Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (9 page)

– in Bramley, Leeds. The four Taylors lived there throughout the early 1980s and John Taylor eventually set himself up as a dog breeder, but he failed to house-train the animals so the house became increasingly dirty and smelled foul. He also began to keep owls and bought 2,000 baby chicks to feed them on, chicks which he stored in the family freezer. It was the final straw for the marriage and his wife left him, taking the children with her. Later the couple divorced.

By now Taylor was selling pet food and pet accessories from the house and sometimes from a market stall, but they didn’t attract a sufficient number of women into his life so the 30-year-old began to advertise for partners in contact magazines, 72

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travelling throughout Britain to meet those who replied. He met at least 25 such women – and had sex with some of them

– but the relationships usually ended after only one or two dates as he was often unwashed and his general appearance was unkempt. His sadistic fantasies were much stronger in his mind than his day-to-day reality, his need to dominate increasing as his social life declined.

Animal abuse

Taylor now began to abuse and neglect his animals for kicks, eventually murdering four dogs and 30 ferrets. He often left the animals locked in a room for hours at a time and he didn’t clean the house so it was saturated with animal urine and excrement. He continued to torture rabbits, foxes and other animals he ensnared in a nearby woodland, becoming aroused by their anguished screams and agonised writhing, but what he really wanted was a woman to control.

The rst rape

On a pleasant afternoon in October 1988 he donned a balaclava, armed himself with a knife, then hid in Houghley Gill, a large wooded area near his home, and waited for a victim. When a woman walked past, he grabbed her from behind, pulled her into the bushes and ordered her to lie down. He raped her, using a great deal of violence, and repeatedly threatening her with the knife. The woman, who had been on the way to her young daughter’s school to collect her, was left badly bruised and deeply traumatised.

The second rape

Rapists are essentially using rape – a sexual act – to meet non-sexual needs. Therefore, the act rarely satisfies them and they go in search of a more ‘perfect’ rape victim who they hope 73

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will bring them peace. And so, a mere four months after the rape in Houghley Gill, John Taylor made his way to an estate near his home in Bramley, where he’d previously identified a potential victim. Again he donned his balaclava and produced his knife before entering the unlocked back door of a house.

He ordered the woman upstairs where he bound, blindfolded and gagged her. Ignoring her screaming child, he brutally raped her and was excessively controlling and aggressive throughout.

Even judged alongside other violent rapes, Taylor’s cruelty was notable and a judge would later describe these rapes as the most depraved he’d known in his entire career.

Unsolved murders

Four years later, in 1992, a prostitute called Yvonne Fitt was found stabbed to death in Houghley Gill, John Taylor’s favourite hunting ground. She had been hastily buried. She had last been seen 12 miles away from her final resting place.

Then, on 7 November 1994, 13-year-old schoolgirl Lindsay Jo Rimer disappeared from the West Yorkshire district of Hebden Bridge. Lindsay had gone to a club where her mother was having a night out and asked her for money to buy breakfast for the following day. She went on to the local Spar to buy cornflakes and was captured on CCTV. Shortly afterwards she disappeared.

The following April two canal workers found her body in a canal, near an area where Lindsay and her brother had once lived in a caravan. (Their father had lived in an adjacent caravan.) She had been strangled and the body had been weighed down.

In 1996, the burning corpse of 17-year-old Deborah Wood was found on Burley Park Railway Station embankment. She had been suffocated within 24 hours of leaving a pub, where she’d had a drink with her father and a few friends. Her body 74

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appeared to have been kept in a freezer for some time, before being wrapped in plastic bin liners and bedclothes, doused with petrol and set alight. Police would later investigate Taylor for these homicides.

In 1998, Taylor was taken on by Parcelforce as a delivery driver, a job which gave him freedom and the chance to find out who lived where.

Another relationship

By early 2000, John Taylor had answered a classified ad from yet another single mother who had advertised through a lonely hearts column. She saw how much he loved hunting rabbits and shooting game in Lindley Woods, but as she too loved the outdoors she saw this as a plus. Within weeks he had asked the 34-year-old and her two teenage children to move in with him and they agreed.

The woman, Deborah, found that the house was filthy and she spent untold hours cleaning it. But, rather than seem grateful, Taylor began to demand that she dress up for him.

More alarmingly, she began to realise how little he cared for the nine dogs, 20 ferrets, and various birds he shared his house with. One day his Alsatian puppy attacked his pet duck and he shot the puppy. Bizarrely, he went on to kill his 40 pet chickens and hung them up in the kitchen with bags over their heads.

His behaviour in the bedroom became increasingly sadistic. At first the bondage, blindfolding and gagging were consensual but soon he began to whip Deborah’s inner thighs with a switch. She protested that she didn’t like it, so during their next sex session he tried something different, binding her hands behind her back with cable ties and then tightening other cable ties around her breasts until she began to scream.

He then whipped her breasts with a branch, only stopping when she burst into tears.

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This behaviour is the complete opposite of the consensual, or recreational, sadist who wants to give his partner pleasure from an erotic whipping. Such men will ascertain which level of pain is pleasurable to their lover and will keep the stimulus within agreed boundaries. But Taylor didn’t care about his girlfriends and didn’t see their sex sessions as being about mutual orgasm.

Instead, he wanted to cause maximum distress.

After Deborah ended the relationship, he began to stalk women at Houghley Gill, a beauty spot near Bramley. At least one woman saw him there with his dog, hanging about for three hours at a time and acting suspiciously. He was hoping that a suitable young female victim would come along.

On Sunday 26 November 2000, he rose as usual and walked his dogs. By late afternoon he’d taken up a position at the Gill where he could see whoever walked by without being noticed. Then he took out his knife and waited for a lone female to arrive.

Murder

Unfortunately, in the same time frame, 16-year-old Leanne Tierney decided to take a short cut home. Leanne had had a nice day, going to church in the morning and doing some Christmas shopping with her best friend in the afternoon. Now, keen to get back for her evening meal after a tiring shopping trip, she cut through the wooded valley of Houghley Gill.

There, John Taylor grabbed her and marched her to his house where he bound her hands behind her back using three cable ties. When he tired of his victim – or when his rage reached its zenith – he strangled her with a ligature, possibly with further linked cable ties or with a grey scarf which he had double-knotted around her neck.

Meanwhile Leanne’s family had alerted the police and it was obvious from the start that she wasn’t an unhappy runaway.

She was very close to her mother and her older sister and was doing well at school where she was studying for nine GCSEs.

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Everyone described her as a happy, bubbly teenager who loved spending time with her friends.

Frozen corpse

The police now launched one of the biggest ever searches in West Yorkshire, using helicopters, police dogs and underwater search teams. They searched hundreds of local houses, outbuildings and a nearby industrial unit. They also searched local canals and waterways. Meanwhile, several psychics phoned the family and told them that Leanne was still alive. But her body was in John Taylor’s freezer – or a freezer that he had access to – and police would later surmise that he remained obsessed with her corpse and returned to it frequently.

Nine months after murdering the 16-year-old, he wrapped her body in plastic bin liners and a floral duvet cover, drove to Lindley Woods near Leeds and began to dig a grave. But his spade soon hit numerous tree roots and he gave up and left Leanne’s corpse only partially covered in soil. This was his undoing as the duvet cover and bin liners were later traced to his home.

John Taylor isn’t the first British killer to keep a teenage female victim in a freezer. On 30 December 1957, 17-year-old Anne Noblett was cutting through a field near her home in Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, when she disappeared. When her strangled body was found a month later in woods five miles from her home, it had been kept in a freezer or similar cold storage unit from the time of her death. Detectives said that there was a sexual motive for the abduction: they believed she’d been abducted by two men but they didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest.

Still predatory

After murdering Leanne, Taylor began a new relationship with a woman he met through a lonely hearts column. But within 77

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weeks he was trying to ensnare her 15-year-old daughter, touching her in inappropriate ways. He then subjected her to a series of obscene phone calls in which he threatened to bind and whip her. She was doubtless at serious risk.

Thankfully, when the girl’s mother went to Taylor’s house for the first time, the neighbours told her that he had women visiting at all hours. She also saw how filthy the house was, and found the bedroom was stocked with whips, handcuffs and nipple clamps. Perturbed by her new boyfriend’s promiscuity and lack of hygiene, she promptly ended the relationship.

Body found

In August 2001, a man walking in Lindley Woods discovered a large package wrapped in a floral duvet cover. He called the police and they cut open the cover to find a decomposed body wrapped in plastic bin liners. It was later identified from its fingerprints as Leanne. Her loving family, who had never given up hope that she would be found alive, were devastated. Her mother had even left the back door unlocked for months in the hope that the teenager would return.

Thankfully the duvet cover and plastic bin liners yielded numerous clues – the cover was matted with dog hair and the twine used to tie the bin liners matched twine at Taylor’s home.

Leanne’s body also yielded various clues. Taylor had left the cable ties in place which he’d used to bind her wrists, cable ties which were mainly used by Parcelforce. The dog collar that he’d fastened around her neck was traced to a batch of six that he’d purchased by mail order the month before Leanne disappeared. He’d also left a paper trail as he’d paid by credit card.

The police ran his name through their computer and found out that he was already on their database – one of his ex-girlfriends had phoned in suggesting that he might be Leanne’s 78

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killer. His behaviour had become increasingly sadistic and she knew he was very familiar with Lindley Woods where the teenager’s corpse had been found.

They searched the filthy house and were initially disappointed to find that John Taylor had removed all of the carpets and burned them. But a few shards remained on a carpet nail and these fibres perfectly matched the carpet fibres found on Leanne’s jumper. They also found pieces of burned burgundy carpet hidden in the garden’s long grass.

The garden was also a cemetery for the animals which the sadist had maimed and murdered. One border terrier had been beaten with a meat cleaver and an Alsatian had been shot, but it’s unclear how the other dogs and ferrets met their deaths.

Arrest and trial

Taken into custody, Taylor at first said that Leanne had brushed against him in the woods and that he’d acted on impulse by grabbing her and warning her not to make a sound. She’d screamed once (this part is true – locals reported hearing one scream) then he’d bound her wrists behind her back with his dog leash and thrown his coat over her head. He’d then forced the girl to walk the half mile to his house, a journey which would have taken over 20 minutes. This strongly suggests that it wasn’t his first murder, that he’d controlled other victims for shorter periods and that this had given him confidence.

Back at his house, he claimed that he’d taken off Leanne’s coat, blindfolded her and bound her with cable ties. He said that he’d been cutting up a pair of trousers to make a hood to conceal his identity when the teenager’s blindfold slipped.

He’d lunged at her to replace the blindfold, they’d struggled and she’d fatally struck her head.

Most of this scenario was doubtless a lie. Taylor had fantasised for months about exactly what he’d do to a female victim, months in which he’d have made himself a hood or mask if 79

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he genuinely wanted to conceal his identity. The reality was he knew that he was going to kill his victim so was happy for her to see his face. And Leanne hadn’t died of a head injury, but from ligature strangulation which is up close and personal, the sadist’s choice. John Taylor also suggested that after the supposed head injury he’d left her corpse alone till the following day – but a man as sexually obsessed as John Taylor would hardly have ignored a nubile female body. The pubic hairs found on the scarf around her neck suggest that he got close to her corpse then put it in the freezer before it began to decompose.