Page 96 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

dumped in a ditch in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire and a murder incident
room began. Other than what he heard in the news that night, most of us
knew very little of the events as incident rooms are very much a closed shop
for the purpose of protecting and preserving any information that might be
prejudiced by premature disclosure.

However, the now famous case was to have more personal meaning for me.

My light duties meant that off-shift attachments that did not require 100%
fitness could be rescheduled. Early in December I was told I would be
attending my SOCO (Scenes of Crime) attachment the following week at
Cantebury Road Police Station.

I reported for duty the following Monday morning. First jobs of the day were
to respond to officer requests to attend premises where burglaries had been
reported to see if any fingerprint or bodily evidence could be preserved from
numerous scenes across the Division. SOCO covered the whole division so we
were spread from the outer boundaries of Aston, north to Erdington, Perry Barr
and Kingstanding and then further to the northern most boundaries of Sutton
Coldfield.

The morning was busy and fascinating as I watched the DS collect prints at
some visits and draw a blank on others. Each print spotted was collected by
applying a special fine powder to the print, fine enough to reproduce clearly
when lifted. The print was drawn from a surface, usually a glass window pane
using special adhesive tape. Once the print transferred to the tape, it was
placed on a glass slide and marked where and when it was obtained. The
SOCO officers were very experienced and could usually tell at a glance if a
lifted print contained enough ridge detail to be identifiable to a suspect.
Remember this was 1981, some years before CSI and other crime scene
programs became popular on our TV screens, so although today this seems
common knowledge, back then it was scientific and a most valuable aid to
the detection of crime.

Morning visits to crime scenes completed, back at Cantebury Road, the DS
apologised unnecessarily for what must have seemed like a routine morning.
He explained that naturally, they couldn’t predict what lay ahead each day
and asked me if I wanted to see some files of the more serious investigations,
they had been involved in. I eagerly said yes. He gave me a file of papers
and introduced it as one I may have seen in the news last week.

As I opened the file, I recognised the victims’ name immediately as John
Haddon, the 13-year-old boy who had been abducted in Sutton Park and
murdered. I knew by now that two people had been arrested and charged
with the murder but other than that I knew little else. The file contained police
SOCO documents and a plethora of newspaper clippings. As I began to Page96