Innocents. Jonathan Rose
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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