News of the murder committed in a public park in London that was frequented by many people for recreational purposes caused outrage and demands for action. A massive investigation was mounted and psychological profiling was used as a means of identifying the type of individual likely to carry out such a crime. A number of likely attributes were suggested. These included a fascination for sadistic sex and an urge to seek domination over women. It was thought such a person would be a low social achiever and probably living alone close to the murder location.
A profile based on these considerations was aired by the BBC’s “Crimewatch” programme in September 1992 and photofit images of two men seen on Wimbledon Common on the day of the murder were screened. Following the programme, four viewers called the police to say they recognized the man in one of the photofits as Colin Stagg.
Thirty-one-year-old Stagg lived at Roehampton and admitted being on Wimbledon Common with his dog on the day Rachel Nickell was murdered. Many of his personal characteristics seemed to match those of the psychological profile. This influenced the police in setting up an unprecedented undercover operation – a so-called “honey trap”. A policewoman befriended Colin Stagg and attempted, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to draw him into making a murder confession.
Despite the failure of this strategy, Stagg was charged with the Wimbledon Common murder in August 1993. His trial at the Old Bailey in the following year collapsed when Mr Justice Ognall ruled that the prosecution evidence was inadmissible. The police were criticized for attempting to manipulate a suspect and trap him into self-incrimination. Colin Stagg was declared innocent and discharged. He was subsequently awarded over £700,000 in damages.
Running parallel with the enquiry into the murder of Rachel Nickell was an investigation into the activities of a serial rapist in southeast London. It would take sixteen years before the two enquiries converged to produce a common suspect.
In May 1992, a few weeks before Nickell was murdered, a young woman out with her child was raped in Eltham. This was one in a series of attacks in which a rapist targeted young women and which culminated in murder in November 1993. Samantha Bisset and her young daughter were killed in their home at Plumstead by an intruder. The four-year-old had been raped and suffocated while her mother was subjected to a frenzied knife attack.
DNA found at the Plumstead murder scene matched forensic traces left by the serial rapist during his earlier attacks. He was identified as Robert Napper, aged forty-two, a man with a history of mental problems. He had also been identified by two members of the public who recognized him from photofit images compiled from victims’ descriptions of the rapist.
Napper, it seemed, had led a charmed life. When questioned by the police, his failure to provide a blood sample was not followed up and he was eliminated from enquiries because he did not match the height of the suspect rapist. A search of his bedsit turned up a pistol, ammunition, knives and documents, which suggested a sinister agenda. He was given an eight-week custodial sentence for firearms offences.
Two years later, he was charged with the Bisset murder on the basis of DNA evidence. Even then, with striking similarities between this murder and that of Rachel Nickell, the crimes were still being treated as separate enquiries. In October 1995, Napper admitted the murders of Samantha Bisset and her daughter and, in addition, acknowledged two attempted rapes and one actual rape. He was committed to Broadmoor high-security hospital.
Forty-two-year-old Napper had a history of psychiatric illness from an early age. He committed his first criminal offence in 1986 and, three years later, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with a tendency towards delusions.
By the time the police started to connect Napper with the Wimbledon Common murder, he had been in Broadmoor for nine years.
In 2004, as the result of a cold-case review, the police made the connection between Napper and the murder of Rachel Nickell. At his trial in 2008, he pleaded guilty to diminished responsibility manslaughter and he was returned to spend the rest of his days in Broadmoor.
The fall-out from the trial was considerable. The police admitted errors in the handling of evidence, which had left Napper free to continue his violent attacks and, in particular, to commit the murder of Rachel Nickell. A public apology was offered to Colin Stagg, acknowledging that he had been wrongly accused of murder. Rachel Nickell’s family also received apologies for failures in police procedure, which had left Napper at liberty to kill again.
Matching DNA
The murderer of a young girl was convicted by DNA evidence thirty-two years after the crime was committed. In the meantime, an innocent man, wrongly imprisoned, spent fifteen years behind bars.
Eleven-year-old Lesley Molseed left her family home in Rochdale, Lancashire, UK on a shopping errand on 5 October 1975. She did not return and her body was found four days later on isolated moorland between Oldham and Halifax. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed.
An intense police investigation resulted in the arrest of Stefan Kisko on suspicion of murder in December 1975. He was a man of low mental age who worked as a clerk and lived with his mother. During questioning, he confessed to killing the child. Kisko was tried at Leeds Crown Court in July 1976, found guilty of murder and jailed for life.
Kisko’s mother mounted a fierce campaign protesting his innocence and his conviction was quashed on appeal in 1992. It was clear that Kisko could not have committed the murder because he was infertile, while forensic traces gathered at the
time from the dead child’s clothing including semen containing sperm. Stefan Kisko, the victim of a tragic miscarriage of justice, was released from prison after serving fifteen years and he died two years later.
In 2005, fifty-three-year-old Ronald Castree, a local man, who lived in the same area as the Molseed family, came under public scrutiny. He had been convicted of abducting and assaulting a nine-year-old child months after Lesley Molseed’s murder. Thirty years after the event, he gave a DNA sample following an alleged sex attack on a woman in Oldham. As a matter of course, this sample was computed with forensic material from other cases. Castree’s DNA proved to be an exact match with the semen traces found in 1975.
Castree was arrested and denied killing the girl, claiming that the DNA had been contaminated. Lesley Molseed died in an era before DNA profiling was possible but evidence from the crime scene preserved in a forensic laboratory provided retrospective proof of his guilt.
Tried for murder at Bradford Crown Court in November 2007, Castree heard that the odds against an error in the DNA evidence that linked him to the crime thirty-two years previously were described as a billion to one. He was convicted of a murder for which an innocent man was wrongly imprisoned and for which, no doubt, he believed he had escaped suspicion. Castree was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of thirty years’ imprisonment.
The Cardiff Three
In a case that made criminal history, a miscarriage of justice was corrected when Jeffrey Gafoor pleaded guilty to murder. In November 1990, at Swansea Crown Court, three men were convicted of the murder of Lynette White on evidence that was unsafe.
The Cardiff Three were Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris. Along with two other men, they were charged with murdering twenty-two-year-old Lynette White,
a sex worker who lived at Butedown in Cardiff’s docklands. On 14 February 1988, the young woman was found dead in her flat, the place where she took her clients. She had been savagely attacked. Her body bore fifty-seven stab wounds and her throat had been cut.
The trial was the largest in British criminal history at that time. The prosecution agreed that Stephen Miller, the dead woman’s boyfriend, owed money to Abdullahi and Paris. They alleged that he needed her earnings to pay off the debt and when she declined to co-operate, they killed her. Lynette White had been a prostitute for three years, living and working in the murky sub-culture of the docklands. The miserable room in which she met her death bore ample evidence of the horrors enacted there. Traces of blood, hair, saliva and semen were collected, together with fingerprints.
Forensic tests on the three defendants all proved negative and each had an alibi. Convictions were secured on Miller’s confession, which he later retracted. Witnesses had seen a dark-haired man with blood on his hands near the murder scene. He disappeared and a photofit failed to produce a suspect. The Cardiff Three were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
There was considerable unease about the trial and the lack of convincing evidence. In December 1992, the Court of Appeal quashed the murder convictions in a landmark decision. Lord Taylor, the Lord Chief Justice, accused the police of using oppressive and bullying tactics in their interview with Miller and had taunted him when he repeatedly denied the accusations made against him. There were emotional scenes outside the court when the Cardiff Three, proven innocent, regained their freedom.
The final twist in the story came five years later. A campaigning journalist who had written a book about the case was convinced that a re-examination of the crime scene evidence would bear fruit, especially in light of new developments in DNA testing. Profiling of material collected at the crime scene in 1988 was found to give a partial match with the DNA of a fourteen-year-old boy on the national DNA
database. This meant that the murderer was a close relative of the boy.
The new information stimulated fresh police enquiries and led to thirty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Gafoor. He worked in Cardiff as a security guard. He lived in a rented apartment and was described as “a loner and a bit tormented”. On 4 July 2003 at Cardiff Crown Court, Gafoor admitted killing Lynette White. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and legal history was made.
Caught On TV
Before disappearing into anonymity for eighteen years, the murderer of five family members in the US left a written confession acknowledging his guilt and apologising for leaving his mother’s body in the attic, saying, “she was too heavy to move”.
John List was viewed by all who knew him as a mild-mannered man and a regular churchgoer. His career consisted of taking jobs with impressive titles but offering little satisfaction. In 1965 he took a position with the First National Bank of Jersey City on the strength of which he bought an expensive house in Westfield. He had pushed his commitments beyond the limits of his salary and was soon in financial difficulties.
In less than a year he was out of the job but kept the bad news from his wife and family. For six months he kept up the daily pretence of going to the office until he found a new job. Then he told his wife, who was ill with a degenerative brain disease, that he had moved on but kept quiet about the much reduced salary.
In his neighbourhood, List was regarded as a slightly quaint figure. He was a very private person who was never seen without a jacket and tie, whether it was winter or summer. He taught at the local Sunday School and was co-leader of the cub-scouts pack. He was regarded as being too heavy-handed with discipline.
Mired in debt and with obligations that he could not fulfil, List decided to lighten his burden by disposing of his family
and starting a new life somewhere else. On 9 November 1971, he shot dead his wife, daughter and two sons and his eighty-four-year-old mother at their home in Westfield and promptly disappeared. The bullet-ridden bodies of his victims were found three weeks later. He had left behind a letter of confession in which he wrote, “I know that what has been done is wrong . . .”
He went west to Denver, Colorado, where he changed his name to Robert Clark and took work as a kitchen night-shift cook. He remarried in 1985 and moved to Brandermill, Virginia, where he found work as an accountant. He told his new wife that her predecessor had died of a brain tumour.
Having enjoyed eighteen years of anonymity and begun a new life, John List probably thought he had put all his troubles behind him. When Fox Television’s
America’s Most Wanted
programme featured the List killings in New Jersey and described the fugitive, public curiosity was stirred. A viewer called the programme’s hotline to report that a man answering List’s description was living in Brandermill.
The knock on Robert Clark’s door came on 1 June 1989 when the FBI came visiting. Once his fingerprints had been taken, his true identity was undeniable and John List, fugitive from justice, was taken into custody. He was extradited to New Jersey where he stood trial in April 1990.
After listening to the evidence for seven days, the trial jury found John List guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree. There being no death penalty in New Jersey, he was given five consecutive life sentences.
Fugitive From Justice
Ira Einhorn was a notorious fugitive from justice who defied attempts to secure his return to the US to answer a murder charge. He remained on the run for twenty-five years before finally appearing on trial.
Einhorn was a recognized figure in the 1960s counter culture movement in Philadelphia and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. His ideas about saving the planet were
widely listened to and he impressed those he met with his encyclopaedic knowledge. He was an imposing figure with a powerful debating style and a high opinion of his own abilities. He styled himself as “The Unicorn”.
In 1972, Einhorn met Holly Maddux, a young Texas girl, and began a passionate affair with her. They lived together in his apartment in Philadelphia and, according to those who knew the couple, the relationship was sometimes strained. In 1977 they went to Europe on holiday together but returned separately.
In September 1977, Holly disappeared. Answering her parents’ concern, Einhorn said she left the apartment on 11 September to go shopping but did not return. Weeks went by with no news of Holly and she was reported missing.
During their enquiries into Holly’s disappearance, investigators learned that Einhorn had a reputation for ill-treating his girlfriends, although no charges were brought. They also discovered that Einhorn had asked two friends to help him move a trunk that he wanted to dump in the Schuylkill River. The task proved impossible because the trunk was too large to fit in the friends’ car.