Who Trolled Amber? - Three doors down: Episode 2 - Rumours

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Rumours choke the case and a vulnerable suspect is arrested. The first 48 hours after a crime are crucial: what did the police get so wrong in the days after Nikki went missing?Listen to the full series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I'm Jack. I see you are still having no look at me. I have the greatest respect for you, George. But Lord, you are no need of catching me now. And four years ago when I started, I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. In the 1970s, the police made catastrophic mistakes in their investigation of a serial killer in the north of England.

Mistakes which resulted in the wrong suspect being pursued, the victims themselves being blamed and the real killer going on to commit more offences. I warned you in March that I'd spread the gene. They never learn, do they, George? I bet you warned them, but they never listened. The police implied that the victims brought about their fate by going out alone, drinking with strange men, or selling sex to feed their children.

George Oldfield, the senior investigative officer in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, was set on his main suspect, a suspect who turned out to be a hoax, who had sent tape-recorded messages to Oldfield. Following his arrest, the real killer, Peter Sutcliffe, told police as long as they believed it was the hoaxer, he felt safe. In November 1980, a few weeks before Sutcliffe was caught,

I was 18 and living in Leeds, less than a mile from where his last victim was found. The week before she was killed, I had been followed late at night by a man who matched Sutcliffe's description. When I told the police about it, they dismissed it. Back in 2006, when I first met Sharon Henderson and she told me about her campaign to find her daughter's murderer, I was struck by the parallels between how the police were handling her case

and how they had dealt with the investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper. I started looking at Nicky's clear. When I knew things weren't right was a year after Nicky's murder. It seemed as if the police were what I was picking up on and it was really hard for me because I was on medication but I kept picking up that the investigating team was just looking into rumours and gossip. I'm Julie Bindle. From Tortoise, this is Three Doors Down. A murder, a mother and a 30-year investigation.

Episode 2, Rumours. The immediate aftermath of a crime is crucial. Those aren't my words. They're from the Policing Handbook, the Authorised Professional Practice, or APP. The golden hour is the term used for the period immediately after an offence has been committed, when material is readily available in high volumes to the police.

Positive action in the period immediately after the report of a crime minimises the amount of material that could be lost to the investigation and maximises the chance of securing the material that will be admissible in court. The APP was published in 2013. Among other things, it sets out good practice when it comes to investigating crime. When it's a missing child, that narrow window in the immediate aftermath is even more crucial. Police are trained to treat the first three hours as the most important, and that any evidence gathered within 24 hours, the most valuable.

On the night of Nicky Allen's disappearance, the guidelines barely differed from those set out in the APP some 20 years later. Back in 1992, police officers were instructed to gather all the evidence they could before the trail went cold. Two crucial things happened in the immediate aftermath of Nicky's murder. The first one was, a rumour started. Well, the first thing I noticed was that everybody was talking about Nicky being out late at night. Blame seemed to be apportioned almost immediately to her mother.

You had this little girl and it was almost as if, like, well, if her mum hadn't have, you know, if her mum hadn't looked after her properly, if her mum hadn't have let her do what all the kids were doing in those days. Nicky had been with her mum at her grandparents' house before returning home down two flights of stairs to her sister. In the hours that she was missing, someone claimed to have seen Sharon at the pub across the road. The boar's head. The impact of this idea has hung

over the case and the investigation, right up until the trial of David Boyd in May this year. I'm Kevin Donald, I'm 52, I'm a freelance journalist and I've worked in the North East for most of my career. Kevin Donald covered Nicky Allen's murder from the moment she went missing. He looked significantly younger than his 53 years. Tall and lean, with a warm, open face and easy smile. His customary button-down shirts, chinos and leather satchel give him a slight preppy look. But Kevin is a down-to-earth, north-east lad, through and through.

Aged 22 at the time of the murder, the Nicky Allen case was a huge story for the young reporter. By the time I the murder. The Nicky Allen case was a huge story for the young reporter. By the time I got to Sunderland and saw the scale of the police operation, the number of people who were out, everyone seemed to be out of their flats, everyone standing on the balconies, looking down, loads of police. And it was obvious then that something very serious had happened.

Do you remember what time you arrived at the scene? I guess it would be late morning. It was full of people and there was obviously this huge panic around the place and it was like walking into a big three-sided maisonette, concrete, brutalist thing. You walked into a courtyard and the three floors, I think, of these concrete flats looked down on you. And everywhere you looked, there were people on the balconies

or in the courtyard or wandering around the streets. There were police everywhere. My memory is that pretty soon after getting there, a word filtered back that she'd been found and it was a murder inquiry. I stayed out there for the day, for the whole day, talking to people and I was phoning it back from a phone box. When our senior colleagues came over and

Nicky's grandfather Dicky Prest was the one who was giving interviews he was in his flat and he invited people in and he spoke about the family's devastation I didn't meet Sharon for some time actually she was just too distraught to have anything to do with us but Dickie was doing all the talking he was an interesting character what do you mean by that I think I'm right in saying that he served a bit of time in prison he was a bit of a rogue in his day I always found from my dealings with him that if you were straight with him, he'd be straight with you. He generally, he never said no, he never turned you away. He always had time to speak to the press because he thought it was useful.

He had some interesting observations about the type of people or person who was capable of doing a thing like that. What about the rumours about Sharon at the time? That was all around. I thought that these things were chatter and gossip but it wasn't you know the cop in charge was was briefing the press. Not that Sharon was a bad mother but it did come from the police that Nicky was outside the Boar's Head begging for pennies for Halloween. My memory of that, I had to check it before I came in here today, my memory of that was that people around about were saying, ah we saw her at the Boar's Head begging for pennies, that's what she was supposed to have been doing, that's where she was supposed to have been

abducted from and that was the working premise, that's what had happened. And I thought that we'd interviewed people who told us journalists that, but it actually came through the mouth of the officer in charge. Which was? George Sinclair. The accepted version of events is you've got a seven-year-old kid out on her own, begging for money outside a pub, where's the mother? That then becomes the narrative. Oh, she was out drinking or she's whatever, all these

rumours. When I did get to know Sharon, she was very clearly not a bad mother, quite the opposite. She was a doting mother, fierce, a North East man. He looked after her kids and loved her kids. The people who knew the family and were understandably livid about this, I'm not sure how it took hold. I mean, it originally started with Nicky being at the pub and then Sharon apparently in the pub, which she wasn't. And then that kind of snowballed a little bit further that took hold and gained traction because it was convenient to blame the family to some extent

for what had happened. I think it was... Well, it's still hurting today that those things came out. But they came out through official channels. In those days when the police told you something, it was an official source and that tended to be the way that it went. There were rumours kicked around that Sharon was on the game.

That was a rumour that went around and gained traction. I hate to say things like that because it's entirely, entirely untrue. She just wasn't and it was a lie. And there were a lot of lies told at the time. A lot of stigma placed on the family that were already in devastated pieces. Following Boyd's conviction, Northumbria Police have issued apologies to both Sharon Henderson and her family, as well as George Herron,

for the failures in the original investigation. I want to step out of this for a second. These rumours added to Sharon's pain and trauma, but the impact went way beyond that. I believe they had a devastating impact on the investigation itself. The idea that Sharon had neglected Nicky on the night she disappeared, the assumption that she had been at the pub drinking while Nicky was on her own outside,

not only clouded the case in intangible ways, like how seriously the police took Sharon, but they clouded the hunt for the killer. The night of the reconstruction, they reconstructed Nicky's disappearance and it started outside the bar's head. This aired on the local TV news. In other words, it started with a lie.

And the lies altered people's memories. I didn't give a shit about rumours, but I believed more people would have come forward if the police had worked properly on the case instead of fucking it up. And some people might have come forward by now. I grew up in a similar community to Sharon. I saw this policing by prejudice on many occasions. If there was a report of domestic violence or child abuse coming from our housing estate, police would often ignore it, believing it to be almost a normal feature of everyday life. In cases of sexual and domestic abuse, police can sometimes focus on the victim rather than the suspect.

It's why we hear, what was she wearing? Or how late was it when a woman is attacked? This can lead to a poor police investigation. One woman who grew up in Sunderland, close to where Nicky lived, saw first-hand the way that Sharon was blamed and vilified. Louise Harvey Golding was 12 in 1992 and grew up under the shadow of the murder and its aftermath. She messaged me while I was reporting on the trial. Her Facebook message said, They blamed the mother for years

and there were awful stories about the kids hanging around the pub times were different then but they really focused on the bad mother neglect narrative that probably allowed a killer to get away with it for so long i met louise in person not long after if you were to give a message to sharon nicky's mom what would it be what would you were to give a message to Sharon, Nicky's mum, what would it be? What would you want to tell her or say to her? Just that it wasn't your fault. None of it was your fault. A second thing happened in the golden hour of the police investigation into Nicky's murder. A suspect came into view.

There was a claustrophobic feeling to this particular case, with a spotlight on the Garths, the run-down housing estate in the east end of Sunderland, where Sharon and her family lived. It's one of these things that sweeps around a place like that. her family lived. It's one of these things that sweeps around a place like that in times where everybody's under suspicion. I don't think there was ever a thought that the person who killed Nicky had come from a long way away. Kevin Donald, the reporter on the scene, has a clear memory of the suffocating feeling of suspicion over the next few days. It was, the focus was always on the Garths. Somebody in the Garths, the nature of how she disappeared, it was opportunistic.

She was there moving from Dickie's flat down to Sharon's and somebody, somebody took her. There were three things that pointed to the killer living within a very small radius of the crime. The first is, as Kevin says, the opportunistic nature of her abduction. The killer had to have been waiting for her to leave her grandad's flat. The second, they had to have knowledge of the derelict old building where Nicky's body was found,

where it was, its layout and that it was empty. The third reason was CCTV footage, which showed Nicky skipping next to a man, which as a shy child meant she must have known him well. A local man became the prime suspect. Heron's name was being thrown around to my memory from day one. By more than one person? Everybody had their theories and George Heron was central. He'd arrived on the estate, lived on the opposite side to the Prests, and I think people just thought, yeah, he's something weird about that guy. And I think he'd attracted a bit of suspicion.

While the search was going on, he was there, peering over his balcony the whole time, not getting involved, but keeping a close eye on what was going on. Heron had recently moved to Weirgarth. People were saying, he's the local weirdo. And I think part of that came because they didn't really know him. You know, he was a reserved bloke. When he became the guy that the police arrested,

I don't think that was a big shock. My recollection of it is that they had their man, that he was the guy in the frame, right from the start. So it would have taken something for them to be dissuaded otherwise. You know, people felt like George Heron fitted the bill. He was the guy. It took them three weeks to tell us. They said they'd arrested somebody. I can just remember the room being full, then CID coming in and they took us in the kitchen. And I just remember screaming and all these windows where I lived were slamming because of the BMA, screaming. These are the things that put Heron as a suspect. He knew Nicky and Sharon.

He lived in Weirgarth and had admitted knowing the old exchange building. During a search of Heron's sister's flat where he lived at the time, police discovered a knife that they claim matched the wounds in Nicky's body. Something else was suspicious. In the house-to-house inquiry, Heron denied knowing Nicky and also claimed he had been at home the whole evening watching TV but he'd been seen at the Boar's Head pub by more than one witness. He bought two packets of cheese and onion crisps which Sharon says were Nicky's favourite.

The police questioned his sister's boyfriend. He told police that Heron came in late at night and spent a long time in the bathroom washing his clothes, his shoes and himself. During the evidence gathering stage, forensic pathologist Hilary Parkinson examined his shoes and said they were wet and it looked as though they'd been washed, perhaps to remove bloodstains. Then there was the CCTV. There were the eyewitnesses who saw a white man in his 20s walking with Nicky towards the old exchange building. The police were confident they had their killer. To be continued... podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation hollywood exiles from cbc podcasts and the bbc world service find it wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com I was a father of, so in 92, I would have been, my kids would have been five and three, two girls. Joe Bradley is an affable, chatty sort of fella in his 60s. He's nearly six foot and broad-shouldered. In 1992 he was a uniformed copper, a PC. I want to find out how the police so quickly came to suspect George Heron.

Do you remember the moment you first heard about Heron when you first heard his name? I don't really remember the first you know when I heard about the name George Heron, no. I do remember George Heron. I was part of what was called a task force, which was a team of police officers that we used for various things. We got tasked with anything that needed extra resources. And I have a vague recollection of a child going missing. I was a bit worried at this point that Joe was not as involved in the case as I'd thought,

if this was just a vague memory. But it turns out he was. They set up a caravan on the High Street right outside of the Exchange Building. So by then, I think that a body had been found and they were going through a forensic process and we were part of that managing and guarding the crime scene while the forensics took place. And once forensics had done their examination of the crime scene, we still had a suspect to find. I say we, the Royal We, the police. We all needed to find this person who had done what they'd done.

I was also aware that there was a massive investigation going on with regards to house-to-house inquiries and statements being taken. I do distinctly remember that. And then when the suspect was found, George Heron, we moved on to help resource the supervision of while he was in custody. The first time I met George Heron, he was in a police cell and my job was to sit there and monitor him. What was your impression of George Heron when you first met him?

I mean, he was kind of your stereotypical child murderer, if you like. You know, he was kind of a very skinny, feeble-looking thing. He was pale. He was certainly, I mean, you know, looking back, he was probably very malnourished he wasn't a very healthy looking guy but he was quite pitiful looking really he had big glasses just this skinny pathetic little thing really this pathetic bloke really sat there george heron was like i say he looked weak he looked feeble he looked pale he looked

you know greasy hair lank greasy hair, lank, greasy hair, big glasses. He certainly fitted the Hollywood bill, if you like. He fitted the Hollywood profile because, you know, a child murderer in Hollywood or in a movie doesn't wear a shirt and tie and look like a solicitor, does he? They look pale, they look gaunt, they look horrible. And he wasn't a very pleasant-looking chap, you know. I was horrified on hearing this. For decades, I've come across police officers looking for monsters rather than men

and expecting rapists and child killers to have three sixes tattooed across their foreheads. I've seen jurors acquit sexual predators who are clearly guilty because they're handsome and respectable looking. I recall one case of a police officer asking a rape complainant, why would he need to rape anyone? Because the accused was a conventionally attractive man. So honing in on a man because he looks the part

has disaster written all over it. There's a lot of questions to be asked of why people, I mean, you know, senior officers and senior detectives, why were they transfixed on George Heron? Why do you think they were? I don't, I really don't know. I mean, there was a lot, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure on the police. There's a lot of pressure on senior detectives. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure on the police. There's a lot of pressure on senior detectives. There's a lot of pressure from the community. There's a lot of pressure from the media. And quite rightly, you know, that's your job.

And especially in a serious situation like a child has been murdered, there is a lot of pressure to get the person responsible. Why was George Heron on the top of the pyramid when it came to narrowing it down to the suspect? I really don't know. And I'd love to know. I'm pretty sure somebody's going to write this up and I'll be able to find out.

But this transfixion of being focused on George Heron, I really can't understand because, you know, you're trained as a cop and certainly as a detective that you've got to keep an open mind on most things. And even when the evidence is swaying towards going in a direction, you've still got to keep an open mind for other directions, if that makes sense. Keeping an open mind in the early stages of the investigation is key to golden hour? So I really don't know, Julie. It's a question I'd love to find the answer out,

find the answer myself. Do you think that police might make a judgment on someone based on their appearance or on their background? No, no. No, I don't think so. Because child abuse, murders, child murders are a classless thing. You know, you're hearing the news all the time. I think the reason why George Heron became a suspect was because of other information that was coming forward.

This is so clearly a contradiction with what Joe says earlier. When I first asked him about Heron, he was very clear that he fitted the image of a child killer. I wondered if being asked directly about whether police made prejudicial assumptions made him defensive. He knew the family. He knew Nicky Allen. He was from that community. He was, you know, and whatever it is that whatever that line of investigation was, it was certainly not based on just his appearance or anything. It's a detective superintendent. You know, they're virtually God. things a detective superintendent you know they're virtually god and if a detective superintendent says that this is the tactic we're going to employ this is the line of questioning we're going to go down this is where i want the investigation to go then that he would get

his wishes i mean if you think about it you can't too many cooks spoil the broth you've got to have a lead investigator a lead manager who's making all the decisions on where and how things are gonna how things are going to be done because if you didn't it would just be chaos the joke was that we bought him to we bought him into a confession we were told basically that he had confessed i remember we were told that he'd coughed the job. That's a police term, you might have heard before. He's coughed and he's admitted it to the forensic pattern. After three days of police interviews and eight days after Nicky first went missing, George Herron confessed to Nicky's murder.

But when the case came to court, Heron's confession wasn't what it seemed. Good evening. There was uproar at Leeds Crown Court today when a jury acquitted a 24-year-old man of murder after the judge ruled that his taped confession was inadmissible. George Heron was charged with murdering seven-year-old Nicky Allen in Sunderland a year ago. The judge said the police interview had been conducted in an oppressive manner. I was in the courtroom when Heron Gore acquitted. I can remember just collapsing.

It's a nightmare if you've put yourself in that situation of being powerless and being told you've done something and you haven't, and you haven't. And you are there. This train is just keep on, it's just keep on blasting down the line and you are just hanging on. It's quite tragic, really, on so many levels. The police got the wrong man.

But how did that happen? And how did it take the police 30 years to find the real killer, who lived three doors away from the spot where Nikki first went missing? Some of those missteps can be found in how the police handled those crucial 24 hours after her disappearance. Instead of remaining open, they doubled down on rumours and paranoia. Boyd, the man who has since been found guilty, was not questioned. Sharon herself was blamed for letting her daughter go out on her own. George Herron quickly became the only suspect, as he wrote in his victim impact statement,

which was released at David Boyd's trial in May this year. I don't understand why the original officers couldn't have admitted they made a mistake, apologised and looked at the case again, instead of having a blinkered view and not trying to put things right. I survive because I have to, like everyone else. I would like answers as to why it took so long to find out the truth.

In the next episode, Sir Boyd wasn't actually on your radar prior to this scientific examination of the clothing. What I would say is when I first started looking at this case, genuinely, it was like a mountain, like, where do you start? This series was reported by me, Julie Bindle. It was written by me and Joanna Humphreys. The producer was Joanna Humphreys. The narrative editor was Gary Marshall.

The sound design and original theme is by Tom Kinsella. The executive producer was Jasper Corbett. Tortoise.