Cannock Chase murders
Encyclopedia
The Cannock Chase murders (also known as the A34 murders) were the murder
s of three young school girls that occurred in Staffordshire
, England
, during the late 1960s. In a trial reported to have received "unprecedented public interest," Raymond Leslie Morris of Walsall was convicted at Staffordshire Assizes
of the murder of Christine Ann Darby after one of the largest manhunts
in British history. Morris is also considered the chief suspect
in the deaths of Margaret Reynolds and Diana Joy Tift. In November 2010, he was granted a judicial review of his case in a bid to overturn his conviction., which failed.
, Staffordshire. He lived in Walsall his entire life and was reported to have an IQ of 120
. Morris went through a variety of jobs before landing a position as a foreman engineer at a precision instruments factory in Oldbury, West Midlands
, in 1967. In 1951, he married 'the girl next door", who was two years younger than him, and fathered two boys. He kicked her out of the house after eight years of marriage, then divorced her on the grounds of adultery when she had another man's child. Morris's first wife would later describe him as a man with a need to express violent sexual dominance. At the age of 35, Morris was married again, this time to a 21-year-old woman named Carol. At the time the A34 murders were committed, Morris and his wife lived at Flat 20, Regent House, Green Lane, Walsall – a council-owned flat in Birchills
, directly opposite the police station.
in Staffordshire. Reynolds went missing on her way to school in Aston
, Birmingham
, on 8 September 1965 and Tift went missing on a short walk to her grandmother's house in Bloxwich
on 30 December that year. Two thousand people searched for Reynolds in the hours following her disappearance.
On 22 August 1967, a soldier who was a member of a search party found the sprawled, naked body of seven-year-old Christine Darby beneath brushwood only a mile away from where Reynolds and Tift were discovered. Christine had been enticed into a car by a strange man near her home in Camden Street, Caldmore
, Walsall, on 19 August 1967. Witnesses in Walsall explained that they saw a man in a grey car who spoke in a local accent, while two others who had been on Cannock Chase remembered seeing a grey Austin A55 or A60
.
. Prior to making an arrest, 150 detectives would visit 39,000 homes, interview 80,000 people and check over a million car forms. Culling 25,000 vehicles from 1,375,000 files, investigators checked every Austin A55 and A60 in the Midlands
. The hunt for the Cannock Chase murderer was led by Sir Stanley Bailey
, Staffordshire’s Assistant Chief Constable
at the time.
. An 18-year-old housewife made a mental note of the vehicle registration plate
, the car was traced back to Morris, and he was arrested in connection with the attempted abduction. The police were aware that Morris, who had been interviewed four times in four years, had owned a grey Austin A55 similar to the one used in the abduction of Darby. He had been considered a suspect in Darby's death, but his wife provided him with an alibi
by stating that the couple were shopping together the day she went missing. A police search of the Morris flat uncovered pornographic
photographs of a young girl who was later determined to be Carol Morris's five-year-old niece. Scotland Yard
detectives arrested Raymond Morris for Darby's murder on 16 November 1968. Two charges of indecent assault on the niece and one for the attempted abduction of Aulton would also be filed against Morris.
and murder
of seven-year-old Christine Darby. His sentencing was delayed until the new year, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment
. As of August 2001, he was incarcerated
at Wymott Prison
and was planning to appeal
against his conviction.
Although convicted only of murdering Darby, Morris is considered the chief suspect in the deaths of Reynolds and Tift. Reynolds's relatives consider Morris to be her killer. In addition, 10-year-old Jane Taylor disappeared from the Cannock
area on 14 August 1966 and has not been seen since. Morris has also been named as a possible suspect in connection with Taylor's disappearance. Some 40 years on, he is one of the longest serving prisoners in England and Wales
.
not to refer his case to the Court of Appeal, in a bid to overturn his conviction. A statement from Morris's defence team said:
However, Mr Justice Simon rejected the judicial review and Morris later indicated that he had abandoned any further appeal .
's crime magazine series Crime Stalker and a 2004 documentary
of the Cannock Chase murders was televised on the ITV
series To Catch A Killer. Morris and the Cannock Chase murders are referred to in David Peace
's novel Nineteen Seventy-Four.
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
s of three young school girls that occurred in Staffordshire
Staffordshire
Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, during the late 1960s. In a trial reported to have received "unprecedented public interest," Raymond Leslie Morris of Walsall was convicted at Staffordshire Assizes
Assizes (England and Wales)
The Courts of Assize, or Assizes, were periodic criminal courts held around England and Wales until 1972, when together with the Quarter Sessions they were abolished by the Courts Act 1971 and replaced by a single permanent Crown Court...
of the murder of Christine Ann Darby after one of the largest manhunts
Manhunt (law enforcement)
In law enforcement, a manhunt is a search for a dangerous fugitive involving the use of all available police units and technology and sometimes help from the public....
in British history. Morris is also considered the chief suspect
Suspect
In the parlance of criminal justice, a suspect is a known person suspected of committing a crime.Police and reporters often incorrectly use the word suspect when referring to the...
in the deaths of Margaret Reynolds and Diana Joy Tift. In November 2010, he was granted a judicial review of his case in a bid to overturn his conviction., which failed.
Raymond Leslie Morris
Raymond Leslie Morris was born 13 August 1929 in WalsallWalsall
Walsall is a large industrial town in the West Midlands of England. It is located northwest of Birmingham and east of Wolverhampton. Historically a part of Staffordshire, Walsall is a component area of the West Midlands conurbation and part of the Black Country.Walsall is the administrative...
, Staffordshire. He lived in Walsall his entire life and was reported to have an IQ of 120
IQ reference chart
IQ reference charts are tables suggested by IQ test publishers to designate IQ score ranges as various categories. As reference charts, they are not to be taken as absolute or precise. All IQ tests show variance in scores even for the same test-taker retested on the same test, and also variance in...
. Morris went through a variety of jobs before landing a position as a foreman engineer at a precision instruments factory in Oldbury, West Midlands
Oldbury, West Midlands
Oldbury is a town in the West Midlands in England. It is a part of the Black Country and the administrative centre of the borough of Sandwell.-Local government:...
, in 1967. In 1951, he married 'the girl next door", who was two years younger than him, and fathered two boys. He kicked her out of the house after eight years of marriage, then divorced her on the grounds of adultery when she had another man's child. Morris's first wife would later describe him as a man with a need to express violent sexual dominance. At the age of 35, Morris was married again, this time to a 21-year-old woman named Carol. At the time the A34 murders were committed, Morris and his wife lived at Flat 20, Regent House, Green Lane, Walsall – a council-owned flat in Birchills
Birchills
Birchills is a residential area of Walsall in the West Midlands of England.It is situated several hundred yards west of the town centre and is an established area containing many different housing types, though Victorian/Edwardian terraced houses and inter-war council houses are the most frequent...
, directly opposite the police station.
The murders
On 12 January 1966, the bodies of Margaret Reynolds, age 6, and Diana Joy Tift, age 5, were found together in a ditch at Mansty Gully on Cannock ChaseCannock Chase
Cannock Chase is a mixed area of countryside in the county of Staffordshire, England. The area has been designated as the Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The Chase gives its name to the Cannock Chase local government district....
in Staffordshire. Reynolds went missing on her way to school in Aston
Aston
Aston is an area of the City of Birmingham, in the West Midlands of England. Lying to the north-east of the Birmingham city centre, Aston constitutes an electoral ward within the council constituency of Ladywood.-History:...
, Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, on 8 September 1965 and Tift went missing on a short walk to her grandmother's house in Bloxwich
Bloxwich
Bloxwich is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Walsall, West Midlands, England, with a population of around 40,000 people.-Early history:Bloxwich has its origins at least as early as the Anglo-Saxon period, when the place name evidence suggests it was a small Mercian settlement named after the...
on 30 December that year. Two thousand people searched for Reynolds in the hours following her disappearance.
On 22 August 1967, a soldier who was a member of a search party found the sprawled, naked body of seven-year-old Christine Darby beneath brushwood only a mile away from where Reynolds and Tift were discovered. Christine had been enticed into a car by a strange man near her home in Camden Street, Caldmore
Caldmore
Caldmore is one of the villages that make up the town of Walsall. The name is pronounced "Kar-ma" by the local populace.-History:The area was an important junction of roads which created a triangular shaped green called Caldmore Green...
, Walsall, on 19 August 1967. Witnesses in Walsall explained that they saw a man in a grey car who spoke in a local accent, while two others who had been on Cannock Chase remembered seeing a grey Austin A55 or A60
Austin Cambridge
The Austin Cambridge is a motor car range sold by the Austin Motor Company in several generations from September 1954 through to 1969 as cars and 1971 as light commercials. It replaced the A40 Somerset but was entirely new with modern unibody construction...
.
The investigation
The three murders were similar in that each victim was determined to have been coaxed into a car while near her home, then murdered after being sexually assaulted. Darby, Reynolds, and Tift lived within a seventeen mile radius of each other and near the A34 road that passes through Cannock Chase. The murders were collectively known as the "A34 murders" or "Cannock Chase murders". The Cannock Chase/A34 murders sparked one of the biggest murder investigations in British criminal history. The manhunt was larger than that of the infamous Moors murdersMoors murders
The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least...
. Prior to making an arrest, 150 detectives would visit 39,000 homes, interview 80,000 people and check over a million car forms. Culling 25,000 vehicles from 1,375,000 files, investigators checked every Austin A55 and A60 in the Midlands
English Midlands
The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...
. The hunt for the Cannock Chase murderer was led by Sir Stanley Bailey
Stanley Bailey
Sir Stanley Ernest Bailey, CBE, QPM was a senior British police officer. He was chief constable of Northumbria Police from 1975 until 1991....
, Staffordshire’s Assistant Chief Constable
Assistant Chief Constable
Assistant chief constable is the third highest rank in all British territorial police forces , as well as the British Transport Police, Ministry of Defence Police and...
at the time.
The breakthrough and arrest
On 4 November 1968, 10-year-old Margaret Aulton in Walsall managed to escape from a man who attempted to force her into his green and white Ford CorsairFord Corsair
The Ford Consul Corsair, manufactured by Ford Motor Company in the United Kingdom, was a midsize car introduced at the London Motor Show in October 1963 and available as either a saloon or estate from 1964 until 1970...
. An 18-year-old housewife made a mental note of the vehicle registration plate
Vehicle registration plate
A vehicle registration plate is a metal or plastic plate attached to a motor vehicle or trailer for official identification purposes. The registration identifier is a numeric or alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies the vehicle within the issuing region's database...
, the car was traced back to Morris, and he was arrested in connection with the attempted abduction. The police were aware that Morris, who had been interviewed four times in four years, had owned a grey Austin A55 similar to the one used in the abduction of Darby. He had been considered a suspect in Darby's death, but his wife provided him with an alibi
Alibi
Alibi is a 1929 American crime film directed by Roland West. The screenplay was written by West and C. Gardner Sullivan, who adapted the 1927 Broadway stage play, Nightstick, written by Elaine Sterne Carrington, J.C...
by stating that the couple were shopping together the day she went missing. A police search of the Morris flat uncovered pornographic
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
photographs of a young girl who was later determined to be Carol Morris's five-year-old niece. Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
detectives arrested Raymond Morris for Darby's murder on 16 November 1968. Two charges of indecent assault on the niece and one for the attempted abduction of Aulton would also be filed against Morris.
The trial and conviction
Carol Morris would eventually become the chief witness for the prosecution and retract what she had initially told investigators about shopping on the day of Darby's murder. On 16 November 1968, Raymond Leslie Morris was found guilty of the rapeRape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
and murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
of seven-year-old Christine Darby. His sentencing was delayed until the new year, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment
Life imprisonment
Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...
. As of August 2001, he was incarcerated
Incarceration
Incarceration is the detention of a person in prison, typically as punishment for a crime .People are most commonly incarcerated upon suspicion or conviction of committing a crime, and different jurisdictions have differing laws governing the function of incarceration within a larger system of...
at Wymott Prison
Wymott (HM Prison)
HM Prison Wymott Category C men's prison, located in the village of Ulnes Walton , in Lancashire, England. Wymott is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service, and is situated next to HMP Garth.-History:...
and was planning to appeal
Appeal
An appeal is a petition for review of a case that has been decided by a court of law. The petition is made to a higher court for the purpose of overturning the lower court's decision....
against his conviction.
Although convicted only of murdering Darby, Morris is considered the chief suspect in the deaths of Reynolds and Tift. Reynolds's relatives consider Morris to be her killer. In addition, 10-year-old Jane Taylor disappeared from the Cannock
Cannock
Cannock is the most populous of three towns in the district of Cannock Chase in the central southern part of the county of Staffordshire in the West Midlands region of England....
area on 14 August 1966 and has not been seen since. Morris has also been named as a possible suspect in connection with Taylor's disappearance. Some 40 years on, he is one of the longest serving prisoners in England and Wales
England and Wales
England and Wales is a jurisdiction within the United Kingdom. It consists of England and Wales, two of the four countries of the United Kingdom...
.
Judicial review
In November 2010, Morris was granted a judicial review of the refusal of the Criminal Cases Review CommissionCriminal Cases Review Commission
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is an non-departmental public body set up following the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice itself a continuation of the May Inquiry. It aims to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland...
not to refer his case to the Court of Appeal, in a bid to overturn his conviction. A statement from Morris's defence team said:
The application for a judicial review is the first stage in his attempts to have the matter referred back to the Court of Appeal after 42 years in prison. If Morris's conviction was overturned it would be the longest running miscarriage of justice in British history. It might also potentially mean that a child murderer had remained at large for more than 40 years during Morris's incarceration.
However, Mr Justice Simon rejected the judicial review and Morris later indicated that he had abandoned any further appeal .
In the media
Morris has been dubbed the Cannock Chase murderer. A 1971 book compared and analyzed various English newspapers' handling of the widely reported discovery of Reynolds's and Tift's remains. Morris was featured in a 1995 report in Central Independent TelevisionCentral Independent Television
Central Independent Television, more commonly known as Central is the Independent Television contractor for the Midlands, created following the restructuring of ATV and commencing broadcast on 1 January 1982. The station is owned and operated by ITV plc, under the licensee of ITV Broadcasting...
's crime magazine series Crime Stalker and a 2004 documentary
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
of the Cannock Chase murders was televised on the ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
series To Catch A Killer. Morris and the Cannock Chase murders are referred to in David Peace
David Peace
David Peace is an English author. Known for his novels GB84, The Damned Utd, and Red Riding Quartet, Peace was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in their 2003 list...
's novel Nineteen Seventy-Four.
Further reading
- Hawkes, Harry (1971). Murder on the A34. London: John Long. (ISBN 0-09102-960-0)
- Molloy, Pat (1988). Not the Moors Murders: A Detective's Story of the Biggest Child-Killer Hunt in History. Gomer Press. (ISBN 0-86383-473-6)