Midlands Ripper: The Vanishing of a Julie Clayton

“When a murder is discovered, it was a female who had her head and her hands removed and she had been found in what could be… was like a duffel bag and she had her her wrist and her ankles bound.

It doesn’t just destroy one life.

I don’t think he’s capable of loving people cuz how do you kill your own children?

That was the last thing those children saw was their dad killing them.

How do you do that?”

“It tears communities apart.

When her body was located she was nude, she was deceased, she had some ligature marks on her neck.

It’s up to the police to not only solve the mystery…”

“I then went round the house looking for anything that might obviously be stolen and tracked down the killer but bring them to justice.

There’s two bodies found.

Your first thought is, ‘Oh my goodness me is there a serial killer?’”

“In this episode, the body of a young woman is found in a ditch, but who is she?”

“So it was very shocking, it felt like there was something in the air for sure.

We didn’t know where she was from, you know, somebody must be missing her.

Meet the detectives.”

“Julie had been drugged with ground down amitriptyline, an anti-depressant.

She had slowly lapsed into a coma.”

“Who reveal how they caught the killer.”

“He was a violent man and he was abusive to women and he was a loose cannon.”

On the 6th of July 1994, the body of a young woman was found in Lincolnshire.

“A body in the ditch at Coleby.

It had been found by a dog walker at 9:00 a.m. that Wednesday morning.

Um, she’d phoned it in um a few minutes later, realized the gravity of what what it was, realized that we needed to be moved quickly on this.”

Local detective inspector Neil Jones was on holiday at a caravan site in Yorkshire at the time.

“I was sat having a meal uh with my wife and two children and we saw this police car moving up and down the site and I thought… I just had this little feeling, you just have a little feeling that that might be looking for me um and uh it was obviously an East Yorkshire police officer uh who came and tapped on the door and said, ‘Uh we’re trying to locate you, there has been a murder down in Lincolnshire.’”

Detective Chief Inspector Nick Howard raced to the scene.

“First thing is to get… that to get down there, assess it and cordon it off.

So I went with the DC and the DI and and straight away you look what’s around.

There’s a pub up the road, there are a few houses, so straight away you can start house to house.

Where this was situated, it was quite a clever deposition site.

It was 300 meters from any habitable building.

That road, you would never use it unless you were a farmer, you would never use it.

So it was clever, the way it was done was clever and designed, I think, to to minimize to the chances of being seen.”

Detective Inspector Neil Jones was appointed team leader on the case.

“Arriving at the scene, I’ve been told that the body of a young lady has been found in this ditch uh down by the side here.

Lincoln is just up the road, this is a small village of Coleby, there’s not a lot of traffic.

I’m here purely to have a look to see the situation of of of where the deceased was found.

When a body is found in a ditch at the side of a road, the problems that we face are largely concerned with decomposition of that body.

So the environment that it’s found in can have a significant effect on how quickly or how slowly those remains decompose.

The area from Broughton, that end up to the village is blocked off, so there’s no movement along this road at all.

Nobody can come down here who isn’t associated with the crime.

So you’ve got a number of vehicles, as I say, scenes of crime officers arriving, scenes of crime equipment, you’ve got forensic scientists uh pathologists uh all the technical experts that going to try and give us a clue to anything that may be on the scene.

The other important thing is we don’t want to lose evidence, and out here, as you can see with the elements, we’ve got to deal with this before there’s some change of weather.

It’s very isolated.

We’re going to do a fingertip search.

They talk about this golden hour.

That first hour is when things are really being uh pulled together.

It’s slightly different here because it’s out of the middle of nowhere, so nobody’s come through in the last hour.

We’re talking about the last few days, so we’re bound to be leaning on people: where were you, what were you doing, what did you see?

And that’s the most important thing: what did you see, and come forward and tell us what you did see.”

The presence of so many police in a rural location soon attracted the media.

“The call would have come into the newsroom.

We used to call a thing called the voice bank and um their um inspectors from uh police officers around the county would put on there any crimes overnight, and this day it was that a body had been found in a ditch um in Coleby, which is a village just outside of Lincoln, and police were appealing for witnesses.

On that particular morning I walked down here, I actually just saw a tractor driver and his instinct, ‘What have you seen?’

So you just stop him, see, and immediately he was able to say, ‘Well, I saw a red van with yellow writing on the side.’”

The team had their first potential witness, but they still had no idea who the victim was.

“There was no clear cause of death.

The body was naked, there were two rings on the on the left hand.

The duvet had covered the body, let the pathologist have a look, take a view of what could be done there, what must be done there as opposed to what could be done at the mortuary.

We weren’t clear, there were no stab wounds, there were no strangulation marks.

Most important things you need to do with a murder inquiry is identify the victim.

Once the identification is complete, obviously that gives you a bit of a clue about what’s happened in most cases.

In this case, obviously, we didn’t know what had happened.

We knew she’d been badly beaten and she’d died, but we didn’t know where that offense had taken place, who was responsible.

In any situation where a body is found, we’re looking for information that pertains to the identity of that individual, the cause of death, and if anybody else might have been involved.

In terms of the body specifically, we might be looking for DNA, we might be looking for fingerprints, we could look at uh dental records, dentistician.

We might also look at determining the biological profile of that individual, so whether they were male or female, how old they were when they died, how tall they might have been, and what ancestry they might have had as well.”

Despite forensic analysis, the team still had no clue to the victim’s identity or how she ended up in the ditch in Coleby.

“Spent probably two days putting dental charts into envelopes for the 17 and a half thousand dentists up and down the country, of which I think we got four replies at the end of the day.

Obviously the murderer, if you like, he’s making his escape, he’s not running away, but he’s covering his tracks.”

The post-mortem revealed that the woman had been badly beaten and had consumed a cocktail of different drugs, including a painkiller called amitriptyline that had caused her…

“…sexual predator.

Delighted really, and elated is the word I was looking for, that you’ve actually got the right person.

I know it was the right person, we haven’t got any doubt about that, as the evidence was overwhelming um and uh you’ve done a service to the community and you’ve probably saved somebody else from the trauma that he’s going to commit in the future.”

Walker’s sentence was 20 years life imprisonment.

“The judge stipulated that before he could be released he had to be of an age or of a state where he wasn’t going to be a danger to other women, cuz the judge clearly saw that he was a danger to other women, that he was devious and a sexual deviant and that he wasn’t going to stop.

He may have gone for another and another, you know, so the judge was probably right in his assessment that he would not have stopped offending.

It’s difficult to know what to say about Denzil Walker really.

He obviously was quite a violent man, he obviously had uh this propensity to pick up young ladies um who didn’t really find him attractive, but uh he found them attractive obviously.

I would say from looking at this case that it is very apparent to me as a psychologist that this man was going to go on to commit murder at some point.

His sexual offending would have escalated to the point that he would have killed at some point, and I think after Julie, the fact that he did kill, he would go on to kill again.

The most frightening thing about him was how impassive, unremorseful, and calculating he was, from his forensic awareness through to his mental strength to stick to this story of ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ and then belatedly, ‘It was a terrible accident.’

Based on what I know about offenders and based on the behavior of Walker in this case, I think he’s probably got quite a high opinion of himself.

I think he thinks he’s a charming individual and people are there purely to serve his needs, which suggests he’s quite a narcissistic, egocentric character.”

Walker was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 20 years. Finally, Julie’s family knew the truth.

“We’re very relieved it’s all over and that it’s settled the way it has.

It’s helped us through the stage of of our grieving.

She did a great deal of good, she helped a lot of people who had… you almost call the rejects of life.”

“By identifying Julie and identifying then the killer, it must have gives some solace to the family and some closure at the end of the day.

They knew what happened to the daughter, a tragic death to her daughter.

My lasting thoughts in this case are twofold really: one, a great sadness for the family that they never got to be reunited with Julie, and secondly, satisfaction that we managed to get justice for them.”

“He died in prison.

I mean, you know, what what more can you say?

I mean here’s the thing, isn’t it: is it about justice or is it about revenge?

If you’re talking revenge, maybe not, you know, because nobody fed him drugs and left him in the back of a van to die and then dumped him naked in a ditch for anybody to find.

So if it’s revenge, no.

But if it’s justice, what more can you do but lock a man up in prison and deny him his freedom for the rest of his life, and that’s ultimately what happened with Denzil Walker.

So in that sense, yes, I think you have to say justice was done.”

“You always have to give yourself just a minute, stand by and realize what tragedy has happened here, and there’s an awful lot of people going to be affected—not only poor that poor lady in the ditch, but all the family around her, friends, the people she’s met recently, and she’s suddenly gone.”