(mirror online)10 crimes that shook Britain

[THE FUGITIVE]

1 - The Shepherd's Bush murders - the Massacre of Braybrook Street

On August 12th 1966, three detectives in an unmarked police ‘Q’ car spotted a battered Standard Vanguard estate car containing three men parked in a side street near Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London.

Suspecting the men might be part of a planned prison break from the jail, and because the car had no tax disc, Detective Constable David Wombwell and Detective Constable Chris Head got out of their car to speak to the occupants.

After a few moments' conversation one of the men in the car, professional criminal Harry Roberts, produced a hidden Luger pistol and shot DC Wombwell dead.

Detective Sergeant Fox tried to run back to the police car but Roberts chased him and killed him with a bullet to the head.

At the same time another of the car’s occupants, John Duddy, armed with a Webley revolver, ran up to the police car and shot dead Pc Geoffrey Fox as he sat behind the steering wheel.

The police murders sparked huge public outrage with demands that the recently abolished death penalty be re-instated.
Witney and Duddy were quickly arrested but Roberts stayed on the run, hiding in Epping Forest until he was captured in Hertfordshire three months after the massacre.

All three men were jailed for 30 years. Duddy died in Jail. Witney was released but murdered by another criminal in 1999.

Roberts, now aged 77, is still considered a risk to the public and remains in prison.

2 - The assassination of Airey Neave

Airey Neave, a leading Conservative MP and shadow cabinet minister, was assassinated as he drove his car out of the car park under the House of Commons on 30 March 1979.

A bomb, activated by a mercury tilt switch, exploded under his Vauxhall as the 63 year old politician drove up the exit ramp.

Neave, who had been appointed shadow Minister for Northern Ireland by Margaret Thatcher, died hours later from terrible injuries.

The Irish National Liberation Army, a break away group from the Provisional IRA, claimed responsibility.

The incident was the only ever murder of a politician inside the Houses of Parliament and caused public outrage.

Years later a debate raged over who actually killed him, with some politicians claiming Neave was murdered by MI6 and the CIA because he was going to expose spies inside Western Intelligence.

No one has ever been convicted of his murder.

3 - The murder of James Bulger

James Bulger, who was just short of his third birthday, was murdered in February 1993 by two ten-year-old boys who lured him away from a Liverpool shopping arcade while his mother was distracted.

The boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, led the crying toddler on a two and a half mile walk across the city to Walton.
There, on a rarely used piece of railway, they used bricks and sticks to beat and torture him and finally killed him by repeatedly dropping a 22lbs piece of steel railway track on his head.

The killers then placed his body across a rail hoping people would think he had been killed by a train.

When he was found two days later his body had been cut in half by a freight train but police examinations showed he was already dead before he was run over.

CCTV from the shopping centre showed him being led away by the two older boys, who were soon caught.

Thompson and Venables were tried and convicted, becoming the youngest murderers ever in British history.

4 - Donald Neilson and Lesley Whittle

Nicknamed The Black Panther, Donald Neilson was a ruthless solo serial killer and kidnapper.

During 1974 Neilson broke into post offices in Harrogate, Accrington and the Midlands in the dead of night and shot dead three post masters while robbing their businesses.

In January 1975 he changed his modus operandi. He broke into a house at Highley, Shropshire, and kidnapped 17-year-old Lesley Whittle, whose wealthy family ran a coach firm.
Neilson kept the terrified teenager hostage in an underground ‘tomb’ â€" a drainage shaft, in Bathpool Park, Staffordshire - while he tried to negotiate a £50,000 ransom from her family.

Through a series of blunders, the negotiations broke down.

Lesley Whittle’s emaciated body was found hanged by a wire noose in a drainage shaft two months after she had vanished.

Neilson disappeared but later that year he was spotted by chance by police patrolling in Nottinghamshire.

After a struggle inside a patrol car in which Neilson’s sawn off shotgun blew a hole in the roof, he was overpowered.

5 - Harold Shipman

Family doctor Harold Shipman is known to have murdered 218 of his patients, but many believe the number over his career may have been 355.

Shipman, who was 54 when he was caught, worked in Hyde in Cheshire. He dispatched his victims at their own homes with deadly injections of diamorphine.

Eighty per cent of his victims were elderly women, but his youngest victim was a man aged only 41.

He got away with it for years because he alone signed the death certificates and because of a reluctance by officials to believe a family doctor could be a serial killer.

Concerns were first raised about his activities in 1998 when a local undertaker told police an unusually large number of his patients were dying. But an initial police investigation cleared him.

His undoing came the following year when he altered the will of an elderly patient who died making him the beneficiary of her £386,000 estate.

Shipman was jailed for life in 2000. He hanged himself in Wakefield jail in 2004.

6 - Mary Bell

Mary Bell was only 10 when she murdered the first of her two victims in Newcastle in May 1968.

It was the day before her 11th birthday when she strangled four year old Martin Brown in a derelict house in the Scotswood district.

Two months later she killed again. Three-year-old Brian Howe was battered and strangled and his body mutilated.

Bell was arrested and put on trial, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
She was released aged 23 in 1980 and a plea to a court that her identity should not be revealed by the media was accepted by the High Court under what became known as the Mary Bell law.

She now lives under a new name in Britain and is reported to be a grandmother.

7 - Fred and Rosemary West

The Wests, a sexually depraved and homicidal couple, were unmasked in 1994 after Gloucestershire police began investigating claims the builder had raped a member of his own family at their home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.

As the investigation continued a number of collections of human bones were found buried under floors and in the garden of the house.

Two of the bodies were those of the couple’s own daughters Charmaine and Heather.

The couple had also killed a number of other young women who they had picked up from the streets.

Although police think the couple killed 13 victims, there was only enough evidence to charge them with 11 killings.

Before killing himself in jail in 1995, Fred told witnesses he had killed 30 people, but police have found no evidence of other murders.

Rosemary West remains in jail.

8 - Great Train Robbery

In August 1963 a gang of robbers held up the Royal Mail’s Travelling Post Office train and stole £2.6 million in cash, equivalent today to £40 million.
No guns were used but when most of the gang were caught, the public outrage over the crime swayed judges to hand out 30 year jail terms.
Three of the gang, Buster Edwards, Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs, spent long spells on the run after jail escapes.
The robbery has achieved legendary status and been the subject of two cinema films, Robbery in 1966 and Buster in 1990.

Many of the robbers are still alive but much of the stolen money is still unaccounted fo

9 - Lockerbie

On the night of 21 December 1988 a bomb planted in the hold of a Pan Am Boeing 747, flight 103 from London to New York, exploded as the plane flew over the Scottish market town of Lockerbie.

It had been hidden in the plane at Heathrow airport.

All the 259 passengers and crew on the plane and 11 people in their homes were killed in the worst act of mass murder in British history.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was convicted of planting the bomb at a special court in Holland.

It is believed the attack was ordered by the former Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi.

10 - Fagan and the Queen

On the night of 9 July 1982, the Queen woke up in her apartments at Buckingham Palace to find a man sitting on the end of her bed.

He was drunken cat burglar Michael Fagan, 31, and he later confessed it was the second time he had breached security to break into the supposedly ‘impregnable’ palace.
At the time, the Royal family were under assassination threat from the IRA.

The crime was an extreme embarrassment to PM Margaret Thatcher and the head of Scotland Yard’s Royal Protection Squad was sacked.

Fagan apologised to the Queen and was sentenced to a short jail term.