Innocents

High on the moors, away from the anguish of the Turf Hill Estate and the homeliness of 11 Delamere Road, Dick Holland presided over the murder scene, one eye on his watch as he awaited the arrival of the forensic and pathological support services. He was only too aware that the further away from the moment of killing he got, the more difficult it would be to find his man. Moreover, the passage of time accompanied intrusions into the evidence: a wind blowing across the moors could blow away a fragment or fibre, a rainstorm could destroy footprints, a less-than-careful bobby might obliterate some tyre tracks, or the killer himself could dispose of clothing, or a vehicle, or a weapon.

Anxious to preserve the murder scene in at least one respect, Holland had directed PC Stuart Akerman to take a series of photographs, of the features of the moorland and the area in which the child was found, and of Lesley’s body itself, in situ, before there could be any further disturbance of the area. He was confident that the body had not been moved by Greenwell or DC Roberts, and therefore had no reason to suspect that the child was not in the same position as she had been left by the murderer. One further photograph. A seemingly innocuous print of a blue-grey coloured fibre-tipped pen, with a white cap and base, found on a rock about fifteen yards from the body, in a direct line between the body and the lay-by. If every picture does in fact tell a story, what tale would be told by the print of this harmless writing instrument?

Senior colleagues of Holland began to arrive at the lay-by. Awaiting the arrival of the pathologist, there were a number of officers of the West Yorkshire police force, among them Assistant Chief Constable Donald Craig, DCS Jack Dibb and Detective Chief Superintendent George Oldfield (whose name would later become inextricably linked with the investigation into the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper). Officers from the adjoining Greater Manchester force who covered the area from which Lesley had disappeared were also present.

At 10.30 a.m., the assembled officers witnessed the arrival of Home Office pathologist Professor David John Gee. Holland briefed Professor Gee with a thumbnail sketch: the identity and age of the victim, when and where she went missing, when and how she was found and that the body had not been moved since its discovery. The professor prepared to view the body. He was accompanied by trainee pathologists Dr Boateing and Dr Swaloganathan, and by Home Office forensic scientists Ronald Outteridge from the Harrogate laboratory, and a Mr Firth from the laboratory at Chorley. The forensic scientists would examine the scene, removing samples of grass and vegetation from around the body, and soil and stone samples both from the site where the body was found, and from the lay-by. Clear plans would indicate the exact location from which each sample was obtained, and the bags containing the samples would be marked accordingly. Later, they would examine the clothing of the deceased and any samples obtained by the pathologist.

Police officers continued to work, first with a finger-tip search of the immediate area, then with a wider, less-detailed rake over a more extensive area, hoping to find anything relevant but, in particular, the weapon used to end this tiny child’s life.

The pathologist’s work would primarily take place in the mortuary, after the body had been moved from the scene, but it was important for him to view the body in situ as it would help him to determine whether that was the place where the murder had taken place, or whether the child had died elsewhere and then been moved there. He would go on to consider the injuries, how they were inflicted and in what order, and which one or ones had been responsible for the death.

Times were vital factors for all the investigators, since they would attempt to provide a band of times within which death had occurred. These parameters would be crucial in eliminating suspects who were able (as Greenwell already had done) to account for their movements within those times.

An access route to the body had been created, so that the scientists could make their way to the corpse without fear of intruding upon any potential evidence. Ascending the steep grassy bank from the lay-by, the men reached a broad, grassed terrace from where they could see, beyond, a rock-strewn slope, steeply rising to the moorland proper far above. At the back of the terrace, some fifty yards from the roadside, they saw, as Greenwell had seen, mere cloth blowing in the stiffening breeze, which, only on closer inspection, became their ultimate objective: the body of a child lying face down in the coarse grass. It was still clad in the dark-blue gabardine raincoat, the hood raised over the back of the head so as to obscure the hair and other features. The left arm was bent up at the side of the body towards the face, the right arm was beneath the child. The thin legs were flexed at the hips, somehow twisted to the left, and the trunk was tilted slightly to its right. The skirt of the raincoat was somewhat displaced upwards, exposing an area of white padded lining, and beneath that could be seen a pink skirt and a pair of red knickers. The blue shopping bag lay across the feet, not quite obscuring the brown shoes, and the Bay City Rollers socks of which Lesley had been so proud.

A closer examination revealed a number of slit-like cuts in the material of the raincoat, running across the back of the body and between the shoulders, and one, similar cut, to the back of the head. Dark stains around the cuts of the material gave an overall appearance of stab wounds with slight blood-staining of the coat’s material. The exposed parts of the body – the left hand and thighs – were not blood-stained, save for a single smear of blood approximately two inches (five centimetres) in diameter on the upper surface of the left thigh. There was blood soiling of the grassed area some three inches (seven centimetres) in diameter below the body, approximately one foot (thirty centimetres) beyond the lower end of the trunk. Behind the right side of the child’s back lay an unzipped purple purse, and for a moment the thought entered many minds, ‘Has this child been murdered for the sake of the meagre contents of her purse?’ The body and clothing appeared not to have been disturbed since the child’s death, but that did not prevent there being a collective theory that the motive for this crime had been sexual, not financial.

Then, for the first time since hands had taken her life from her, Lesley Molseed is touched again, but this time it is by people who care about her, at least in the sense of being anxious to help bring her killer to justice. They are gentle, not violent, deliberate, not frenzied, and they are painfully experienced in the performance of their various tasks. With minimum conversation they go about their macabre but necessary business. Detective Sergeant Kenneth Godfrey has been appointed exhibits officer, responsible for the collection, collation and identification of every single item of physical evidence, whether seized by a scientist or police officer, whether taken from a witness or, in due course, a suspect. He receives the Tweety Pie-crested handbag and the purple purse, and places each into a separate polythene bag which is then sealed and labelled: a description of the item, the time, date and place of recovery and a unique reference number which relates to the person who recovered it. The items will remain protected in their polythene sheath until the time comes for forensic examination in the sterile atmosphere of the laboratory.

Sellotape lifts are taken from the child’s left hand and legs, the simplest of tools to search for the tiniest fragment of evidence. A fragment of blue material is found stuck to the back of the left thigh.

Then, and only then, does Professor Gee begin to intrude on the body itself. He first removed the child’s knickers. They did not appear to have been tampered with, giving at least an indication that there had been no sexual interference. Then the professor took anal and vaginal swabs, which were placed in exhibit tubes and handed to the exhibits officer.

To assist in determining the time of death, Professor Gee took the rectal temperature of the body. At 12.30 p.m. it was 46 degrees fahrenheit. The examination had by now taken over two hours, and though the weather was dry, there was a cold westerly wind blowing. The air temperature on the ground varied between 52 and 48 degrees fahrenheit, whilst the temperature three feet above the body varied between 47 and 48 degrees fahrenheit. Although the ground appeared to be dry, the upper clothing of the deceased was slightly damp, and a few beads of moisture had been visible on the upper surface of the raincoat when the men had first arrived at the body, but these had quickly disappeared due to the effects of the wind. The sky, which had been clear at the beginning of the examination, was now starting to cloud over.

Now, finally, the child could be removed from the exposed grass bank. With reverence and respect – and doubtless with thoughts of their own children and grandchildren never far away – the assembly of men watched Lesley Molseed as she was lifted on to a black polythene sheet. As her body was lifted, it was evident that rigor mortis was well developed in the limbs, although hypostasis1 was only faint. As Lesley was turned, they saw that she had bled from the nose and her facial features were distorted and flattened from their prolonged contact with the ground. There was no blood soiling at the back of the head, nor of the fleecy white lining of the interior of the hood of her raincoat. A small cut was visible to the left of the front of the raincoat, and there was a stab wound beneath. The front of the child’s clothing was heavily blood-stained, as was that which covered the back of her shoulders, where blood had seeped into the right-hand side of the clothing due to the position in which the body had lain. These early indications lead to a hypothesis that Lesley had been repeatedly stabbed where she lay, and left to bleed to death. She had been alive when brought to this desolate place, and her life had ebbed away in lonely isolation, her screams only partially drowned by the high-pitched whistling of the winds which swirled through the peaks and vales of the moors.

Then she had been left. The skin over the left hand was macerated, being sodden, white and wrinkled. The skin of the lower limbs was slightly grey, and a few fly eggs were found in the hair close to the left ear. These features, and the rectal temperature, indicated that the body had been exposed to the elements for some time, although a more precise time of death would only become clear after the post-mortem, and a more careful analysis of the temperature readings already taken.

After Lesley’s hands and feet were encased in plastic bags to preserve any evidence which might cling to them, the black sheet was wrapped around the body, which was then placed into a coffin-shell and carried off the bleak moors with solemnity and dignity. Whatever vehicle had carried her on her last journey in life, she was now to be moved by a hearse which was waiting in the lay-by below. Her next journey led to the Halifax Royal Infirmary.

Removed from the wind and rain of the moor to the hospital mortuary, the child is received by Mr Seward, the mortuary attendant. He is experienced, and treats each corpse given to his charge with equal care and reverence. But his experience extends to victims of crime and, knowing that this child was said to be such a victim, he is instantly aware that his care of the body must extend beyond the norm. He knows from previous post-mortems in murder cases that the body is itself a source of evidence, and that whilst he must prepare the body for viewing by the relatives, so as to cause as little distress as possible, he has a second, but equally important, role in ensuring that any movement of the body will not contaminate or cause the loss of any evidence. These dual roles clashed at this point: whilst he had previously prepared bodies with extensive head or facial injuries so as to minimise the trauma to the relatives carrying out the identification, he was unable to do so with Lesley, whose face, although uninjured, was heavily stained with blood. That blood-staining would doubtless be of concern to the scientists, and so the best Mr Seward was able to do was to lay her body out in the black plastic sheet, now covered with a purple velvet cloth.

Mr Seward was assisted by Sergeant Appleyard, the coroner’s officer, who performs a number of functions for the coroner. One such function is to ensure that an accurate identification of the deceased has taken place at an early stage. And so, the child is identified. April Molseed is brought by police officers to Halifax, the journey littered with her questions which those officers were unable to answer: were they sure it was Lesley? How had she died? Had she been sexually assaulted? These officers do not have the answers. Indeed, at this point, no one does.

Now Lesley is left to the scientists. Now is the white, sterile phase. The tiny child reduced to ‘the deceased’ whilst the cause of her death is sought. A grim and gruesome task in any case, made the more pitiful by the victim’s age. A necessity, both for the detection of the criminal and for his prosecution, to know that she did not die from natural causes, to know the nature of the attack, the number of wounds and of blows, to know (if possible) the time and place of death, to know whether there has been indecent interference. Mercifully not. To draw from the child any clue which may yet help justice to be done.

Professor Gee and the forensic scientists work, methodically and in accordance with regulated and established procedures, under the watchful eyes of ACC Craig and DCS Oldfield. The participants agree an order in which to proceed, a necessity when some type of examination might secure one form of evidence whilst destroying others.

The first step is an examination of the body’s external surfaces by Detective Chief Inspector Swann, a fingerprint expert, but he finds nothing upon the child and soon leaves, taking with him a set of the child’s own fingerprints for use in comparison against any found in a culprit’s home or car (although Lesley’s prints were never found on any exhibit in the eventual case).

Then the child is undressed, and each item of clothing is handed to Sergeant Godfrey who, assisted by Detective Constable Robert Shore, bags and labels each garment separately. Lesley is wearing precisely the same clothing that she was wearing when she left home.

The forensic scientists are provided with samples of Lesley’s hair, both plucked and cut, and with finger-nail scrapings, and they then leave, to continue their work back on the moors, while they wait to receive all exhibits at the laboratory, where their own tests would be conducted. Samples would be taken from the body by Professor Gee in the course of the post-mortem, for later use by the professor and by the forensic scientists.

Finally Professor Gee is alone with the body. He will carry out his extensive examination whilst ensuring that he makes detailed notes, for in the information which the post-mortem will yield it is hoped to find, not merely the time of Lesley’s death, but also the motive behind her death and the cause and, perhaps, some clue which might assist in the bringing to justice of the person responsible.

The external examination revealed the body of a thin, small, brown-haired girl, some four feet in length and weighing forty pounds. There was slight blood soiling of the skin at the front and back of the trunk and over the face. When this was removed post-mortem staining was found to be faint, pinkish in colour and mainly present at the front of the body, with some areas of pressure pallor in the skin over the knees. Rigor mortis, though confirmed had by this time begun to pass off. The effect of exposure to the elements, visible in the exposed parts of the body, by reason of a dark-grey coloration, particularly to the left hand and the thighs, was also confirmed.

The eyes appeared normal although the pupils were unequal, the right being larger than the left. The absence of petechial haemorrhages2 in the lids or on the eyeballs enabled the professor to exclude strangulation or asphyxiation as the cause of death. The ears and nose were normal, whereas the mouth was slightly soiled by blood with the tip of the tongue protruding between the teeth, and although the teeth themselves showed several caries, none was loose or displaced, indicating that the face had not been subjected to violence.

The chest carried an old, healed, oblique surgical scar on the right side of the chest, some seven inches in length, with a second and similar scar on the left side, both reminders of the surgical treatment for Lesley’s heart complaint.

The external genitalia were normal, with no blood soiling and no evidence of injury. The hymen was intact and the anus normal. The child had not been raped nor subjected to any penetrative sexual attack.

Professor Gee found twelve stab wounds: one to the left front chest, one to the right front of the neck, one to the back of the left ear and nine to the upper part of the chest, at the back, principally on the left-hand side, all within an area measuring six inches by three inches.

As Professor Gee measured the dimensions, the angles, the tracks of entry of each stab wound, was he already constructing a scenario of blows driving the child to the ground, then the killer’s orgy of violence as he stabbed her in the back. He might say it was violent, for several wounds had faint areas of bruising of a half-inch diameter. Were these bruises caused by the impact of the hilt of the knife against the child’s body? It is not a scientific term, but the expression ‘frenzied attack’ hangs unspoken, like an uninvited guest at a wedding.

Her hands were unmarked. There were no defence wounds.3 She had not had time, or had not been able to defend herself. Or she had been attacked from behind.

When the professor examined the child internally, the twelve stab wounds could be traced on their path into the body. Each had penetrated to different depths, and some had caused damage to bones and to internal organs, most notably the heart and lungs.

The hair was cut from Lesley’s head to enable examination of the scalp, but there was no evidence of injury or blood-staining. It was then passed to PS Godfrey, along with a vaginal swab, a mouth swab, a blood sample and the stomach contents (which would show that Lesley had not eaten since leaving her home). The internal organs each yield further samples to be taken for further examination. They are taken to exclude any suggestion of death by natural causes.

From 2.30 p.m. until 6 p.m. Professor Gee went about his work, slowly, cautiously, meticulously and without regard to the silent staring of the police officers – including ACC Craig – who lined the walls of the mortuary, observing proceedings anxiously.

The result of the post-mortem revealed that Lesley had died of bleeding from the twelve stab wounds, the heart, aorta and left lung having been penetrated. The wounds were caused by a knife, with a thin blade no more than half an inch broad and not less than two and a half inches long, with one edge sharp and the other rounded. Bruising adjacent to two of the wounds at the back of the left shoulder suggested that those blows had involved the knife being driven in with substantial force, the hilt or the attacker’s hand having made forceful contact with the body. The wounds to the back of the body had been inflicted as the child lay in the position in which she had been found.

Whilst it was impossible to be certain as to the time of death, Professor Gee was of the opinion that Lesley had been dead more than twenty-four hours before she was found, and that she had possibly died up to three days earlier, namely on Sunday, 5 October 1975. There was a silent hope that his longest estimate was most accurate, so that the child had not had to endure days of captivity (and what else?) before her final, brutal death.

The inquest into the child’s death which opened on 14 October 1975 would disclose only that Lesley had died from multiple stab wounds. There was no need to say more.

Her body has been mutilated, and the post-mortem necessarily adds to that defilement, but Mr Seward again applies his skills, and the body may now be prepared for burial.

But her clothes are neither discarded nor returned to her parents. In murder cases the victim’s silence is compensated for: for her body speaks for her, and her clothes speak for her, and for Lesley Molseed her clothes shout loud.

DS Godfrey amasses his collection from the search team which has, throughout the day, continued to scour the moors and lay-by. He receives twenty-six items, including seven bottles, a Polaroid camera cartridge wrapped in silver foil, part of a plastic bag, a small tablet still in its foil (would that be the killer’s medication?) and four photograph negatives. Had one of these items been discarded by the murderer and, if so, would even one yield up his fingerprint?

A pair of socks, a handkerchief, a packet of cigarettes and a high heel from a lady’s shoe.

And, from the lay-by, a broken knife …

For nearly thirty-six hours PS Godfrey has collected exhibits, numerous and diverse. The collected materials are brought together, and then they are removed from Halifax to the laboratory at Harrogate, where they are handed to Ronald Outteridge, the principal scientific officer in the case and a highly respected member of the Home Office Forensic Science Service.

For now, the scientific material is mute, or, if not mute, it speaks in half-sentences only. It directs the scientists to look carefully, and note what they might find, but it can say no more until the time comes for comparisons. Until fibres from two sources lie alongside each other under a microscope, or two semen samples are observed together, the scientific material can tell only a fragment of the story. It will say that Lesley had been in contact with a cloth which shed fibres, but it cannot yet say from where that cloth came. It will certainly tell the investigators that, whilst the child had not been interfered with, the killer appeared to have derived some sexual pleasure from being with her. But it cannot, now, say who the murderer was. Or was not.

Each single item is removed from its shielding plastic bag and is examined closely. It is a critical and crucial examination, and it yields results. Peter Guise, a forensic scientist and Batchelor of Technology examines the clothing: each garment, as ever, on its own to prevent any contamination, lying on a sheet of brown paper to collect any matter which may fall away in the course of the examination. He looks for blood or fluid staining, and he notes the dimensions and directions of the cuts. He runs Sellotape over the garments to collect loose fabrics which might adhere.

Of the blood-stains, he finds no evidence of ‘run down’, supporting the already-held theory that the child had not been standing up when the principal injuries were inflicted. From the jumper, the vest, the skirt and a sock, tiny fibres of a certain hue, a certain type, a certain constituency. And a single blue fibre from the back of Lesley’s neck. From the underwear, what appear to be semen stains. He makes up microscopic slides from these stains and looks further: his initial belief is confirmed. He can see sperm heads. He applies the test then in use to record the amount of heads: +H is the lowest, ++++H the highest. He writes ‘+H’ in his notes. There is a low sperm count given the large area of seminal staining.

Outteridge was soon to provide an initial report, confirming Professor Gee’s findings that Lesley had been murdered where she was found, and indicating Outteridge’s belief that the murder had a sexual motive, based on the finding of semen on the lower garments. He has identified Lesley’s blood as being group B,4 but he wishes to continue to examine blood-staining on the clothing in the hope of finding blood of a different group, perhaps belonging to the murderer. Outteridge would therefore advise Dibb and Holland that any suspects should have blood specimens taken from them, and that their clothing should be seized for forensic examination. Any suspect vehicles should also be examined, for matching fibres, but also because Lesley’s purse bore a sequined pattern, and the sequins appeared to be falling away. The appearance of any such sequins in a suspect’s vehicle would be a matter of great interest.