Innocents. Jonathan Rose
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enable the true killer to be identified, since only the actual killer would be able to specify these facts in the course of making a confession. In 1975 this was crucial, since it would enable a prosecutor to point to the two specific matters as irrefutable evidence that the confession was genuine.
As the appeals continued and information came in, the investigation team deliberately investigated every act of indecency which was brought to their attention. Many were discounted; others were pursued even though it was believed unlikely that anything useful to the murder enquiry would be found, but the investigative course was essential if no stone was to be left unturned, however remote the chances were.
In 1975 the principle of ‘best chance’ did not apply. Today, financial and human resource constraints imposed on investigators, together with increased and competing demands on the modern police force have brought a new discipline to murder enquiries. Officers are now committed to those enquiries which are regarded as having the best prospect of producing a detection, and investigations are structured on a computer which enables prioritisation of lines of enquiry, at any given time in the investigation. This methodology has to be compared with the systems in place only twenty years ago, when much depended on the personal knowledge of individual officers as to a particular line of enquiry, with no certainty that an officer would be aware of the stage other enquiries had reached. Curiously, this method had an advantage over the ‘modern’ system in that it enabled a substantial number of other crimes to be detected in the course of a murder investigation, a result lacking in the more refined approach of the 1990s.
Of course, even at that time enquiries were prioritised. Dick Holland used experience, personal knowledge and instinct to select what he considered to be the first priority, which were reports of indecency which were similar to those of Lesley’s abduction or geographically proximate to the Molseed case. In the former category local detectives believed that the abduction of an 8-year-old girl earlier in 1975 might provide a link.
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 12 August 1975 ‘Jennifer’1 was playing with her 7-year-old sister ‘Francine’ by the side of the Leeds Manchester Canal at Miles Platting, near Manchester. They were fishing for tiddlers using a small fishing net, keeping their catch in a little blue bucket. A man, who later called himself ‘John’ came and stood near them before looking down into the water at the fish, and then turning and smiling at the two girls. He said ‘Hello’ and the girls both answered him ‘Hello’, before Francine wandered off. John then engaged Jennifer in conversation about the fish, before offering to take her to a park where there were lots more fish. He took her in a white car, past a City of Salford road sign and to a shop, where he bought her mints and a can of Pepsi Cola. He had told her that he lived near the shop, but had then taken her by car to another place which he said was near Heaton Park. He had driven on, however, until he came to a car park and, from there, led the child on foot across a field and to a much larger field where they sat down. There, the man undressed Jennifer, removed his trousers and underpants and lay on top of her, kissing and sucking her body whilst he attempted to have intercourse with her. He failed to do so, but did ejaculate on to her stomach.
Even after he had dressed, John kept the child with him, she wearing only her underpants. He took her to swim in a nearby pond, after which he again took her to a field where he repeated the previous sexual assault, before taking her back to the canalside where he had first met her.
Jennifer had been abducted for a three-hour period, but, despite her ordeal, she was able to give police to whom her mother reported the incident a graphic and detailed account of the events of that day. So accurate were the details that the police were able to trace a man to whom Jennifer had spoken at the pond where she and John had swum, and he was able to confirm Jennifer’s description of John as being a well-built, muscular man of 33 to 35 years of age, with short, well-groomed black hair. He was about five feet ten inches tall, had a distinctively hairy chest, a deep suntan and wore a silver watch. Despite the description, John was never caught.
The team investigating Lesley’s murder considered this report, and believed that it gave them some possible insight into what may have happened to Lesley during the last hours of her life, and, in particular, how very easy it was to abduct, or take away, an unsuspecting and trusting child, even where, as in the case of John and Jennifer, other members of the public are in the immediate proximity.
In truth, it must be asked quite how useful the John/Jennifer case was to the investigating officers in the Molseed case. It was a child abduction case involving a little girl, and the perpetrator had ejaculated on to the child, but in many respects it was so very different. The obvious difference is that Jennifer was not subjected to any violence at all. Lesley was not undressed in what might be termed ‘the sexual phase’ of the incident, and her killer had ejaculated on to her clothing. John had attempted to rape Jennifer, but there was no evidence whatsoever that Lesley’s killer had attempted to have sexual intercourse with her, or had interfered with her in any sexual way at all. As for the other features of the Jennifer case, they indicated only that a child abductor might use sweets and lemonade to lure a child, and that much must have been obvious to the experienced police officers.
It would appear, however, that the police were aware of the substantial differences between the two cases, and that their interest had been aroused simply by reason of the fact of abduction of a young girl and the fact of ejaculation. The case illustrates the methodology being used by the police at this stage in the investigation. It was a method with many merits, and those merits would become patently clear in two cases much closer to Lesley Molseed’s home, lifestyle and the date of her death.
At about 8.15 p.m. on Friday, 3 October 1975 two girls called Ann Marie Storto and Sheila Woodhead, both aged 10, were walking home from the Kingsway Youth Club in Rochdale, of which Lesley was a member. As the girls approached the clinic on the corner of Stiups Lane and Kingsway, they saw a man in the clinic porchway, leaning against the wall with one hand in his pocket, who appeared to be staring at them. Through real or imagined fear, the girls walked away, at which point they were later to say that the man began to follow them, whereupon they both ran back to the youth club. They described the man as being about five feet ten inches tall, thin, with dark hair, wearing a dark overcoat and a dark wool knitted printed skull cap. They also described a large dark-green or yellow car in the area, parked with its radio playing very loud.
A part-time youth leader at the club, a Mr Alfred Sutcliffe, was told that a man had stopped the two girls, but that some older girls would walk Ann Marie and Sheila home. As a precaution Mr Sutcliffe walked behind the group of girls to Ann Marie’s house, and then walked the older girls back to the club, where he telephoned the police. He did not see any men in the area, and Police Constable Stefan Kowal, who attended at the youth club at about 8.45 p.m. and conducted a search of the immediate vicinity was also unable to find anyone.
There is very little that is remarkable in the account of the two girls, or of the two adults who gave statements concerning this incident, but it began to take on rather different proportions and have yet more significance when statements were taken from other children who had been in the youth club that Friday night.
Debbie Brown, who was then 13 years old, told the police that Ann Marie Storto had said that the man at the clinic had followed and tried to stop her and Sheila, and that he had had a knife. She said that herself, Maxine Buckley and Debra Mills (both aged 12) then walked the younger girls home.
According to Debbie Brown, Maxine Buckley and Debra Mills, there then followed an incident in which one of these girls was to say that a man exposed himself, but the accounts of the three girls vary so much, and the incident itself has so much relevance in the later proceedings, that there is some value in examining the details. It should be borne in mind that neither Ann Marie Storto nor Sheila Woodhead reported any incident of indecent exposure on the night of 3 October 1975. Nor, of course, did Alfred Sutcliffe, the youth club worker who had walked behind the group of girls on the way home.
Debbie Brown gave two statements to the police, one made on 8 October and the second on 9 October.
In her first statement she said that she had been in the youth club with Ann Marie and Sheila, and that Ann Marie had gone outside (alone) and had then come running back in, whereupon all three of them – that is, herself, Ann