of the Molseed case but essentially the case was now firmly in the hands of Dick Holland. Holland was immediately promoted from detective chief inspector to detective superintendent, a great personal advance for him based entirely on his ability and on previous successes.
