In the second of our monthly series on Worcestershire’s most infamous crimes, Mike Pryce revisits a kidnap that turned into murder and a major police manhunt.

IN many ways it glorifies terrible people to give them glamorous nicknames and so it was with Donald Neilson, who somewhere along his murderous path through life was christened the Black Panther.

Neilson was neither black nor a panther and to call him an animal would do serious injustice to animals. He was described at his trial for murdering Worcestershire teenager Lesley Whittle as “a frustrated military man of modest rank, a lance corporal who fancied himself as a general”.

Nevertheless Neilson’s devious cunning, based partly on his military training, led to an 11-month police hunt that was blighted by mistakes and unfortunate coincidences and cost West Mercia’s top detective his hitherto unblemished career.

At the end of the case, Det Chief Supt Bob Booth, head of the force’s CID, which had been commended many times under his 10-year command, went back into uniform to take over Malvern police division.

Neilson crept into a large detached house near Kidderminster on the night of January 14, 1975 and kidnapped 17-years-old Lesley as she slept in her bed. His plan seemed so simple to him. To abduct a member of the Whittle family, which ran a successful Midlands coach company, and hold them until a ransom was paid.

But it all went disastrously wrong and ended with Lesley virtually naked and dead. Hung by a wire noose around her neck in the desolate blackness of a 100ft deep drainage shaft in a country park. The terror the poor girl had to endure during her final hours, alone, freezing cold on a winter’s night and in total darkness, can barely be imagined.

Donald Neilson was a man with a grudge against society. He had been born Donald Nappey in August, 1936 and his surname made him the target for bullies both at school and during his National Service in Kenya, Aden and Cyprus. But he relished army life and picked up an interest in guns, which he maintained throughout his life.

However, his fiancee, whom he married in 1955, persuaded him not to pursue a career in the services and instead to return home to Bradford and settle down. A daughter was born in 1960 and it was then Nappey changed his name by deed poll to Neilson.

A series of jobs ended in failure and so he turned to crime to make ends meet .He managed about 400 burglaries without being caught, but the financial returns were low so he turned to robbing sub-post offices. Between 1967 and 1974 he carried out 19 such robberies in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but the cash taken was not enough for Neilson, who became more and more embittered and ruthless.

In February 1972, he broke into a sub-post office in Heywood, Lancashire, in the middle of the night and shot the postmaster, who was lucky to survive. Two years later he shot and killed a sub-postmaster in North Yorkshire and then seven months later killed another in Accrington, Lancashire.

Three months after that Neilson drove south and murdered again, when Sidney Grayland was shot dead at his sub-post office in Oldbury, six miles north of Kidderminster. By then police had linked the three murders and Neilson was dubbed ‘the Black Panther’ by the media. Two months later he turned to kidnap as a means of getting his hands on the financial jackpot he craved.

Neilson first got the idea of kidnapping Lesley Whittle in May 1972, when he read an article in the Daily Express which gave details of the £82,500 she had inherited when her father George, who ran the family coach company, died.

After taking the girl from her bedroom in the dead of night, allowing her to put on only her dressing gown, Neilson is believed to have driven her to the place where she would eventually die, a deep drainage shaft beneath Bathpool Park, near Kidsgrove, Staffordshire.

In a move that was to prove highly controversial, Bob Booth, a career detective who had solved every one of the 70 murders he had investigated, ordered a news blackout on the case until the kidnapper was caught. Neilson had given detailed ransom instructions for the Whittle family on a piece of Dymo tape left in the lounge, but a proposed hand over of the cash under covert police surveillance in Bathpool Park went disastrously wrong.

Firstly the family member with the money was late for the rendezvous and then a police patrol unconnected with the case drove into the park. Neilson was spooked and it was then, the prosecution at his trial alleged, he returned to the drainage shaft where he had left Lesley tethered and standing on a narrow two foot ledge, and pushed her off to her death.

With Neilson on the run, police lifted the news blackout and valuable clues quickly began arriving from the public. Nearly two months after the kidnapping, a search team finally entered the drainage shaft. On a landing, 45 feet down, they found a cassette tape recorder. A further 54 feet down was a sleeping bag and survival blanket.

Lesley was found hanging only seven inches from the shaft floor. The few items handed to the girl by her captor were found in the murky subterranean canal below. They included a bottle of brandy, six paperback books and a small puzzle.

It was nine months before Neilson was caught and that was almost by accident. When two police officers, stopped a small, wiry, suspicious character near Mansfield, the killer reacted with typical violence, producing a sawn-off shotgun, clambering into the panda car and ordering the policemen to drive. Yet they fought back, risking life and limb inside the cramped vehicle.

Britain’s most wanted man was eventually subdued with the help of customers at a fish and chip shop, outside which the squad car screeched to a halt. In fact, they beat Neilson so badly the policemen had to protect him. Bloody and bruised, the killer was dragged away and handcuffed to railings.

Neilson’s home in Yorkshire was searched and police found guns, ammunition and even a model of a black panther.

For several days he refused to answer any questions, but finally cracked and made a full confession, maintaining he had accidentally knocked Lesley off the ledge.

In July 1976, he went on trial at Oxford Crown Court and was given five life sentences.

Donald Neilson died in prison in 2011. Bob Booth, who was made an MBE for his police work in 1975, retired in 1980. He moved to Skipton, North Yorkshire and died in 2013.