Donald Neilson, born
Donald Nappey and also known as the "
Black Panther", was a
British multiple murderer and
armed robber died he was 75.. Following three murders committed during robberies of sub-post offices from 1971 to 1974, his last victim was
Lesley Whittle, an heiress from
Highley,
Shropshire,
England, in early 1975. He was arrested later that year and sentenced to
life imprisonment in 1976, remaining in prison until his death 35 years later.
[1]
(1 August 1936 – 18 December 2011)
Early life
Neilson, known previously as Donald Nappey, married 20-year-old Irene
Tate in April 1955 at the age of 18. His wife persuaded him to leave
the army where he was serving as a national serviceman in the
King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
Their daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1960.
After his daughter's birth, Nappey changed the family name to Neilson
so that the little girl would not suffer the bullying and abuse he had
endured at school and in the army because of his surname's similarity to
the word
nappy.
He was also bullied because of his short stature, five feet six inches.
According to David Bell and Harry Hawkes, Nappey bought a taxi
business from a man named Neilson and decided to use that name instead
of the former.
[2]
An alternative theory, proposed by a lodger, Miss Lena Fearnley, who
stayed with the Neilson family in the early 1960s, is that Neilson took
the name from an ice-cream van from which he and Irene often bought
ice-cream for their daughter. Miss Fearnley told the BBC in an interview
that he told her, "I like that name."
[3]
Turn to crime
A jobbing builder in
Bradford,
West Yorkshire,
Neilson turned to crime when his business failed. It is believed he
committed over 400 house burglaries without detection during his early
days of crime. Before he became notorious as The Black Panther he was
sought under a variety of nicknames such as The Phantom and Handy Andy.
To confuse the police, he adopted a different modus operandi every few
weeks. For example he would steal a radio from each house and abandon it
nearby then when that pattern of behaviour was established he would
drop it and do something else. Proceeds from simple housebreaking were
low however and after stealing guns and ammunition from a house in
Cheshire he upped his criminal activity which resulted in him turning to
robbing small post offices. Neilson committed eighteen such crimes
between 1971 and 1974.
[4] His phobia about dogs meant that he avoided post offices with guard dogs.
His crimes became progressively more violent as he sought to protect
himself from occupants prepared to put up a resistance to defend their
property. In February 1972 he gained entry to a sub-post office in
Rochdale Road,
Heywood,
Lancashire during the night. Leslie Richardson, the postmaster, and his
wife woke to find a hooded man in their bedroom. Richardson leapt out
of bed to tackle the intruder while his wife phoned the police. During
the struggle, Neilson showed Richardson his sawn off shotgun and snapped
in a West Indian accent, "This is loaded." Mr Richardson saw that the
gun was pointing up at the ceiling and there was no danger of anyone
being shot. He snapped back, "We'll find out if it's loaded," and pulled
the trigger himself blasting two holes in the ceiling. The fight
continued and Richardson managed to pull Neilson's black hood off to
reveal not the West Indian he had expected but a white man with dark
staring eyes. Neilson then stamped mercilessly on Richardson's feet
breaking several toes and kneed him in the groin. As Richardson
collapsed on the floor, Neilson made his escape empty handed. Richardson
gave police a description of his masked intruder which turned out to be
inaccurate in many respects.
[5]
Several other photofits of Neilson were similarly unhelpful to the
police but one, made by sub postmistress Margaret Grayland, was
extremely accurate.
Turn to murder
Neilson's first three murders occurred in 1974. He shot dead two
sub-postmasters and the husband of a sub-postmistress as well as
brutally battering sub-postmistress Margaret 'Peggy' Grayland in post
office robberies. He killed Donald Skepper in
Harrogate in February 1974,
[6] Derek Astin of
Baxenden near
Accrington in September 1974, and Sidney Grayland in
Langley,
West Midlands during November 1974.
[3]
The Baxenden murder gained Neilson the nickname The Black Panther when,
during an interview with a local television reporter, Astin's wife,
Marion, described her husband's killer as "so quick, he was like a
panther". Alluding to the killer's dark clothing, the enterprising
reporter ended his piece by asking "Where is this Black Panther?" and
the
soubriquet
stuck. The Whittle case made him Britain's most wanted man in the
mid-1970s and the kidnapper was irrefutably linked to the post office
shootings when he shot security guard Gerald Smith six times while
checking a ransom trail and forensics showed the bullets were fired from
the same .22 pistol that was used to shoot Derek Astin and Sidney
Grayland.
Kidnap and murder of Lesley Whittle
Lesley Whittle (1957–1975) was a 17-year-old girl and was Neilson's
youngest victim. Whittle was the daughter of noted coach transport
business owner George Whittle, who had left his entire fortune to his
second wife and their children, Ronald and Lesley. After reading about a
family dispute over George's will, and three years of planning, on 14
January 1975 Neilson entered the Whittle family home in
Highley,
Shropshire, and kidnapped Lesley from her bedroom.
Neilson calculated that the family would not materially miss £50,000
of their fortune, and so made a subsequent demand in a note left at the
family home for that sum. A series of police bungles and other
circumstances meant that Whittle's brother Ronald was unable to deliver
the ransom money to the place and time demanded by the kidnapper.
Whittle's body was found on 7 March 1975, hanging from a wire at the bottom of the drainage shaft where he had tethered her in
Bathpool Park, at
Kidsgrove,
Staffordshire.
The subsequent post-mortem examination showed that Whittle had not, in
fact, died slowly from strangulation, but instantaneously from
vagal inhibition. The shock of the fall had caused her heart to stop beating.
Neilson may have pushed Whittle off the ledge where he had kept her.
An alternative to this scenario is that Neilson was not even there when
Whittle died and that he panicked and fled on the night of the failed
ransom collection without returning to the shaft, believing the police
were closing in on him, leaving Whittle alive in the dark for a
considerable period of time before she fell to her death.
The pathologist noted that Whittle weighed only 98 pounds (44 kg)
when found, her stomach and intestines were completely empty, she had
lost a considerable amount of weight and was
emaciated.
He concluded that she had not eaten for a minimum of three days, the
length of time it takes for food to pass through the body, but added it
could have been much longer.
Capture and arrest
In December 1975, two police officers, Tony White and Stuart Mackenzie, were in a
panda car
in a side road keeping a watch on the main A60 trunk road leading out
of Mansfield in North Nottinghamshire when they spotted a small wiry man
scurrying by carrying a holdall. As he passed the police car he averted
his face, drawing Mackenzie's attention. As a matter of routine, they
called him over to question him. The man said he was on his way home
from work, then produced a sawn-off shotgun from the holdall. He ordered
White into the back of the car. The policeman opened the car door but
the gunman snapped,"No time for that, climb the seat"! The officer did
so with alacrity and the gunman settled himself in the passenger seat,
jamming the gun into Mackenzie's armpit.
He ordered them to drive to
Blidworth,
six miles away and told them not to look at him. This presented PC
Mackenzie with a problem. Gently he explained to the gunman that they
were going the wrong way and he would have to turn the car round. The
gunman agreed but warned both officers if there were any tricks they
would both be dead. As they were driving along Southwell Road the gunman
asked if they had any rope. As White pretended to look, Mackenzie
reached a junction in the road. Turning the steering wheel violently one
way then the other, he asked,"which way, left or right"? causing the
gunman to look toward the road ahead. White saw the gun drop a few
inches and realised this was his chance; he pushed the gun forwards and
Mackenzie stamped on the brake. They screeched to a halt outside The
Junction Chip Shop in Rainworth. The gun went off, grazing White's hand.
MacKenzie fell out of the driver's seat, banging his head on the road.
He staggered to his feet and ran towards the fish and chip shop
screaming for help. Two men, Roy Morris and Keith Wood, ran from the
queue outside the chip shop and helped overpower Neilson. Wood subdued
the gunman with a karate chop to the neck before Morris grabbed his
wrists and held them for White to snap the handcuffs on. The locals
attacked him so severely that in the end the police had to protect him.
They hauled Neilson to iron railings at the side of a bus stop and
handcuffed him there before calling for back-up, and when they found two
panther hoods on him, they realised that they had probably caught the
most wanted man in the U.K. In the subsequent investigation, Neilson's
fingerprints were found to match one of those in the drain shaft. In the
interview at
Kidsgrove
police station when he confessed to the kidnap of Whittle, Neilson gave
an 18-page statement to DCS Harold Wright, head of Staffordshire CID,
and Commander Morrison of Scotland Yard, with the statement handwritten
by DCI Walter Boreham.
[7]
Trial and conviction
During his trial at
Oxford Crown Court,
Neilson's defence lawyer Gilbert Gray QC contended that Lesley Whittle
had accidentally fallen from the ledge and had hanged herself, and that
Neilson had fed her chicken soup, spaghetti and meatballs, and bought
her fish and chips and chicken legs. These claims were contested by the
prosecution as lies. Neilson had provided his victim with a sleeping bag
designed to prevent hypothermia, mattresses, survival blankets,
survival bags, a bottle of brandy, six paperback books, a copy of the
Times, the magazines Vogue and Home, a small puzzle and two brightly
coloured napkins. These items were found in the shaft, and in the
subterranean canal running below it, by the police. While on remand,
Neilson was interviewed by a forensic psychiatrist, Dr Hugo Buist Milne.
Dr Milne's examination found no evidence of insanity. The psychiatrist
told the defence team, "I've examined him and he's the classic
psychopath of all time." After the case Milne said he was convinced of
Neilson's truthfulness when he said he had not murdered Lesley Whittle.
However, his claims that the other four deaths were accidental were
dismissed by the psychiatrist as excuses for aggressive behaviour.
Neilson's defence team, solicitor, Barrington Black, junior counsel,
Norman Jones and leading counsel Gilbert Gray all remained convinced of
their client's innocence of murder in the Whittle case believing his
conviction was simply a reflection of public opinion, a backlash of the
publicity given to the hunt for the kidnapper and killer and that he
should have been convicted only of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
[8]
In July 1976, Neilson was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of
Lesley Whittle, for which he was given a life sentence. Three weeks
later he was convicted of the murders of two postmasters and the husband
of a postmistress.
[3] In total Neilson received five
life sentences.
[6]
The judge also gave Neilson a further 61 years: 21 years for kidnapping
Lesley Whittle and 10 years for blackmailing her mother. Three further
sentences of 10 years each were imposed for the two burglary charges
from which he stole guns and ammunition and for possessing the sawn off
shotgun with intent to endanger life. All the sentences were to run
concurrently. The judge told Neilson that the enormity of his crimes put
him in a class apart from almost all other convicted murderers in
recent years.
Neilson was found not guilty of the attempted murders of
sub-postmistress Margaret "Peggy" Grayland and PC Tony White but guilty
of the lesser alternative charges of inflicting grievous bodily harm on
Mrs Grayland and possessing a shotgun with the intent of endangering
life at Mansfield. A charge of attempting to murder a security guard
named Gerald Smith whom he shot six times while checking the Whittle
ransom trail was left on file because of legal complications due to fact
that Mr Smith died more than a year and a day after being shot. Had
this charge gone ahead, he would have told the court that the six
bullets had been fired at a dog but instead accidentally hit the
unfortunate Mr Smith. The trial judge recommended that Neilson receive a
whole life tariff.
After the verdicts, his counsel, Gilbert Gray QC, visited him in the
cells below the court. He found his client in the corner of his cell
curled up in a foetal position, totally broken and dejected, filled with
immense remorse for Lesley Whittle and her family.
[9]
2008 appeal
Following subsequent legal judgements in various other cases, and the
implications of European Union Human Rights laws, Neilson was confirmed
on numerous occasions to be on the
Home Office's list of prisoners with whole life tariffs, as a succession of
Home Secretaries ruled that life should mean life for Neilson.
In 2008, Neilson applied to the
High Court to have his minimum term reverted to 30 years. On 12 June 2008 Mr Justice Teare upheld the whole life tariff, saying:
[10][11]
| “ |
This is a case
where the gravity of the applicant's offences justifies a whole life
order. The manner in which the young girl was killed demonstrates that
it too involved a substantial degree of premeditation or planning. It
also involved the abduction of the young girl. The location and manner
of Lesley Whittle's death indicates that she must have been subjected by
the applicant to a dreadful and horrific ordeal. |
” |
Death
In 2008, Neilson was diagnosed with
motor neurone disease, a progressive and fatal condition.
[12] He was taken from
Norwich Prison to
Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in the early hours of 17 December 2011 after developing breathing difficulties and was pronounced dead the following day.
[1]
In popular culture
Neilson's life and crimes were portrayed in the 1977 film
The Black Panther directed by
Ian Merrick and starring
Donald Sumpter as Neilson. It was released on DVD in 2012.
To see more of who died in 2011
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