Donald Neilson
Donald Neilson | |
|---|---|
| Status | In Prison |
| Occupation | Builder |
| Children | Kathryn Neilson |
| Conviction(s) | Murder |
| Criminal penalty | Life |
Donald Neilson (born Donald Nappey, August 1, 1936 aka the Black Panther) is a convicted multiple murderer whose most notable victim was Lesley Whittle from Highley, Shropshire, England.
He married in 1955 at the age of 19, and changed his surname from Nappey to Neilson in 1960, on the birth of his daughter Kathryn, to prevent her from suffering the humiliation that he had endured at school and in the army.[1]
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. Proceeds were low, however, which resulted in him turning to robbing small post offices. Already having fatally shot three postmasters in post office robberies, the Whittle case made him Britain's most wanted man in the mid-1970s. [2]
Neilson was ultimately caught and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976 for the murders of Whittle and four other people. He remains in prison after more than 30 years and is unlikely ever to be released.
Lesley Whittle
Lesley Whittle (1957—1975) was a 17-year-old girl who became the youngest and most infamous victim of the British multiple murderer known as the Black Panther, later established to be Neilson.
On January 14 1975, Whittle was kidnapped from the bedroom of her home in Shropshire, England, in order to acquire a £50,000 ransom from her family. Her mother was asleep in the house at the time. The kidnapper had read that Lesley had been left a considerable sum of money (£82,000 - almost half a million pounds in 2007 figures) by her late father George, who ran a successful coach company, one of the largest in the country, based at Highley and Kidderminster.
A series of police bungles and other circumstances meant that Lesley Whittle's brother Ronald was unable to deliver the ransom money to the place and time demanded by the kidnapper, who pushed Whittle off the ledge where he had tethered her in Bathpool Park, at Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, strangling her.
Lesley Whittle's body was found on March 7 1975. She was hanging from a wire at the bottom of a drain shaft in the park.
Capture and arrest
In December 1975, two police officers spotted a man seen acting suspiciously in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. The man turned out to be Neilson. He was armed with a gun and was only arrested with the help of several customers in a nearby fish and chip shop. His fingerprints were found to match one of those in the drain shaft.
Recriminations followed but Neilson was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1976 for the murder of Whittle, three sub-postmasters and the attempted murders of a security guard and a police officer. The trial judge recommended that Neilson should never be released unless he lived to a great age or endured infirmity. He has since been confirmed on the Home Office's list of prisoners issued with whole life tariffs, as a succession of Home Secretaries had ruled that life should mean life for Neilson, until European Court of Human Rights legislation saw politicians lose that power in November 2002.
More than 30 years on, he is still behind bars as one of the country's longest-serving prisoners.
References
- 1975: Heiress Lesley Whittle kidnapped BBC On This Day archive
- Serial killer who chose Heywood to strike first, Heywood Advertiser, 8th September 2004
- Harry Hawkes, The Capture of the Black Panther, Harrap: 1978.
- Shari-Jayne Boda, Real crime: four crimes that shocked a nation, Granada:2003. [