Triple nominated at the True Crime Awards and nominated Best British True-Crime Podcast at the British Podcast Awards, also hailed as 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FOUR: This hostel marks the final attack of a horrific rapist, kidnapper, paedophile, alleged necrophile and an almost triple murderer. It’s a case which caused uproar in a community, destroyed several families, and three lives which would be changed forever, yet it was barely reported and it remains forgotten. The killer came from nowhere, which begs the question, what led him to do the evil things he did?
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UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: How did a killer so horrific and cruel come out of nowhere? Find out on Murder Mile. This is Craven Terrace in Bayswater, W2; two streets north of The Night Porter, one street south of the Vice Girl Killer, and one street west of the missing hands of ‘Miss B’ - coming soon to Murder Mile. As it has since 1973, at 35 Craven Terrace stands the German YMCA, an affordable and safe place to stay for Christians, Germans, non-Germans and atheists, as everyone is welcome. In this area, you’d be lucky to buy a pie and a pint without needing to sell a kidney, yet here they offer help, events and a comfortable bed for those who aren’t a fan of waking up in a bath of ice, groggy and unable to pee. But as we’ve seen many times on Murder Mile, every hotel or hostel has a dark story, and this is theirs. This hostel marks the final attack of a horrific rapist, kidnapper, paedophile, alleged necrophile and an almost triple murderer. It’s a case which caused uproar in a community, destroyed several families, and three lives which would be changed forever, yet it was barely reported and it remains forgotten. The killer came from nowhere, which begs the question, what led him to do the evil things he did? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 304: ‘Mr Nobody’. Autumn 1992, Britain was in recession, unemployment was at its highest since the war, the Queen’s Ruby Jubilee was marred by what she called her ‘anus horribilis’ and a spate of bombings by the IRA across the UK’s towns and cities left every tourist and tenant looking at waste bins with suspicion. After a long hot summer, the rubbish strewn streets were stinking by Wednesday the 28th of October, and with everybody struggling financially, it was a bad time to be begging for change on the pavement. By the late-afternoon, a homeless woman sat on the cold floor outside of an undisclosed cafe in Swiss Cottage, North London, hoping that someone would take pity on her, rather than just ignoring her. She was tired with hunger, exhausted by stress, and like most days, her life existed on a knife edge. We know almost nothing about her; she was in her late 20s, 5 foot 5 inches tall, 8 stone in weight, she was petite and frail, with brown eyes and brown curly collar-length hair. Kept warm by a dirty black bomber jacket, torn ski pants and a scuffed pair of black shoes (which detectives discovered had been bought from an Oxfam shop in nearby Golder’s Green), she was as ragged as a Victorian orphan. And yet, as a woman with no obvious history, her bag was never found, and her only possessions were a green earring in her right ear, a silver scorpion ring with a Onyx stone and one with an entwined snake. Her origins are unknown, but as a relatively recent arrival, possibly illegally, Police suspected she was a Yugoslavian refugee fleeing the brutal Bosnian war which had erupted six months before, leaving millions displaced and an estimated 100,000 people murdered by genocide and ethnic cleansing. If so, she had left everything she knew to find safety in Britain, but what she found instead was her death. As the dusk light fell, a man of a similar age with a kindly face approached. They chatted. Her in broken English, him in a thick Scottish accent, which in maudlin tones he told her of his life, woes and worries, and – as seen by the café’s waitress – using a Switch credit card, this Good Samaritan treated her to possibly her first warm meal in days, later stating “I befriended her because he felt sorry for her”. He said her name was ‘Becky’ and she came from Germany, but it’s hard to know if this was the truth. In the late evening, as the rain began to fall, they travelled 3.5 miles south to Bayswater, and under the name (Mr Rodier), he paid £60 to book her a room at the German YMCA in Craven Terrace. He said he never went in and that he stayed at a different hotel, but it’s name he couldn’t remember. In truth, a witness saw him leave before dawn. Three hours later, with the room supposedly vacant, a chambermaid entered to change the sheets, and saw a woman’s arm hanging out from under the bed. Nothing had been stolen as she had little to take, except her life. That night, inside her locked room, he had savagely beaten her about her head and face with his fists, a hard object, or against the floor. With her unconscious, dead or dying, he violently raped her. And not seeing her as a person but a hole to assuage his desires, when he was done, he strangled her and stuffed her body under the bed. It was a cold-blooded murder to silence a vulnerable woman so he could rape her. But who was he? The name he used (Mr Rodier) was an alias. The credit card had been stolen earlier that day. The Police had a fingerprint, but with the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System not set-up for three more years, the 13-year-old Police National Computer relied on prints being searched by hand. They had his DNA but no perpetrator, and with no witnesses to the crime, the case swiftly stalled. A local appeal proved fruitless. The Met’ Police and InterPol scoured 58 countries for a match using dental records, but it came back with no-one. And although a second appeal garnered nothing new, by then, the body of this unknown woman had remained in the Horseferry Road morgue for a year. Alone and unloved, on a cold day in January 1994, the nameless woman was laid to rest in a grave paid for by the council, the only mourners being the senior detective and the Westminster Coroner. Her killer had vanished as fast as he had faded from any witnesses’ memory… …but this ‘Mr Nobody’ hadn’t come from nowhere, as every crime leaves a trace. Sources state that prior to this attack he had moved from his hometown near Aberdeen to Balornock in Glasgow. Having previously served a few months for the minor crimes of theft and dishonesty, he had fled to London, and – with it alleged he’d escaped from prison – he was unemployed and alone. Yet, something had been brewing inside of him, as five weeks before his last attack, he struck again. It was an almost carbon copy of what you’ve just heard. Thursday 17th of September 1992 had been a hot and muggy day as everyone dripped with sweat, making every interaction clammy and unpleasant. At lunchtime, an unnamed 18-year-old Japanese student who was tiny (being just 4 foot 10) was leaning against a wall, feeling faint due to diabetes. Her vision was cloudy, her mind was foggy and her body was weak and trembling. As before, he spoke in a soft Scottish accent, he smiled a sweet smile of innocence, and being outside of a café in Victoria, he bought her a chocolate bar, and chatted to her about his life until her wooziness began to subside. As two Christians coming together, she saw him as a Good Samaritan. And with him pouring out his heart to her across the afternoon and being open about his bouts of depression, thinking that he was potentially suicidal, she didn’t feel threatened by this meek and mild man, so she opened up to him. In him, she had found a new friend, someone she liked and trusted enough to invite back to her friends flat in Pimlico, where the three of them sat all afternoon drinking tea (as she was teetotal), and they chatted for hours about history and politics, with him telling the girls “all rapists should be hanged”. He was polite, calm and kind, and with them both feeling peckish, using the same Switch credit card and possibly the same alias, he bought her dinner at the Jam restaurant at 289 King's Road in Chelsea. He later stated “I had the feeling she liked me, but I didn’t fancy her”, so having finished their meal at 10pm, half an hour later, as a student at King’s College, she invited him for a end-of-night cuppa on the communal seating in her University’s halls of residence at Wellington Hall, near where they’d met. They chatted until midnight and everything was fine… until she asked him to leave so she could sleep. He gave her excuses, she insisted, but it was as she pointed to the door and walked off to her bedroom, that he smothered her mouth and dragged her into her inside, with not a witness seeing a thing. Again, a petite girl had been attacked. Again, he had masqueraded as a Good Samaritan. And again, she was strangled, raped and had her head bashed unconscious with a hard object or against the floor. But this time, miraculously, she had survived. Inside her locked room, he threw her onto the bed. Straddling her hips with his knees, he pinned her arms by her sides, and strangled her with his rough calloused hands until her vision faded to black. She recalled “I saw a terrifying look in his eyes… I realised he wanted to kill me”, but being helpless and immobile, she could do nothing to fight him off, and as she passed out unconscious, he raped her. Again, he fled, with nobody seeing him run and believing she was dead. But four hours later, she came too; her swollen eyes too sore to open fully, her raging throat too bruised to breathe full gasps, and although unable to scream as she had bitten through her tongue as he strangled her, she was alive. In her room, forensics found his fingerprints and his DNA, which again, was searched manually as the National DNA Database was yet to be set-up, and the Police National Computer was ancient. To the detectives, she gave a detailed description of her attacker having spent almost 12 hours with him; he was late 20s, 5 foot 7, well built with rounded shoulders, he had short dark hair, thick eyebrows, a wide moustache, he had a strong Scottish accent, he loved history and was friendly and unthreatening. The Police had no idea who he was, or how to find him… …but being such an unassuming ‘Mr Nobody’, where did his crimes begin? This monster was branded by the press as ‘The Beast of Banffshire’, but his name was actually Colin. Colin James Findlay was born on the 9th of September 1962 as the second of five children to Arthur & Kathleen Findlay who doted upon him. Raised in the coastal village of Cullen in north-east of Scotland between Aberdeen and Inverness, he was small, bright, shy, and although said to be a bit of a loner, he was never violent, sexual or cruel. In fact, as an avid reader, he’d never returned a library book late. From 1967 to 1973, he attended Cullen Primary School, where he was said to be neither academically gifted nor a trouble maker, but ordinary and easily forgettable. He lived in a nice little bungalow on a quiet residential street at 24 Glebe Park Crescent in Cullen, being raised in a loving and decent family. And from 1973 onwards, he attended secondary school in the neighbouring village of Buckie, but left in 1977, aged 15, as – like many boys and their fathers in this fishing village – he became a trawler-man. For five years, he trained onboard the Buckie-based trawler called ‘Minerva’ in which his father had a part share; he became the ship’s cook, he worked hard, he never caused any problems, and only quit the job when he saw his father blinded in one eye when a mooring rope snapped. In 1983, hired by ARA Caterers, he became a steward on a series of oil rigs in the North Sea, and he earned a good wage. He had friends but was happier alone. He wasn’t a big drinker and didn’t do drugs. He never dated, as one friend stated “we thought Colin wasn’t interested in girls, if you know what I mean”. And he wasn’t consumed by bad influences or morbid thoughts, as passionate about Scottish history, he spent his spare-time driving to burns, glens, castles and bothies in his 2-door, wine-coloured, Datsun Sunny. Colin Findlay truly was a ‘Mr Nobody’, and yet, his first crime was horrific. Being persistently bullied onboard the oil rig, Colin (who never fought back) had been signed off with depression. Due back to work the next day, on Monday 23rd of June 1986, he said he packed a flask, and a travelling rug into his Datsun Sunny and headed off to visit historical sites like Drummuir Castle. That was his plan, he said, and nothing else. Drummuir is an isolated village typical of many in the Scottish highlands. From your eye to the horizon in every direction, you would see nothing by distant fields and endless skies dotted every mile or more with a cottage or a farm. People are sparse, cars are infrequent, distant villages are connected by thin roads and uneven tracks, and between are high hills, dark forests and craggy brooks (known as burns). Drummuir was the home of a 10-year-old girl whose name shall remain a secret. All that shall be said is she was small and thin, but strong when she needed to be. With three younger siblings, her thoughts were always of protecting them. And educated at Botriphnie Primary School, it was a fluke that just weeks before, she had been shown a video titled ‘Say No To Strangers’, which probably saved her life. At 3pm, the bell rang at the tiny 33-pupil school and the children slowly filed out. With the day bright, many were picked up by their parents, but as the girl’s mum couldn’t that day, instead she would walk the 2 ½ miles home on a regular route. Dressed in a dark uniform, white blouse and a schoolbag, she headed west down the sparse B9014 towards Dufftown and – dabbing her nose with a hanky as she had a cold – at the junction of the road to the village of Keith, she turned left and off the main road. It’s uncertain if Colin had singled her out or if this was a chance encounter; whether he watched her leave school, passed her in his car, or if he was already waiting? But a quarter of a mile from the road, he had parked his red Datsun Sunny in a remote layby, the boot wide open as if he had broken down. At roughly 3:15pm, out of sight of anyone, the girl passed him, and being polite she said “hello”… ….but it was then that Colin pounced. Putting a knife to her throat, he ordered her into the back of his car, bound her twists with twine, pushed her onto the floor and covered her in a tartan travelling rug. She was young, innocent, and as the car started up and drove further into the remote wilds, she knew she was being abducted, and that this unknown man intended to do something truly horrible to her. But she didn’t scream or panic. Instead, recalling the ‘Say No To Strangers’ video, she kept calm, she focussed her mind and she tried to remember as many details as possible, in case she survived this. Details; like the make and colour of the car, the tartan rug, the knife, the twine, the litter on the floor, and the fawn coloured vinyl which covered the backseat. Peeping up, as they passed the old toll house, she recalled the car turning right onto a bramble-covered track and bouncing wildly from left-to-right as it struggled uphill, twice it grounded, its wheels spun, and hitting a tree stump, it lost a mudflap. This was Haggieshaw Wood, a remote and heavily wooded forest, which even the Police later stated, “some of the places he stopped at are completely isolated, and even we had difficulty finding them”. It was there that the car stopped. Screaming was hopeless, running was futile, and as he got out of the front seat and into the back, she knew what he planned to do with her as he removed the rug, and then her skirt, socks, blouse and knickers. He cut the twine from around her wrists, he laid the knife on the passenger’s seat, and as he pulled down his trousers and pants, he kissed this child on the lips. She remembered everything; his age, weight, height, greasy hair with a centre parting, his local accent, his black trousers and a grey sweatshirt with an oil rig motif. She recalled things a child should never see, but as he tried to rape her, she fought him off, she scratched his cheek, and his attack would fail. But now, 15 minutes in, the most dangerous part of the attack was yet to begin. Over the next few hours, sitting silently, he drove the dark and twisty tracks of this barren landscape looking for somewhere and finding nowhere, as the girl he’d abducted and tried to rape lay bleeding, semi-clad and hidden by the travel rug – as the only witness to his crime and she’d seen his face. Around 5:30pm, after more than two hours of terror, he stopped the car. The spot is called SilverFord, but being in the middle of a desolate moor, there is nothing but a empty road wreathed in fog, and an old metal gate leading under a bridge to a burn, a shallow brook full of hard rocks and cold water. It was there that he led her, there that he tripped her, and with her face down in the burn, either with a rock in his fist or dashing her against it, he beat her unconscious, fracturing her skull, jaw and cheeks. And throwing her schoolbag and clothes into the water, he drove away, leaving her to die… …only somehow, after all that pain, this little girl found the strength to fight on. At 5:45pm, bleeding, cold, soaking wet and partially clothed, she pulled herself from the burn, up a 10 foot bank, and onto the road, where by chance, a lost tourist in a caravan was looking for a camp site. Through the fog, he saw a scene of utter horror; a pale ghost-like figure, all ragged and trembling, her hair matted with blood, her face swollen and deformed, and her innocence lost, and yet she was alive. Driven to the nearest hospital at Huntley, and transferred to Royal Aberdeen Children’s hospital, she was said to be in a serious but stable condition. The surgeon George Youngson praised her “fortitude and bravery”, the Police described her attacker as “a sadistic psychopath”, the community were in a rage, yet she didn’t pity herself, as her only concern was that her mother and siblings were alright. Police stated in the press “a very dangerous man is at large and the public must help us to find him”. This ‘Beast of Banffshire’ had abducted a child, tried to rape her, beaten her and left her for dead. The full force of the Grampian Police were hunting him with search teams, sniffer dogs and a chopper scouring the area to solve what DCI Norman McCormack referred to as “a murder without a death”. An incident unit was set-up at a nearby school, potential witnesses were questioned, it was front page news in every local paper, and hundreds of tip-offs and names came in, but it proved fruitless as the Police were looking for a paedophile, a maniac and a psycho, not a Mr Nobody with no criminal record. Having returned home that night, Colin put his car in the garage out of sight, he packed his bag, and with him due to return to his job on the Charlie Forties oil rig in the North Sea, he flew 110 miles east. The case would have collapsed if it hadn’t been for the bravery of that 10-year-old girl. But knowing that they had to be careful not to reopen her trauma, the detectives trod carefully, and the only person allowed to speak to her was a young female detective called Alison Young, who the girl called ‘Auntie’. Slowly, as she began to recover in hospital from her life-changing injuries, she told Alison everything she had tried to remember about her attacker in a calm and controlled way; she got his height right, his hair and his clothes, down to drawing the oil rig motif on his grey sweatshirt. She was so detailed, Police stated “she gave us virtually everything we needed to know about him, except his name”. She recalled his car, “a two-door red or wine coloured saloon with a boot, not a hatchback”, missing a mudflap, a fawn vinyl seat cover, and even though one eye-witness, an adult, was adamant that the car was a Peugeot and she even gave part of the licence plate, the Detectives were so impressed with how consistent this young girl was in her retelling, that they believed her details over everyone else. Detectives found that of the 675 Datsun Sunny’s shipped into Britain from Japan with that distinctive fawn coloured vinyl, only nine of them were in the Grampian area, and the first in their list was Colin’s. On the morning of Saturday 28th June, just six days later, in the garage of his parent’s home at 24 Glebe Park Crescent in Cullen, they found his car; it was missing a mudflap, it had dents where she said, it had bits of bracken embedded in the chassis, and the mudflap was found at Haggieshaw Wood. Searching his bedroom, in his wardrobe they found his shoes and socks still wet from the burn, his clothes balled-up and bloody, and next to the door was the girl’s cotton hanky, containing her DNA. That day, boarding a helicopter, detectives flew to BP’s Charlie Forties oil rig and Colin was arrested. He gave no resistance, he had a scratch on his cheek, and overcome with emotion having admitted to abduction and rape, he was transferred to Craig Dunain hospital being regarded as a suicide risk. Held at Craiginches Prison, 24 year old Colin James Findlay never said why he did it, his family and his community struggled to believe it was him, and remorseful, he wrote to the girl expressing how sorry he was. On the 30th of September 1986, he was tried at Inverness High Court on the charges of assault, abduction, attempted rape and attempted murder, having admitted that he was wholly responsible. A rapist, paedophile and attempted murderer had been caught at his first crime before he could kill… …so, how did this ‘Mr Nobody’ go onto to attack a Japanese student and an unidentified woman? The system failed. With this as his first offence, “horrible as it may be” as Lord Kincraig summed up, his defence counsel agreed to plead guilty to rape, if they dropped the attempted murder charge. The family were furious, the detectives were in tears, and instead of serving life, he got just six years. (Out) A lenient sentence for the horrific attack on a child led to a double rape, another attempted murder and a murder shortly after his release from prison. Seeing similarities between his description and his method, his fingerprints and later his DNA proved to be a match between the attacks on the 10-year-old girl, the 18-year-old Japanese student, and the unidentified woman found in the German YMCA. Again, it took just days to find him, and tracking where he had used the stolen credit card, on Saturday 31st of October 1992, he was arrested at a hotel not far from Bayswater, and gave up without a fight. It was a unique case in which the Police would convict the killer without knowing who the victim was. Tried at the Old Bailey on the 26th of October 1993, in Court 3, he admitted he knew both women, he denied raping them (in spite of the evidence) and claimed they were alive and well when he left them. He pleaded ‘not guilty’ to rape, attempted murder and murder, but with the jury deliberating for just four hours, he was convicted by unanimous verdicts on all charges, and was due a very long sentence. But again, the system failed. On the 12th of November 1993, being previously been convicted of the brutal attempted rape and murder of a child, for two further sadistic crimes, Judge Brian Smedley sentenced him to just 10 years in prison, meaning he would have been released in 2003, if not sooner. It is uncertain where he is now, maybe he has changed his name and his look, maybe he is living free in any city or town, and maybe he walks among us as a 63-year-old man whose crimes are forgotten? He never gave a motive, all we know is that he was a ‘Mr Nobody’ who came out of nowhere. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. Archives
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