RSS Feed
December 24th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Steve Bird
Last updated at 1:02 AM on 24th December 2011
Despite the passage of time, Harold Wright is still haunted by the memory.
Indeed, it is as raw today as it was 36 years ago. Step by echoing step, he recalls climbing 60ft down metal ladders inside a pitch black drainage shaft deep in the bowels of the earth.
Near the bottom, under a dank steel platform, his torchlight settled on the body of naked girl hanging by her neck from a steel wire.
Lesley Whittle (right) was kidnapped and murdered by Donald Neilson (left). It was seven weeks before her body was found
At the age of 92, the former Detective Chief Superintendent and one-time soldier admits to having seen a lot of gruesome sights in his 31-year career as policeman.
‘But this was really nasty, very nerve-racking. She was a 17-year-old girl hanging underground in absolute darkness,’ he says.
‘I just felt terribly sorry for her. She had been kept a prisoner down there, before being hanged.
‘She would have occasionally heard trains going by overhead or seen rats with the torch she had been given. It was no place for a girl.’
All those years ago in 1975, the drainage shaft in Bathpool Park, Staffordshire, was both Lesley Whittle’s prison and place of execution following her kidnap in a failed attempt to ransom her for £50,000 (worth £400,000 today).
She was the last victim of Donald Neilson, the multiple killer nicknamed the Black Panther, who was Britain’s most wanted man.
When Neilsen was finally captured, he would boast of the people he had killed — how he had shot dead three sub-postmasters, for example, in the space of just nine months during violent robberies.
Donald Neilson the day after his arrest. In the witness box for 19 hours, he boasted of his pride in the kidnap ‘operation’ of Lesley Whittle
The former lance corporal also prided himself on being responsible for more than 400 burglaries in which he wore his trademark black clothes.
This week Neilson died aged 75 from pneumonia while in prison. He had motor neurone disease and had spent 36 years behind bars.
‘He was a cold-blooded and vicious killer. I feel no sorrow at his death,’ Mr Wright said from his Staffordshire home where he lives with his wife, Kathleen, 86.
‘I was pleased he never came out of jail. But, if I am honest, I would have liked to have seen him hanged for all those murders.’
To Professor David Wilson, a criminologist at Birmingham City University, Neilson was a narcissist, a deeply inadequate man who nevertheless was determined to exert control over others in order to appear as if he had achieved some status in life.
‘There was this world of Neilson’s in which he was a powerful super-criminal who was always in control. But, in reality, he was a pathetic and needy man,’ he says.
Born in Bradford in 1936, Neilson’s real name was Donald Nappey, a name that ensured he was the butt of endless jokes at school, and later in the Army. This was not helped by his diminutive stature — as an adult he stood just 5ft 6in tall.
Gerry Corfield, a boyhood friend, recalled Neilson as ‘small and wiry’ who enjoyed ‘playing at soldiers, fighting, wrestling — anything where he could try to prove his physical prowess.’
At the age of 18 he married Irene, 20, at St Paul’s Church, Morley, near Leeds, in April 1955.
It was when their daughter, Kathryn, approached school age in 1960 that he changed the family name to Neilson to try to ensure she did not suffer the ‘nappy’ taunts he had endured.
It was during his National Service in Kenya, Cyprus and Aden that he developed a fascination with the regimented and macho lifestyle of the Army.
At the age of 18 Donald Neilson married Irene, 20, at St Paul’s Church, Morley, near Leeds, in April 1955
After he left, at his wife’s persuasion, he foundered — first as a security guard, and then trying to run a taxi business which failed.
He became a burglar — a role, as he saw it, in which he could put his military training to good use.
At the dead of night and wearing black clothes he would break into properties. If he encountered anyone, he would use extreme violence. To Neilson, it felt like an extension of his jungle training.
During the 19 armed robberies he carried out by 1974, he shot dead two sub-postmasters — Donald Skepper, in Harrogate, North Yorkshire and Derek Astin in Accrington, Lancashire.
His third victim was Sidney Grayland, the husband of sub-postmistress Peggy Grayland, who was also brutally battered in Oldbury, West Midlands.
By then he had achieved his dream. He revelled in the fact police considered him a ruthless criminal known only as the Black Panther, a reference to his dress and cunning. It served only to make him more audacious.
A couple of years earlier, in 1972, he had read in a newspaper about George Whittle, the founder of a coach company, who left an estate worth £300,000 (more than £2 million today) to his widow Dorothy, son Ronald and daughter Lesley.
For months Neilson prepared to kidnap one of the family: he was regularly seen in training running with a heavy backpack around his home town of Thornbury, Bradford.
He bought a ‘kidnap kit’ of night sights, binoculars and coils of wire; he set up an abduction headquarters in a rented garage in Nuneaton, Warwickshire; and he fitted fake plates to a stolen Morris 1300 which he drove to scout out the Whittles’ home in Highley, Shropshire.
In the early hours of January 14, 1975, he broke into the home and found Lesley, an A-level student, lying naked asleep in her bed.
As he was to later admit, she was the ‘ace’ in his plot.
Pointing a sawn-off Remington shotgun at her he ordered her to get dressed.
Petrified, she put on a blue candlewick dressing gown and slippers before he wrapped sticking plaster around her mouth and eyes and taped her hands together.
After placing a ransom note in the living room he bundled the girl into his car and fled.
The note told the Whittles to await a telephone call at a specific time at a public phone box in a shopping centre. Neilson’s instructions ended: ‘You are on a time limit. If police or tricks, death.’
He then drove 65 miles to Bathpool Park, Staffordshire, where he removed a manhole cover and took his quarry 60ft down the steel ladder of the shaft.
The drainage tunnels in Bathpool Park, Staffordshire, where Lesley Whittle died. Donald Neilson was at large for 11 months from the day of the kidnap
Towards the bottom was a 2ft by 5ft steel platform. There he tethered her to a pipe with a 5ft length of wire wrapped and bolted around her neck.
It was there he recorded the girl’s ransom message.
Above the sound of gushing water in the drainage system, her girlish, tense voice was taped saying: ‘There is nothing to worry about, Mum. I am OK. I got a bit wet but I am quite dry now and I am being treated very well, OK?’
By this time her distraught mother and brother had contacted police.
The investigation was handed to Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Booth, who had been awarded an MBE for solving all the 70 murder cases that landed on his desk. This one was to ruin an otherwise unblemished career.
Neilson’s plans began unravelling. He was late phoning the shopping centre and by then no one was there to take the call.
He called their home, played the ransom tape down the line, and gave the Whittles instructions to go to Bathpool Park to await the signal of flashing light.
Lesley’s brother Ronald, 32, was fitted with a covert police radio transmitter and went to the park to await the signal. But Ronald turned up an hour late.
By then Neilson had flashed his light erroneously at a couple courting in their car, believing them to be Ronald.
Later a police car unconnected with the case pulled up nearby and an officer stepped out to have a cigarette.
Convinced the net was closing in on him Neilson rushed back down the shaft to his dungeon lair, and pushed Lesley off the ledge to her death before fleeing.
She died from a heart attack due to hanging. Experts believed she would have taken four minutes to die because her neck did not break and she wasn’t strangled.
As a result of the bungled investigation, it was seven weeks before her body was found.
It was not until March that Detective Chief Superintendent Harold Wright was put in charge of 50 officers to search the park.
Phil Maskery, the scenes of crimes officer, was first to venture into the drainage system.
He later told how Neilson had kept her ‘tethered like a dog’ on that platform.
When police raided Donald Neilson’s home they found hoods, masks, more than 500 car ignition keys, combat clothing and crowbars
Today Mr Wright, who has three grandchildren, recalls the horror of the discovery: ‘Her feet were inches from the ground. That wire was cut to a specific length. On the platform around her was a torch and sleeping bag.’
Neilson was at large for 11 months from the day of the kidnap.
He was discovered only when officers Stuart Mackenzie and Tony White confronted him at a sub-post office in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in December 1975 where he was acting suspiciously. Neilson pulled a gun.
Mr Mackenzie, 64, says: ‘It was a routine stop and search. We got his details and the next minute I was looking down the business end of a shotgun.’
Neilson ordered them into their squad car, issuing his tried and tested threat: ‘Any tricks and you’re dead.’
When White saw Neilson momentarily lower the gun he grabbed it and shouted at Mackenzie: ‘Get him.’
‘The gun went off at the side of my head and I felt a burning sensation from the flash and bang,’ Mr Mackenzie recalls. In the struggle, Neilson was eventually disarmed, overpowered and handcuffed.
The officers thought they had simply encountered the ‘local nutter’ rather than the country’s most wanted gunman.
But when police raided Neilson’s home they found hoods, masks, more than 500 car ignition keys, combat clothing, a polar suit, rucksacks, holdalls, crowbars, tape recorders, radios and the Dymo tape printing machine used to write the ransom note.
There was also a model of a black panther, proving that Neilson had revelled in the notoriety of his criminal career.
At Oxford Crown Court, Neilson, who was in the witness box for 19 hours, boasted of his pride in the kidnap ‘operation’, claiming his ‘conscience was clear’ regarding Lesley’s death.
He was in the habit of standing to attention when the judge entered, and addressing barristers as sir.
He described at length how he had considered holding Lesley in a shed, garage or boat, but settled on the maze of storm drains because her cries for help would never be heard and it gave him many escape route options.
He summed up his philosophy when he said: ‘The most important part to me of any crime is to be free at the end.’
His attempts to portray himself as a caring abductor failed.
Wiping crocodile tears from his eyes, he told the court he had given Lesley a copy of Vogue magazine, fish and chips and even a bottle of brandy.
But a post-mortem examination revealed she had not eaten in days. The jury took just two hours to reject his suggestion that the girl fell to her death accidentally. They convicted him of executing his promise to kill her if the kidnap plot failed.
Amid the cheers from the public gallery, Lesley’s mother, who has since passed away, hugged her son as the guilty verdicts were delivered.
To the end, Neilson refused to accept any responsibility for Lesley’s death and blamed the police.
Booth admitted feeling a sense of responsibility for the botched investigation. But he rounded on Scotland Yard for ruling out a search of the Staffordshire park in case it alerted the kidnapper that police had been brought in by the family.
In jail, Neilson was a well-behaved prisoner, in part, Professor Wilson believes, because he had at last obtained a semblance of status as a lifer.
He says: ‘Prison was his barracks or billet. He simply got his head down, got three square meals a day and tidied his cell.’
A week ago Neilson was taken from HMP Norwich to hospital, where he died from breathing problems the following day.
Lesley’s brother Ronald has maintained a dignified silence about the case.
Last night at the home he shares with his wife, Geraldine, in Bridgnorth, he would not be drawn on Neilson’s death.
Inside the porch to St Mary’s Church in his former home village of Highley, he and his mother had a small brass plaque mounted to mark their loss.
It reads: ‘In loving memory George Whittle (1905-1970) and his daughter Lesley Whittle (1957-1975)’
The Reverend Clive Williams, who has been at St Mary’s for 23 years, believes that Neilson’s death could go some way to helping to heal those who remember the murder.
‘I am just hoping that this will bring closure for the Whittle family,’ he says.
Share this article:
Here’s what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts,
or debate this issue live on our message boards.
The comments below have not been moderated.
-
Newest -
Oldest -
Best rated -
Worst rated
He may not have hung for this but there is some poetic justice, he would have died fighting for breath like his victim and hopefully for alot longer than poor Lesley.
Report abuse
“Lesley’s brother Ronald, 32, was fitted with a covert police radio transmitter and went to the park to await the signal. But Ronald turned up an hour late.” ——————–What the hell happened there??? How could the police not have made sure he was there on time when they had all been told that this was to secure his sister’s life?
Report abuse
Hope they call him ‘nappy’ in hell………….
Report abuse
O the evil things we do Lord.
Report abuse
Being opposed to capital punishment does not make anyone members of the unlamented Myra Hindley’s fan club. Similarly, being in prison does not mean Nielson was “kept in luxury”. Finally, Albert Pierrpoint ‘s quickest hanging took seven seconds, not four. Pierrpoint, who executed almost 700 people on behalf the State wrote in his autobiography, ” I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people. ” Fits Colin to a T.
Report abuse
Women are exceptionally vulnerable when it comes to monsters like him. If we had the same strength as men we could maybe stand a chance of fighting back. I wish I hadn’t read the article as I will have nightmares for a long time to come. They should’ve hung him years ago as it seems he liked his life in prison!!!
Report abuse
One thing that did stand out in this tragic case was the absolute bravery of the arresting officers. I remember being fascinated by this case all them years ago and I agree with the policeman in charge, Neilson should have hung for his horrific crimes.
Report abuse
Lesley Whittle took FOUR MINUTES to die at the bottom of a drainage tunnel in complete darkness. I look forward to members of the Myra Hindley Fanclub AKA Opponents of Capital Punishment coming on here and explaining why Nielson/Nappey should not also have hung, of course he would have died in less than 4 seconds in a well run hanging rather than costing the taxpayers millions, kept in luxury for 36 years.
Report abuse
HOPE HE DIED IN AGONY………
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Report abuse
HOPE HE DIED IN AGONY………
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Report abuse
The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.
Related posts:
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
