The torrential rain hit the road hard in the middle of the night, when the cyclist slowed down. In the background, a kind of weak, sobbing and unknown noises could be heard. Intrigued, the man got off his bike and decided to investigate: he entered some rubble and, a few meters away, he saw a half-naked and badly injured girl. She had been raped and strangled, but she still had a pulse.
The little girl survived the merciless attack, but three other girls did not. A sexual predator was on the loose in the guise of a caring and helpful citizen and had embarrassed the police in the biggest manhunt for a pedophile in UK history. It was Raymond Morris, better known as the Monster of Cannock Chase.
Raymond Leslie Morris was born on August 13, 1929 in the English industrial town of Walsall, in the county of Staffordshire, of which we hardly know information about his biography except that he worked as an engineer and that he was married twice. The first was in 1951 with Muriel, a neighbor's daughter, and they had two children.
For the next almost ten years, the marriage was under Raymond's absolute control and domination. Our protagonist had a violent attitude and had total power over Muriel, whom he habitually mistreated and forced to have extreme sexual relations when she ordered him to. The situation ended when she decided to separate from her.
The second marriage came at age 35 and a few months before his first sexual assault on a minor. Raymond married 21-year-old Carol, they moved into a flat opposite Green Lane Police Station, also in Walsall, and he went to work as a senior engineer in a precision instrument factory in Oldbury.
Although in his previous marriage, Raymond showed a double face, one kind towards the outside and the other violent towards his wife, during his life with Carol he was always a calm, kind and respectable man. His own co-workers described him as polite and helpful, if somewhat unsympathetic.
Despite this appearance of normality, Raymond concealed strong sexual impulses towards underage girls. One of her first crimes was cajoling two ten and eleven year old schoolgirls into photographing them nude. However, these facts never came to trial because no evidence was ever found. It was her word against that of some girls.
Meanwhile, the engineer continued to stalk and observe minors in the distance until, on December 1, 1964, he went a step further and crossed the line.
Raymond tricked 9-year-old Julia Taylor abducted. He told her that he was a friend of her mother's and the little girl, confident, she did not hesitate to get into the car of that stranger, a certain "Uncle Len". Minutes later, a cyclist found her about to die, half-naked and with signs of having been raped, beaten, and strangled.
Despite the fact that an eyewitness to the kidnapping described the car - large, with two-tone paint and some wings on the rear and another on the windshield closest to the driver - the police could not locate it and the case was closed.
That caused Raymond to trust himself and start a bloody massacre. Knowing the region, particularly the Cannock Chase agricultural track, very close to the A34 road, the engineer dedicated himself to kidnapping girls between the ages of five and seven who, through all kinds of tricks, he convinced to get on the to your vehicle. He then brutally raped them, murdered them, and dumped their bodies in a ditch.
Between September 8, 1965 and August 19, 1967, 6-year-old Margaret Reynolds, 5-year-old Diane Tift, and 7-year-old Christine Darby were killed by this sexual predator without authorities being able to do anything to stop this carnage.
In all cases, the police and citizen deployment was extraordinary. We are talking about more than 1,000 agents in the area involved, in addition to Scotland Yard experts in forced disappearances and sexual predators, more than 2,000 neighbors helping in the raids, hundreds of posters hanging on electric poles, canopies, bus stops, shop windows...
In the first two murders, that of Margaret and Diane, occurring in the space of three months, 6,000 houses and gardens were searched, underwater units searched ponds and reservoirs, abandoned factories and warehouses were checked…
And more than 25,000 people were questioned, including our killer. But his alibi was solid: he was with his wife on the days of the disappearances, so he was never considered a suspect.
On January 12, 1966, a rabbit hunter found the bodies of the girls on Cannock Chase, in a water-filled ditch. The autopsy revealed that Diane had been raped and then suffocated with the pixie hood of her anorak while her killer pressed down on her nose and mouth.
In Margaret's case, her naked body lay just inches from Diane and was badly decomposed so cause of death could never be determined. The only forensic traces found at the crime scene were traces of the perpetrator's semen: they were on and in Diane.
Two days later, Staffordshire Police Deputy Chief Constable Thomas Lockley confirmed at a crowded press conference: "We are on the hunt for a dangerous killer of girls who may strike again." Therefore, it was urgent to implement a strategy to catch him red-handed.
During the following year and a half, a large group of investigators were in charge of collating information, questioning witnesses house to house, reviewing thousands of vehicle forms, collecting any type of evidence... In addition, an action plan was devised in case a girl disappeared.
This roadmap, called the Stop Plan (something like a detention plan), consisted of sealing off the town of Walsall and its environs, cordoning off secondary exits, putting up barricades at all the main approaches to Cannock Chase and deploying officers at each of the these strategic points. Four police forces in the region, apart from Scotland Yard, got down to work. But all this effort was in vain.
On August 19, 1967, Raymond kidnapped 7-year-old Christine Darby in broad daylight, while she was playing with some friends in the street and a few meters from her home. The killer pretended to be lost and needed some directions from her, so he invited the little girl to show him her way. That was the last time she was seen alive.
Minutes later, the family reported him missing and the witnesses explained the details of what happened: he was a white man, in his thirties with a local accent, clean-shaven and dark brown hair, wearing a white shirt and his car was a A55 or an A60 Austin model in gray.
Again, an unprecedented search deployment was carried out with more than 1,000 volunteers, fifty police officers, 24,000 leaflets with the little girl's photograph and the questioning of hundreds of locals, including Raymond, whom they did not suspect either.
Not even his family or friends could imagine that he was the one they were desperately looking for when he made comments about the intelligence of the alleged perpetrator in order to get away from the police.
On August 22, a soldier, a member of the search group, found Christine's body: she had been raped, suffocated and thrown into the brush less than a kilometer from where the other two minors were found.
At the crime scene, fragmented tire tracks were recovered and it was determined that they belonged to a family-size car, and that its driver, from the maneuvers carried out to enter and leave the area, knew the area perfectly. I mean, he had to be a local.
From there, the police investigation intensified thanks to the help of Scotland Yard: 150 detectives visited 39,000 homes, interviewed 80,000 people and reviewed more than a million car forms after witness descriptions.
To this was added the importance of the testimony of two crucial witnesses: they physically described the christened Monster of Cannock Chase and a facial composition was made in full color. They had finally put a face to the predator, now they just needed to find it.
But this strategy did not work either, nobody knew the individual. Hence, the investigators chose to question again the locals between the ages of 21 and 50. They had to fill out a questionnaire explaining their whereabouts on the date of Christine's kidnapping and murder, as well as including the names of the people who could corroborate her alibi.
This also failed, although one of the detectives discovered something relevant: many of these people had their wives as an alibi. Therefore, it was possible that the murderer had been previously interrogated, but covered up by his wife. While the police tried to follow this lead, the events related below precipitated his arrest.
On November 4, 1968, Raymond unsuccessfully tried to kidnap 10-year-old Margaret Aulton, but the little girl resisted strongly and managed to escape. A neighbor, a witness to the event, quickly wrote down the car's license plate and the model, a green and white Ford Corsair.
The police verified the identity of the owner and the next day Raymond Morris was arrested for attempted kidnapping. But since Margaret couldn't point him out in a lineup, he was released. Even so, the investigators noticed the great resemblance of the suspect with the robot portrait of the murderer and decided to continue investigating it.
The agents discovered that Raymond had been questioned up to four times in connection with the disappearances and deaths of the girls, but that his alibis were always confirmed by his wife Carol.
To this were added several coincidences: he had had a two-tone Vauxhall Velox vehicle, the gasoline receipts corresponded to areas close to the places of the abductions, and an analysis of his time record at work confirmed that he had left an hour before. of Christine's disappearance. The pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit.
On November 15, they made their second arrest for kidnapping and murder while a team searched their home. Child pornographic images made in his home, including those of his own 5-year-old niece, were seized.
At the same time, other agents questioned the wife about the alibis provided and, although Carol tried to maintain her version, she ended up collapsing and confessing that it was all a lie: she said that her husband was with her because she did not believe that he could be responsible for something like that.
For his part, Raymond denied all the charges against him and looked “cold, cruel and just plain mean,” said former Superintendent Pat Molloy, one of the three lead officers on the case.
On February 18, 1969, the trial against Raymond Morris began for a crime of murder of Christine Darby, two of sexual assault against his niece and the attempted kidnapping of Margaret Aulton. As for the crimes of Margaret Reynolds and Diane Tift, their involvement could never be linked.
After seven days of trial, the Stafford court jury took less than two hours to reach a verdict. It was 4:28 p.m. when the Monster of Cannock Chase was found guilty on all counts. “I do not intend to detain you long or comment on this terrible murder,” Judge Ashworth told the defendant, “there is only one sentence, as you know. Life imprisonment".
Hearing the ruling, Raymond looked up at the public gallery, which began to utter insults and threats. "Hang him!" they yelled. The assassin kept his composure undaunted and, just before leaving the room guarded by several agents, he gave his wife a cold look. She had betrayed him.
For 45 years, Raymond was held at HMP Wymott prison in Preston, where he tried to apply for a review of his sentence, but was rejected by the court. Her only public statements, already in very poor health, were published in the Sunday Mercury in 2011.
“I will always maintain that I am not responsible for the murder of Christine Darby and hope that my fight for justice uncovers the truth. I can only say over and over again that it wasn't me and hope that someone listens to me,” she said.
Three years later, Raymond passed away of natural causes, at the age of 84. His body was cremated by the Ministry of Justice and became a national affair when it came to light that taxpayer money was used to pay for funeral expenses and buy flowers for the killer. The amount was about 3,000 euros and the families of the victims felt ashamed.
