The police had quickly formed the view, and DCS Jack Dibb had expressed that view in the media, that the motive for the killing was ‘definitely sexual’ and that the killer was a local man. Moreover, they believed the man to be ‘mentally deranged with sexual deviations’ and being in need of urgent treatment. This theory is, with hindsight, of great interest. The police, at an early stage, were speaking of a man whose sexual urges went beyond mere perversion. If there exists such a thing as a ‘normal’ paedophiliac, it appears to be quite clear that the person whom the police sought was regarded as being beyond that range of normality. He was mentally ill, to the point that his illness was in need of treatment.
The flow of information from the public related to a wide range of incidents considered suspicious and the geographical spread of these reported incidents was also enormous.
On Tuesday, 7 October 1975 a 6-year-old girl in Denton, Manchester, was lured into a car and given sweets, before the driver of the vehicle indecently assaulted her. The car had been driven on to an unmade road, only yards from the girl’s home, and she had screamed and run away after the assault had taken place. This incident took place only two days after the abduction of Lesley, and a day before her body was found. The fact that Lesley’s body had not yet been found, and so had not yet been publicised, tended to militate against the Denton attacker being of the ‘copycat’ variety. Conversely, the fact that the child in Denton had escaped from her attacker, apparently uninjured, represented an argument that it was a wholly unconnected attack, and a mere coincidence. Nevertheless, Denton is only ten miles from the scene of Lesley’s abduction and, with the evidence being equivocal as to whether the two attacks were linked or not, DCS Dibb understandably expressed the view that, ‘It would be foolish to disregard the possible links.’ He was speaking, of course, with the benefit of the full police report on the circumstances of the Denton assault. He had been provided with a sketchy description of the attacker: 30 to 40, tall and thin with short brown hair.
Of more interest was the description of the car involved. The young girl could only say that it was brown, but a local resident gave a more full description of a car which the police believed was involved. It was a four-door brown Cortina with patches of primer on the front offside wing and the driver’s door, J or K registered.2
The report on the Denton attack was quickly followed by an alleged attack on a 13-year-old girl in Stockport, Manchester. An attempt was made to entice the girl into a car, and, when that failed, the man concerned had grabbed the girl and tried to drag her into the vehicle. She was able to escape and run away.
A further incident was then reported in Eccles, Greater Manchester, when a man, said to be aged about 30, drew his car alongside a 13-year-old girl as she walked along the street. He had opened the passenger door and attempted to drag the girl into the car, but she had struggled and freed herself before running off.
Although experience has told the police that a few murderers – particularly serial offenders – do travel about the country, it is clear that the vast majority live within a few miles of the victim or the scene of the killing.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that Dibb concentrated his initial enquiries on the Turf Hill Estate, from where the majority of calls were received. Naturally, there was no structure or format to the flow of information, and Dibb was anxious not to miss a potential witness. He had already seen, with Coverdale, that many witnesses were, until ‘prodded’ by police investigators, unaware of the significance of what they knew or what they had or had not seen. In this latter respect, those people who were on the estate on Sunday, 5 October, who knew Lesley, and had not seen her, particularly between twelve noon and 1 p.m., were of significant relevance to the investigation, for they reinforced the belief held by the police investigators that Lesley had already been abducted by 1.30 p.m., that is, before the Molseed family began their search for her.
Dibb would use the information from these people both to trace the last movements of Lesley and, he hoped, to trap the suspect or at least to create a list of potential suspects which might then be cut down. To tap the source of information which the estate represented, Dibb deployed teams of officers on the estate, some to conduct house-to-house enquiries and others to set up roadside check-points, questioning all motorists and pedestrians passing through the estate. Each officer was supplied with a carefully prepared pro forma questionnaire, thus ensuring continuity in questioning. Every house on the estate and the surrounding area was visited, as was every business, and every resident or employee was questioned. It was difficult to believe that, on such a close-knit estate, even on the Sabbath, not a single person would have seen the abduction of Lesley. Whereas houses had been visited before, during the search for Lesley, now their occupants and the business employees were being questioned in a desperate search for clues. Dibb had to know who was on the estate, including visitors, that Sunday, for each such person was a potential witness and, until eliminated, a potential suspect. This included women, although the findings of the post-mortem and early forensic investigations made the police more interested in adult and teenage male suspects. Details of their names, ages, dates and places of birth together with a full physical description were recorded on Personal Description Forms (PDFs). They were asked to account for their movements on that Sunday and, in certain instances, up to the morning of the day when the child was found. Where possible the accounts were independently verified or submitted to the incident room for further checks to be made. The killer was believed to be a driver, so details of any vehicles they owned or had access to were obtained. All this information was channelled into the incident room where specially trained staff carefully compiled indices, whilst others analysed the information received, comparing it with reported sightings of persons or vehicles at the scene or on the estate. Checks were made into the criminal records of those interviewed for, it has been found, sexually motivated murderers have often been found to have previous criminal convictions for other forms of violent behaviour.
Dibb wanted no person eliminated from the enquiry until the last piece of information had been drained from them, and until the research had proven them to be unconnected with the crime.
Dibb’s first objective was to establish a picture of Lesley’s last movements. Far from having insufficient reported sightings Dibb was now faced with a plethora of often conflicting sightings, and he needed to eliminate those which were false or inaccurate. To do this he needed to trace everyone who had seen Lesley on her last errand, for confirming genuine sightings is often less time-consuming than eliminating false ones. However, the latter not only complicate and slow down enquiries, but can, if not disproved or eliminated, seriously damage a prosecution.
Two teenage girls, Julie Cooper and Ann Jones, who both knew Lesley from the estate, told police that they had seen her off the estate, on Oldham Road, between 8 p.m. and 8.15 p.m. that Sunday. They described how they had spoken to her as they waited for their boyfriends near a local supermarket, and how she had walked off towards Rochdale town centre.
This simple tale could have had gross repercussions for the investigation:
it significantly altered the time of the last sighting of Lesley;
it therefore opened a further time period of up to seven hours during which her movements would have to be discovered;
it significantly altered the geographic location of Lesley’s abduction, from a relatively small housing estate to an area substantially larger, from Oldham Road up to and including large parts of Rochdale;
it raised substantial questions as to the type of girl Lesley really was, changing her from the quiet home-loving obedient child, to one who would strike out to a (to her) major town. In doing so it may have altered the profile of the killer from an abductor who had lured the child with, say, sweets or the promise of finding the cat, to any range of possibilities