Meanwhile, the police had brought in a psychology professor, David Canter, to help them identify the solo rapist. After looking at where the rapes had occurred, Dr Canter drew up a profile which suggested the rapist would have an indepth knowledge of the railways and would live in Kilburn. John Duffy had been a British Rail worker and he lived in Kilburn. Canter noted that the rapist liked to talk to the victim before the sexual assault: this suggested to him that the man had previously been in a long-term relationship with a woman. As he combined sex with violence, that relationship had also probably been violent. Duffy, who had viciously sexually assaulted his ex-wife, again fitted the bill.
The professor said that the killer wouldn’t have children, and indeed he did not. David Canter suggested he’d have two close friends, and this was indeed the case. In total, Canter suggested seventeen factors about the rapist,
thirteen of which would apply to John Duffy. As a result, he became the first criminal to be identified from an offender profile.
On 7th November 1986 Duffy was arrested but he remained aloof when interrogated by the police. He stared at them unblinkingly, occasionally muttering ‘What’s the worst they could give me? Thirty years? I can do thirty years.’ Five of his victims identified him in a line-up and he was charged and subsequently sent to trial.
Trying to find the identity of the second rapist, the police put John Duffy’s friend David Mulcahy in several line-ups but none of the victims identified him so he remained a free man. The police also questioned him about the murders but there was nothing to link him to them and he was released without charge.
When Duffy went to trial in 1988, the jury heard that several rape victims had identified him – his short stature, reddish hair and staring eyes made him very distinctive. There was also forensic evidence: detectives had gone to his mother’s home and found the unusual string he’d used to bind his victims. Fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat had been found on one of Duffy’s sweaters and a man matching his description had been seen running from one of the rape scenes and catching a late night train.
Moreover, Ross Mockeridge had admitted that he’d beaten Duffy up and slashed him with a razor at Duffy’s request so that he could fake amnesia and avoid being interviewed by the police. Duffy himself was a martial arts expert – and Maartje Tamboezer’s corpse had been found with a bone in her neck broken by a martial arts blow. He’d
also kept keys from each of the victims as a souvenir, and had thirty-seven of them. Rather than attempt to explain this, John Duffy claimed that he was still suffering from amnesia and this formed part of his defence during his trial.
In court he showed no emotion, not even when found guilty of the murders of Alison Day in East London and Maartje Tamboezer in Surrey. He was found not guilty of the murder of Anne Lock, as her body was so decomposed that it no longer bore his distinctive bondage signature. He was given seven life sentences with a recommendation that he serve at least forty years. The hunt to find the man known as the Railway Killer had cost three million pounds.
Prison sources now suggested that John Duffy wanted to be as infamous as possible, to go down in history like the Yorkshire Ripper. He was allegedly devastated when the Stockwell Strangler’s trial started on the same day and the press devoted equal attention to it. (The Stockwell Strangler, Kenneth Erskine, had killed seven elderly victims as they lay in their beds.)
For the remainder of the Eighties and most of the Nineties, John Duffy served his sentence in various Category A prisons. Meanwhile his childhood friend David Mulcahy remained married to Sandra and raised their surviving children. He worked as a plasterer for Westminster Council and liked to go roller-skating with family and friends.
The police still believed that he was the second rapist, so they questioned him every time that another local rape was committed, but none of the victims identified him and, where forensic clues were available, his DNA did not match.
The police occasionally interviewed John Duffy, hoping that they could tie him to other unsolved rapes or that he’d ‘remember’ the name of his co-rapist. (He was still claiming amnesia.) By 1998 he’d formed a good relationship with his prison therapist, Dr Jennie Cutler, and hinted that the killings had been committed in tandem and that he wanted to talk to the police again. Eventually he told them that his partner in crime for the rapes and killings had been David Mulcahy.
He talked about the joy of ‘hunting…finding a victim and travelling to an area’ and said that he and David used to drive around at night in David’s car, playing a tape of Michael Jackson’s album
Thriller
and fantasizing aloud about what they’d like to do to women. He said that these fantasies included a great deal of violence.
He told the police that he and David Mulcahy would target a victim, sometimes tossing a coin to decide who got to rape her first. One of them would then blindfold and gag the woman, threatening to mutilate her with a knife if she offered resistance. The other would walk a short distance away, keeping a lookout for witnesses, until his friend finished the sexual assault. Then they’d swap places. On other occasions, one man would rape the victim whilst his friend offered crude encouragement. The violence escalated with time.
He added that rape had become addictive, saying ‘We would have balaclavas and knives…We did it as a bit of a joke, a bit of a game…It is very difficult to stop.’ But the second man in the series of rapes appears to have eventually stopped – and there was no forensic evidence to suggest that the murders had been committed by two men.
The forty-year-old was taken back to the Old Bailey where he admitted to seventeen more sex crimes, namely nine rapes, six conspiracies to rape and two burglaries with intent to rape. The assaults had taken place between 1975 and 1986 in London and Hertfordshire. The judge asked for psychiatric reports, explaining that he would pronounce sentence after Duffy gave evidence against another man in a forthcoming trial. (The man was David Mulcahy though he couldn’t be named at this stage for legal reasons.)
According to the police, David Mulcahy’s reinvestigation hadn’t just come about because John Duffy decided to confess. They said that by coincidence they were investigating a new series of rapes committed in Hampstead and wondered if an earlier rapist had resurfaced. As a result, they looked at the forensic material they had kept from various old cases, including the Railway Rapes. By now advances had been made in DNA testing – and the police were able to rule David Mulcahy out of the new Hampstead rapes. But when they looked at the semen they’d retained from one of the 1984 rapes (found on one of the Danish au pair’s panties and the crotch of her trousers) they found that they had a match.
In 1998, David Mulcahy was arrested. He was very relaxed at the police station because he’d often been accused of rapes which he hadn’t committed. But when the police said that they’d forensically tied him to one of the 1984 rapes, he apparently paled and was violently sick.
On 3rd October 2000, John Duffy went back to the Old Bailey to testify against his former best friend. He steadfastly refused to look at David Mulcahy as he gave his evidence.
Mr Mulcahy had said that his friendship with Mr Duffy had ended after Duffy went into hospital to avoid being questioned by the police – but prosecution witnesses, including John Duffy’s relatives, stated that the friendship had continued. In contrast, Mr Mulcahy’s friends noted that he didn’t even mention John Duffy’s name to them.
The prosecution said that the two men had formed an evil bond after being bullied at school, and that by their early twenties they’d started stepping out from behind trees in the nearby woods to shock both gay and heterosexual courting couples. The police would later describe the men’s behaviour as immature.
The CPS suggested that ‘both seemed able to disassociate themselves from the awful reality of what they were doing and treated their victims only as objects rather than people.’ In contrast, the defence noted that David Mulcahy had never been identified by any of the victims and that his wife didn’t recognise the prosecution’s description of him as ‘evil.’ She was standing by him, as were his friends.
John Duffy now stated that David Mulcahy had become so violent that he, Duffy, feared for their victims’ safety. Yet he alleged that he met up with Mr Mulcahy to attack Alison Day on 29th December 1985.
But the defence noted that Mr Mulcahy had been ill with bronchial pneumonia from the beginning of December 1985, and that he’d had a home visit from a doctor a few
days before. His employer confirmed this. His wife Sandra was in India so he probably had a friend or relative helping look after his three sons, who were seven, five and just over a year old at the time.
Mr Duffy said that Mr Mulcahy had made Alison walk along the outside edge of the bridge that they used to cross the canal. He said that his friend raped her twice and that they both strangled her with a portion of her blouse and a piece of wood. He became tearful as he described her death.
Turning to the murder of Maartje Tamboezer, Duffy said he and David Mulcahy had attacked her as she returned from a sweet shop, and that they’d split the twenty pounds she had with her. But the defence noted that the day after the murder, Mr Duffy had paid twenty pounds off his TV arrears. He claimed that the money came from his own bank account, but this was disproved in court as his bank records didn’t show a withdrawal for that period.
Mr Duffy also said that the string used to tie the victim’s hands had come from Mr Mulcahy – but forensic tests proved that the string came from a ball found at John Duffy’s parents home.
John Duffy said that he’d raped Maartje Tamboezer and that David Mulcahy hit her across the head with a heavy stone. Mulcahy had then allegedly wound the girl’s belt around her neck and told John Duffy to ‘do this one.’ Duffy said he’d twisted a piece of wood into the belt to make a tourniquet and used it to kill the teenager. At one stage during Duffy’s fourteen days of testimony, David Mulcahy shouted that it was ‘all lies.’
The prosecution said that Ms Tamboezer was subjected to a long and terrifying walk through fields, and that one
man couldn’t have acted alone. But the defence noted that John Duffy had controlled various rape victims on his own – after all, he owned several knives and was skilled in martial arts.
Finally, turning to the murder of Anne Lock – which he’d initially been acquitted of due to lack of forensic evidence – John Duffy said that he had raped her but that David Mulcahy had strangled and suffocated her.
This murder had taken place on a Sunday (18th May 1986) but Sandra, David Mulcahy’s wife, said that he always spent Sundays with her and the children. It was their regular family day out.
Most of the five month trial centred around John Duffy’s testimony, and for several months the jury were subjected to photographs of the murder victims. Three of the rape survivors also attended the trial.
David Mulcahy was linked to six of the rapes by Duffy’s testimony and purely circumstantial evidence – in other words, as a young man he’d been Duffy’s best friend and they’d enjoyed scaring courting couples together. But he was linked to the rape of one of the Danish au pairs on scientific evidence as a forensics laboratory had found that semen stains on her briefs and trousers matched his DNA profile. (Confusingly, the au pair had thought that her attacker was black.) The prosecution stated that there was only a one in a billion chance that the DNA was not David Mulcahy’s whilst the defence argued that the bag which contained the items of clothing had been opened at least four times since being stored away in 1984 and could therefore have become contaminated.
In February 2001 David Mulcahy was found guilty of raping and murdering Alison Day in December 1985,
Maartje Tamboezer in April 1986 and Anne Lock in May 1986. He was also found guilty of seven rapes and five conspiracies to rape, given three life sentences and incarcerated at a high security prison in York. The trial had cost more than two million pounds.
Since then the forty-three-year-old, who was in his twenties at the time of the murders, has continued to protest his innocence of all these crimes.
David Canter, who produced the insightful profile which helped to identify John Duffy, has subsequently written of the case that ‘There are still unanswered questions around these assertions, even though Mulcahy had now been convicted of the crimes.’
In March 2004 I wrote to David Mulcahy, noting that though John Duffy and the police’s version of the Railway Murders had been widely reported, his own version had not. I asked to see his document
A Case For Innocence
, as its existence had been briefly referred to in the London press.
Mr Mulcahy wrote back and I spoke on the phone with one of his friends. I subsequently received
A Case For Innocence
and a second set of papers relating to the case.
David Mulcahy states that after John Duffy raped Margaret Duffy, he asked Mr Mulcahy to provide him with a false alibi, but that Mr Mulcahy refused. When the police approached David Mulcahy, he confirmed Duffy owned the weapons which were used during the rape on Duffy’s wife. Subsequent to John Duffy being arrested for this rape, his blood was cross-referenced to various rapes and ultimately to the murder of Maartje Tamboezer. He
believes that this gave John Duffy a reason to want revenge. (An obvious question is why Mr Duffy waited for twelve years to exact this revenge but when he was asked by his mother in 1999 why he hadn’t told the police about his accomplice over a decade sooner, he simply replied ‘the time wasn’t right.’)
Mr Mulcahy also pointed out something previously detailed in this profile – that the Danish au pair who was linked to his DNA described her rapist as being black. The
Ham & High
newspaper dated Friday 20th July 1984 describes both rapists as coloured.