Authors: Paul Britton
In addition, the blackmailer wrote that a young couple would be picked up from a lovers’ lane and also held as hostages during the ransom drop. The male hostage would be sent to pick up the money to thwart any police marksmen who may be waiting.
The letter then drifted into a rambling one-sided debate, listing the possible outcomes of his plan, but in each case giving the reason why he believed he would succeed. He was showing the police how clever he was and how he’d thought of absolutely everything. He was telling them to forget about the road blocks, bugging devices, helicopters, satellite observation, marker dye and transmitters - he’d covered them all.
Quite pointedly, he criticized the headlines that he’d seen in the newspapers.
Julie was not bludgeoned to death (Jim Oldfield, Daily Mirror) she was rendered unconscious by three or four blows to the back of the head and then strangled. She never felt a thing.
That night, the operation went ahead at 8.31 p.m. when the phone rang at the service station. However, it faltered immediately when the WPC was unable to hear the tape recorded message.
As he finished bringing me up to date on the inquiry, Bob Taylor looked in dire need of a cigarette. I could sense his frustration. He didn’t know if he had a killer who was trying to cash in on a girl’s death; or a blackmailer who accidentally killed his hostage; or a scam involving Julie that had gone badly wrong. Not a great deal made sense.
I liked Taylor’s directness and we made arrangements to meet again in several days.
At home over the next two nights, I immersed myself in the details of Julie’s death and the blackmail letters. People often talk about ‘reading between the lines’ but my analysis had to leave the page and step into the mind of Julie’s murderer. To know him, I had to see the world through his eyes and to hear the sounds that he heard, even if it meant ‘watching’ and ‘listening’ to the screams of a terrified young hostage.
Julie was obviously relatively new to prostitution. Being inexperienced, she was perhaps more vulnerable because she hadn’t encountered the focused sexual violence and hatred that plague women who regularly work the streets.
On 9 July she’d left Dominic’s house and travelled into the centre of Leeds where she shared an address in Spencer Place with two other prostitutes. They worked together that evening, soliciting on the street outside, before leaving Julie alone at about 11.30 p.m.
Few prostitutes in Leeds are still on the streets after the pubs empty and business dries up. Apart from the lack of trade, it’s less safe because the girls can’t keep an eye on each other. For some reason, perhaps inexperience, perhaps because she had debts to repay or wanted to save money before accepting an offer to join the army, Julie continued working.
That night someone had watched her from a distance and thought to himself, is she the one? He’d been out trawling before, waiting for the right victim. She had to be on her own so that no-one would see her stepping into his car.
A prostitute suited his purposes because she was easier to acquire and more anonymous than most. Her disappearance wouldn’t create the same headlines as abducting, say, a schoolgirl who is expected at home. Scores, maybe hundreds of women who work as prostitutes disappear, sometimes for days or weeks, from some habitual red-light area only to turn up later working in another. They are usually driven by trade, by whimsy and by fear. Some, far too many, never turn up again, or, if they do, have to be entered in the growing file marked ‘Unsolved Prostitute Murders’.
From her killer’s viewpoint, Julie suited his purposes because he wasn’t seeking headlines or demanding ransom from her family; he wasn’t interested in her as a person, he needed her only as a manageable hostage.
He pulled up alongside her and she leaned in the window, quoting a price. She had a room nearby but he wanted to do it in the car. That’ll be more, she told him as she slid into the passenger seat. It may have happened more violently than this because he had the strength to drag Julie inside and disable her quickly, but this would have risked attracting attention, something which didn’t happen.
In all likelihood, he secured her by tying her hands and feet and then drove her somewhere that had been prepared in advance. He planned to keep her alive, at least until she wrote a letter to her boyfriend. The other letter, detailing the ransom, had been written in advance ready for posting.
But why demand money from the police? Why give complex instructions saying that no-one should follow you, or use radios, or tracking devices, when the very people you’re blackmailing have no option but to do exactly the opposite?
The answer became clear. His main motivation wasn’t money. All the meticulous detail and elaborate camouflage pointed to a man set on challenging the police, inviting them to play a game with him. His letters read like shopping lists of demands, specifying how the money should be wrapped, the thickness of the plastic and exact dimensions of the bundle. Why be so specific? Does it matter? Only if you want to exert control, making your opponent jump through as many hoops as possible.
The demand for Ł5,000 to be lodged in bank accounts was all part of the game. He knew withdrawals could be traced and was obviously inviting police to ‘track me if you can’.
Similarly, the overall demand for Ł145,000 was too small in the context of what he’d planned. If he’d asked for a million pounds or two million, then the planning and risk might be worthwhile. The only other explanation was that he had a specific debt that needed paying for this amount, such as a mortgage or a business loan, or believed that some earlier injustice had cost him exactly that amount.
The blackmailer knew he was clever and now he wanted the police to show him some respect. Maybe they hadn’t respected him before and had treated him like scum or some petty criminal, but now he was going to show them. He was going to prove to the world how much better he was than life’s opportunity had shown. All the failure and disappointments would be forgotten and people were going to be impressed. He might not have some fancy degree from university but he had brains and was far too clever to be caught.
The letters contained no evidence of loss of control or anger, but clear signs of a quiet excitement. It must have taken him a long while to plan it all - every hour enjoyable.
He probably kept Julie alive until the next morning, I thought, which meant he needed somewhere to keep her -a garage, basement or workshop - where he wouldn’t be disturbed. He had to kill her, of course. He wanted to be taken seriously by the police and for that to happen he had to make it absolutely clear that having killed once, no boundary could be taken for granted.
It wasn’t a sexual murder and he probably regarded Julie’s death with indifference - as partly a matter of good housekeeping or the clever use of an exclamation mark instead of a full stop. If he did feel pleasure from the act, it was like picking cherries from a tree as you walk past. Yet he clearly didn’t want to be regarded as a cold-blooded murderer, so his third letter didn’t gloat.
He wrote instead, ‘Words will never be able to express my regret that Julie Dart had to be killed…’ and stressed how painless it had been. It was to do with image management. He wanted to be seen as a Raffles-like figure, a clever rogue whom the public would admire and the police grudgingly respect.
I delivered my psychological profile to the crime management committee which consisted of about a dozen officers, Tom Cook being the highest ranking. We took up a conference room at Millgarth Police Station, sitting around a large table. The meeting began with a briefing from each of the officers responsible for various aspects of the inquiry. Certain teams were tracing Julie’s last known movements, talking to her family and friends; others were going door to door asking if anyone had seen her on that Tuesday night. Detectives were also checking dozens of hotels and boarding houses in the Huntingdon area of Cambridgeshire.
Meanwhile, everything about the letters was being analysed - the brand of stationery, where it was sold, the typewriter (an old Olivetti with a faulty ‘f’) - and every person who had handled the letters, right back through the sorting office and postal collection had to be fingerprinted to perhaps isolate the blackmailer’s prints.
One lead involved an unusual laundry mark on the sheet wrapped around Julie’s body. The tag was printed with the letters ‘MA143’, which dated back to the late 1940s and had been traced to a shop in Mosley Avenue, Coventry, which twenty years earlier had been a laundry.
Similarly, his second letter, postmarked in Leeds, yielded another possible clue. The first-class stamp, depicting the head of a teddy bear, was quite unusual and had only been released in a presentation pack containing ten different stamps. It might be possible to trace the people who bought them.
Bob Taylor introduced me to the management committee and made it clear that everyone should listen carefully and they could ask questions afterwards.
‘The man you’re looking for is in his late forties or early fifties,’ I said, glancing at my notes. ‘The methodology and tone of the letters has a maturity about them that wouldn’t be found with a younger offender.
‘He’s of above average intelligence, probably consistent with university entrance but his formal education is to secondary level, not to degree standard - the quality and structure of the language support this.
‘It’s quite likely that he has continued self-improvement since leaving school, possibly attending some formal courses. He will be familiar with electrics and machinery, perhaps in his job, but his theoretical knowledge is much better than his ability to implement it.
‘He’s not a senior employee in a large organization -there isn’t the conceptual lay-out and complexity of language in the letters. They’ve been written by someone who is familiar with typewriter keyboards but is probably only a two-fingered typist.
‘He’s likely to have been married but won’t be able to sustain a marriage over any length of time.
‘He’s a very strong planner, look at how carefully he’s thought things through. He needed time to prepare, it didn’t happen spontaneously, and he has probably rehearsed a lot of his plan.
‘He’s likely to have a previous history of offending but this will be for things like property offences, deception, fraud and misrepresentation,’ I said. ‘His plans are well debugged and he clearly has some knowledge of police procedure that suggests he’s been through the system before, although I see nothing to indicate that he has killed before.’
One avenue that I suggested checking was anyone who might have a personal or family grudge against the former Leeds City Police.
‘This person could be projecting responsibility for their own troubles onto the police,’ I said. ‘You’ll need to check back quite a long way because thoughts of revenge can simmer for a long while before boiling over into action. This man or his family would have been in touch at the time, demanding justification. This means that somewhere there’ll be a written record of a complaint and that should narrow the search.’
At the same time, I warned about placing too much emphasis on this strand of inquiry. Although it had to be followed up, I was intrigued by the spelling errors and antiquated address on the first letter to the police.
‘These details aren’t likely to have just drifted past this man’s planning processes. He’s almost certainly creating blind alleys for you and will be hiding behind a welter of smokescreens and diversions. It’s precisely in these that he’ll overreach himself and allow us to turn them back on him, and then we’ll find him.’
Now I reached a point that had particular resonance as far as I was concerned. ‘Julie Dart was always going to be murdered. This man wants to be taken seriously by the police and in order for that to happen he had to kill her.
And, if necessary, he’ll go on killing until he feels that he’s got your attention.’
Understanding this was vital. Julie didn’t die in a botched kidnapping or while trying to escape - two of the theories being bandied about. Her killer wanted a contest, he was constructing games and issuing challenges. He wanted to be highly regarded as an adversary by the police so his plans and demands were designed to be thorough and most of all to be very impressive.
‘He’s primarily a games player. This is, for him, the most thrilling, exciting, self-fulfilling thing that he’s ever been engaged in,’ I said. ‘He’s now playing on a national canvas and the intensity of his feelings of satisfaction, control and pleasure is difficult to convey. He’s hooked on this. Even if he gets his fill for the moment, after a while he’ll want it again and come back - he won’t be able to stop.’
Tom Cook asked if I had an opinion on the blackmailer’s home turf. Looking at the chronology and maps, a large triangle had emerged with Leeds, Birmingham and Huntingdon forming the apexes. He knew Leeds well enough to locate and take Julie without being seen; had posted the first two letters in Huntingdon and had chosen a particular phone in the heart of Birmingham railway station for the first ransom call. All of the prominent locations were connected by good road and rail links.
‘He has strong geographical connections with the West Midlands and I think he’ll live somewhere inside the triangle,’ I said. ‘If you want me to put my neck out, I’d favour the right-hand corner closer to where Julie was found.’
When I finished, we took a break. I wondered what the police were thinking. Some of them were probably sceptical about the profile, others undecided although they didn’t let it show. The next stage, discussing strategy, would be more delicate because I had to be careful not to tread on professional toes or suggest the inquiry was heading in the wrong direction. In my view they had five options.
1) Follow all existing lines of enquiry, but ignore the threats and refuse to negotiate. Not wise. Julie had died to attract police attention and if they ignored him I had no doubt there would be dead prostitutes up and down the country.
2) Launch a major press campaign, making all the details public, and hope that someone out there could identify him. A very slim possibility, but more likely to send him to ground for a few months. Then he’d be back, perhaps killing again to reintroduce himself.