2009
Observation photograph from Operation Minstead
THESE OBSERVATION PHOTOGRAPHS were evidence in a prolonged operation to catch a serial rapist.
When a night-time attack on an elderly woman in her home in Croydon took place on 13 October 1992, the local police investigated the rape, but were unable to trace the perpetrator. Futher similar sexual assaults took place and, eventually, over the next eighteen years, there were to be over 203 linked offences: the victims being both men and women and aged between 68 and 93, spread over most South London boroughs and into Surrey, and occurring on random days of the week. The offender typically removed windowpanes to gain entry into the houses and cut telephone lines or, towards the end of his reign of terror, disabled mobile telephones. He would remove light bulbs from the bedroom and shine a torch into his victims’ faces so that he could not be identified. He made sure that his hands were covered with gloves or socks to avoid leaving finger marks.
Remains of the offender’s semen had been left behind, however. As DNA technology improved, more samples from crime scenes were analysed, but there was no match on the DNA database. It was apparent that the offender would stalk his victims prior to the crime to ensure that they lived alone. In some cases the offender would show tenderness by kissing them on the cheek, but also great violence, like in the case of one victim, in 1999, who was raped twice and left bleeding from a perforated bowel – the injuries sustained on this occasion were almost fatal.
In 1998, the linked investigations were taken over by the Serious Crime Group at Lewisham under the name of Operation Minstead. Each crime scene suspected of being in the series of rapes was carefully re-examined by officers on the team, with a view to extracting the best quality evidence available, particularly details that may have been overlooked on the initial investigation. One item, now on display in the Crime Museum, was a glove that was found in a bush no less than seventeen houses away from an attack in an elderly lady’s bedroom in September 2004 in Bromley, Kent. A widespread specialist search had found a vital clue far away from a normal crime scene search area. DNA traces on that glove linked it to the rapist.
Advanced DNA analysis indicated that the offender appeared to have originated from the Caribbean. Thousands of black men in South London voluntarily provided DNA samples so that they could be eliminated from the inquiry and help trace the offender. Hundreds of potential suspects were identified during the HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) computer-based enquiries and eliminated. One very grainy CCTV image established that the suspect might have been driving a Vauxhall Zafira car. But the potential for resolving the investigation was limited because of no clear geographical focus for making further intense inquiries. The sporadic nature of the offences sometimes had gaps of months or years between incidents.
In 2009, the offences started to occur more frequently, however, and a proactive operation became more viable. Under the leadership of Detective Superintendents Simon Morgan, and later Colin Sutton, over 150 officers were deployed on a nightly basis, with 100 undertaking observations and fifty doing follow-up inquiries. The staffing of an operation on this scale was a considerable strain on resources. On 15 November 2009, when this operation had been in progress for three weeks, an officer on observation duty saw a man running and then drive off in a Vauxhall Zafira, which had already been spotted parked several hours prior earlier. The officers reported the incident and the car was stopped by the police in Penge, some distance away. A crowbar was found in the boot, which made marks that matched those found at the scene of a crime in the series committed a month before, on 19 October 2009. A cagoule matched that shown on CCTV footage when the suspect had withdrawn money from cash machines using victims’ credit cards, and a hat and fleece matched other similar images. The suspect, Delroy Grant, was then charged with twenty-six offences from fourteen crime scenes that were selected because of the strength of evidence, including matches of the prisoner’s DNA profile. When Grant, who had become known as the ‘Night Stalker’, appeared at Woolwich Crown Court on 1 March 2011, he claimed that his ex-wife had collected and stored his DNA and given it to her boyfriend to plant at the various crime scenes. On 24 March he was convicted on a majority verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of twenty-seven years.
A series of murders of prostitutes took place in the Hammersmith area in 1964, starting with the case of 30-year-old Hannah Tailford, who was found dead in the River Thames on 2 February 1964 near Hammersmith Bridge. She had apparently been strangled. Several of her teeth were missing and underwear had been forced down her throat. Six victims – all prostitutes that were found naked and dead – made up the series of unsolved murders. Detective Superintendent John du Rose took charge of the inquiry into what became known as the ‘Hammersmith Nude Murders’. Two months later, Irene Lockwood, 26 years old, was found dead on the shore of the River Thames, on 8 April 1964, not far from where Hannah Tailford had been found, and the investigations were linked. Within three weeks, a caretaker, Kenneth Archibald, had confessed to the crime, but his account was not consistent with some known facts, and he was dismissed as being untruthful, particularly because another victim was then found on 22 April 1964 in Brentford – Helen Barthelemy (22). The police found flecks of motor vehicle spray paint at the scene and they started to concentrate their attention on paint-spraying business premises nearby.
Ten weeks later, on 14 July, 30-year-old Mary Fleming’s body was found in the street in Chiswick. Paint traces were again found on the body, and neighbours had heard the sound of a car reversing down the street just before the body was found. On 25 November, Frances Brown (alias Margaret McGowan) was found under some rubble in a car park off Hornton Street, Kensington. Frances Brown had given evidence in the trial of Stephen Ward, a figure involved in the Profumo scandal. A witness, Kim Taylor, had been on the streets working with Frances Brown when Brown had been picked up by a man a month before, on 23 October 1964, when she was last seen alive. Kim Taylor provided the police with an Identikit picture of the man and a description of his car – a Ford Zephyr or Zodiac – but this did not yield any positive result. The sixth victim, Bridget (‘Bridie’) O’Hara, aged 28, was found in a storage shed in West Acton, her body again bearing traces of paint. The paint matched a transformer near to where she had been found and was consistent with her body having been kept warm for a period before it was discovered, so the location of the storage place for the bodies was finally identified.
John du Rose’s team interviewed no fewer than 7,000 men in the area, but without obtaining sufficient evidence to prosecute anybody. He did, however, announce that he was ‘whittling down the suspects’ in an attempt to force the killer into unplanned action that might incriminate him, but this was unsuccessful. Du Rose wrote in his autobiography that his prime suspect committed suicide before the police had obtained sufficient evidence to confirm or disprove his involvement, but withheld the identity from public knowledge.
Because these were murders of prostitutes, there were some similarities with the Whitechapel murders. The suspect became known as ‘Jack the Stripper’ and there has been similar speculation by various authors about the identity of the killer.
From 1983 to 1989, a series of rapes of nine women over six years occurred in the West London area, the offender becoming known as the ‘Notting Hill Rapist’ who typically attacked women living in ground-floor or basement flats. He would threaten his victims at knifepoint, then tie, blindfold and gag them, assuring them, falsely, that his intention was only to steal property. There had been no finger marks left at the scenes and no victim was able to identify her attacker. The offences occurred within a relatively small area bounded by Ladbroke Grove, Lansdowne Road, Clarenden Road and Elgin Crescent. During some of the period, another rapist had been committing offences in South Kensington and it was not entirely clear whether they were a separate series or not.
The police, under the leadership of Detective Superintendent James Hutchinson, mounted a series of observations and patrols, and there were a number of occasions when a suspect slipped through the net and escaped. A four-year gap occurred at one point before the next offence took place, in May 1987. PC Graham Hamilton stopped Tony Mclean and had a hunch about him. Mclean, like many other local men, had given a blood sample to eliminate him from inquiries, but due to a slip of the finger, his blood group had been recorded as O secretor rather than the 0 (zero) secretor that had been traced to the offender. Another typographical error had wrongly recorded Mclean’s date of release from prison, thus providing him falsely with an alibi for one of the crimes. When Graham Hamilton double-checked and revealed both of these errors, Mclean became the prime suspect. By this time, DNA profiling had been discovered and this enabled Mclean to be identified as the rapist for two of the crimes with certainty. He had lived just off Clarenden Road, was convicted in April 1989 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Between 1989 and 1994, a series of rapes and sexual attacks occurred in and around the Plumstead area and nearby parts of South London. These amounted to an eventual total of about seventy offences, and became known as the work of the ‘Green Chain Rapist’, the locations being loosely linked to the Green Chain long-distance footpath through that part of London. In November 1993, 27-year-old Samantha Bisset was viciously murdered in Plumstead. Bisset had been walking around in her home in a state of undress when an intruder had entered and attacked her; she was stabbed to death. Her 4-year-old daughter Jazmine was also murdered. The offender mutilated Bisset’s body and took away parts of her internal organs as trophies. It was a grisly scene that was traumatic to see, not least on the part of the police photographer who was badly affected for a long time afterwards. A finger mark found at the scene led to the arrest and prosecution of Robert Napper in May 1994. He was convicted, and also admitted two rapes and two attempted rapes that were linked to the Green Chain offences.
Napper had earlier been eliminated from the Green Chain inquiries by virtue of the fact that he was deemed to be too tall – at 6ft 2in – to fit the description of the offender. He was sent to Broadmoor in October 1995. In October 1989, Napper’s mother had made a telephone call to the police indicating that he had confessed to a rape that had taken place in Plumstead, but this did not lead to Napper’s arrest, possibly because the officer concerned was unable to identify the report of the crime concerned, and thereby corroborate this confession.
On 15 July 1992, Rachel Nickell was stabbed multiple times and murdered in front of her young son Alex, aged 2, on Wimbledon Common whilst they were out walking their dog. The police conducted a prolonged and controversial investigation that included interviewing thirty suspects, but centred around Colin Stagg, a man known to visit the common. In the absence of usable forensic evidence at the time, the police investigation focused on using an undercover female officer to befriend Stagg with a series of letters that progressively became more explicit, so that Stagg would be lured into making an admission that he had committed the murder. The operation resulted in the Crown Prosecution Service charging Colin Stagg, but at his trial the police technique – about which a psychologist, Paul Britton, had been consulted – was severely criticised by the trial judge as a ‘honeytrap’ and the case was dismissed. Stagg had spent fourteen months in custody and was paid substantial compensation after his wrongful detention. In December 1995, Robert Napper was questioned about Rachel Nickell’s death but he denied any involvement. In 2004, the Rachel Nickell murder became the subject of a cold case review, and traces of DNA were found from exhibits. This DNA sample matched that of Robert Napper and he was charged with her murder. He admitted the manslaughter – on grounds of diminished responsibility – of Rachel Nickell and two other attacks. On 18 December 2008, he was sentenced to be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor.