Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  ‘We were both very excited,’ Duffy was to admit later, ‘and said we should do it again.’ In the following years they were to do so many times, leaving a string of victims aged between fifteen and thirty-one. ‘We used to call it “hunting”,’ Duffy was to explain. ‘We were playing games with the police and generally making it fun.’

  On 27 March 1983, they targeted a twenty-nine-year-old French woman who was working as a restaurant manager and walking home near Finchley Road railway station in West Hampstead. The two launched their attack, but the woman bit Mulcahy’s hand very hard, despite being kicked and punched as she lay on the pavement curled up into a ball, and the two let her go.

  It was almost a year before they struck again. On 20 January 1984, they attacked a thirty-two-year-old American social worker on Barnes Common, in west London. Mulcahy and Duffy, who were in the area decorating Duffy’s parent’s home at the time, stripped and raped her. The victim was to explain later that Mulcahy told Duffy to ‘gouge out my eyes, slice off my ears and slice off my nipples … I believed I was going to be murdered, disembowelled, tortured.’

  Four months later, on 3 June 1984, a twenty-three year old became their fourth victim. They grabbed her in the waiting room of West Hampstead railway station and put a knife to her throat before marching her to a dark spot under a railway bridge not far away. She said later, ‘They had a knife and said they would cut me if I didn’t do as I was told. All I could say was, “Please don’t hurt me.”’ The two men merely laughed.

  By this time both men were married and living outwardly respectable lives. They were both working for Westminster City Council, Duffy as a carpenter and Mulcahy as a plumber. Mulcahy had married Sandra Carr, an Anglo-Indian, in 1978, while Duffy had married nursery nurse Margaret Byrne in 1980. Mulcahy continued to have difficulty in maintaining an erection unless the sex was apparently against his wife’s will.

  In July 1984 the pair tried to drag a twenty-two-year-old woman into the back garden of a house in Highgate, north London, but the owners switched on the garden lights, forcing them to leave her untouched. But on 15 July 1984, they dragged two Danish au pair girls into bushes on Hampstead Heath, stripped and raped them.

  It was six months before Mulcahy and Duffy were to strike again. On 26 January 1985 they raped a German au pair girl in Brent Cross, north-west London, and five days later returned to Hampstead Heath and grabbed a sixteen-year-old girl but did not go through with the rape. There quickly followed another attack – on a twenty-three year old in South Hampstead – but she managed to escape, as did another prospective victim on 2 February 1985. Undeterred, the very next evening, the two men stalked a solicitor’s clerk on Hampstead Heath, whom they blindfolded and raped on a bench. Their desire to rape was escalating, while Mulcahy was becoming ever more sadistic as the attacks continued.

  The two men had developed an almost telepathic understanding. Their victims talked about an uncanny, almost psychic relationship that had now lasted fifteen years. One was to explain, ‘They didn’t tell each other anything. It was two bodies but one brain,’ while another added, ‘The two men seemed to be able to communicate without words – by nodding their heads.’

  The rapidly escalating number of rapes across London saw the police launch Operation Hart in an attempt to bring the culprits to justice – and it quickly became the largest police operation since the hunt for the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, Peter Sutcliffe, five years earlier. Conscious of the mistakes in that enquiry, however, the police also decided to invite forensic psychologist Professor David Canter to participate, bringing to bear a technique that he was pioneering – a ‘geographical profile’ of where the rapists attacked as a means of narrowing down the search area and the pool of suspects. Professor Canter, who quickly established himself as one of the first criminal profilers in Britain, sought to demonstrate that the rapists usually operated in a geographical ‘comfort zone’ which would include where they lived and worked.

  Certainly, Mulcahy and Duffy attracted police attention as 1985 progressed. They were arrested in the autumn of that year when they were stopped in Mulcahy’s car with stolen building materials. A black balaclava was found by the police in the car but the pair escaped with fines after Mulcahy told the officers that he used the mask when he was working as a plasterer on dusty ceilings. It was an opportunity lost to stop the pair’s attacks – and one which would ultimately cost the lives of three innocent young women: for by the end of the year the two men had progressed from rape to murder.

  On the evening of Sunday 29 December 1985, nineteen-year-old Alison Day was the only person to get off a train at Hackney Wick railway station and had the supreme misfortune to encounter the two men – once again on the hunt for a victim. She was on her way to meet her boyfriend at his printing firm nearby. But the teenager never arrived. Mulcahy and Duffy snatched her as she left the station and dragged her to snow-covered playing fields nearby.

  After they had both raped her, Alison tried to escape and either fell or was pushed by Mulcahy into the freezing water of a local canal that led to the River Lea. Duffy later claimed he pulled her out, but that Mulcahy had become so sexually aroused by the incident that he raped her again, before tearing off a piece of her blouse to use to throttle her. Mulcahy later told his accomplice that he had killed Alison because she might recognise them. But Duffy insisted, ‘David actually enjoyed it, saying it gave him power – the decision over life and death. I remember him going on, “It is God-like – having the decision over life and death.”’

  Alison’s sheepskin coat was weighed down with stones in its pockets and her by-now dead body was hurled back into the canal. She was found seventeen days later, her hands tied behind her back and gagged. What had begun as a sexual adventure for Duffy had turned into murder with Mulcahy’s specific and sadistic contribution. There could be no separating the two men now as their spree developed ever more quickly across north London. What was there to lose now? They had already killed. What difference would one or two more bodies make? There was no death penalty to fear – only the possibility of life imprisonment. Rape seemed small beer after murder.

  Just over three months later, on April 17, 1986, Mulcahy and Duffy struck again, but this time they abandoned their regular haunts in north-west London and set off for the leafier fields of Surrey – perhaps aware that remaining so close to their homes so consistently might finally have begun to attract the attention of the police. This time the two set a trap by stretching a length of thin fishing line across a path in fields between Effingham and East Horsley in Surrey in the hope of catching someone unawares, who would then fall over helpless in front of them. The plan worked and the fishing line knocked fifteen-year-old Dutch schoolgirl Maartje Tamboezer off her bicycle. She was then marched across the fields and raped by Duffy – only for matters to take an even darker turn. Mulcahy suddenly lost his temper.

  ‘He was becoming very aggressive – hyper, shouting at the girl,’ Duffy recalled later. ‘He then raised his fists and hit the girl. She crumpled to the floor. She was struck on the head, at the side. It was a swinging blow. I noticed he had a rock in his hand, or a stone. She just crumpled up and fell on the floor. I believed she was unconscious.’

  Mulcahy ripped off the teenager’s belt and looped it around her throat, telling Duffy, ‘I did the last one, you’ll do this one.’ Mulcahy then passed his friend the belt. ‘It had a piece of stick through it which was twisted and he gave it to me in my hand,’ Duffy explained. ‘I actually started twisting it while David turned away. I think I just got caught up in it. It
is very difficult to explain. I just continued twisting until she was dead.’

  Their depravity did not even end there, however. Mulcahy broke Maartje’s neck after she was dead and then set fire to parts of her body, specifically targeting her genitalia in a desperate effort to destroy any forensic evidence that would link the two men to her rape. There could hardly have been a more profound desecration of the poor girl’s innocent and defenceless body as it lay in a Surrey field on that spring day in 1986. Their actions deeply affected the police officers working on the investigation, who responded by increasing still further their efforts to track down the killers.

  That did nothing to deter Mulcahy and Duffy, however, who were by now trapped in their own spiral of self-destruction. Barely a month later they struck again, even more boldly, as they returned to their hunting ground north of London – and back at a railway station. Just as they had done with Alison Day the previous April, the pair ambushed a young woman as she got off a train shortly before 10 pm – although this time it was at Brookman’s Park station in Hertfordshire on 18 May 1986. She was television secretary Anne Lock, aged twenty-nine, who had only just returned from her honeymoon in the Seychelles.

  The terrified young woman was frogmarched to a nearby field with a knife at her throat where Duffy raped her, but then Mulcahy threw him the car keys and told him to collect their car. When Duffy reappeared with the car it was clear something dramatic had taken place. Duffy was to say later, ‘David said he had taken care of it. He was very evasive, like he was playing mind games. He was saying, “She won’t identify us now.” He was very excitable, buzzing. He was even saying, “Keep your eyes open for another one.”’ The decomposed body of Anne Lock was found two months later in undergrowth just a mile from her home. She had been suffocated with her own sock.

  By this time Duffy had come to the attention of the police, although not as a specific prime suspect in the rapes and murders. In August 1986 – after the three murders – he was arrested after beating up his wife at home and was put into the computer system run by Operation Hart to find the killers. Duffy was found to have a rare blood group, a group that had been found at several of the crime scenes. After that connection had been made, Duffy was arrested on suspicion of rape, and was identified by two of the rape victims – not least because of his severely pockmarked face and his piercing blue eyes. But at this stage there was no firm evidence against him – that would come later.

  Mulcahy was questioned, but no evidence was ever found linking him to the rapes or the murders, although the police were certain that Duffy often operated with an accomplice and that Mulcahy was the most likely candidate for the role. For his part, Duffy remained studiously silent about his friend’s role in the rapes – still subscribing to the agreement that they had reached as schoolboys that they would never ‘grass each other up’. There was also the signal fact that – by this point – Duffy was terrified of the relentlessly sadistic Mulcahy and feared saying anything critical about him.

  No action was taken against Duffy by the police immediately, however, and he started to operate as a lone rapist. On Tuesday 21 October 1986, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl was raped on the outskirts of Watford, and during the assault her blindfold slipped and she was able to describe a short, pock-marked man with a dog he called Bruce. This, together with Professor David Canter’s ‘criminal profile’ of the likely attacker – which matched Duffy in thirteen elements out of seventeen he had created – convinced the Operation Hart detectives that he was indeed their prime suspect. The police team put Duffy under surveillance and on Sunday 23 November 1986 he was arrested.

  The detectives who searched Duffy’s home found hard-core pornography, martial arts videos and magazines, and several martial arts weapons – while he was also found to have a dog named Bruce. It was during a search of his mother’s home, however, that they got their most significant breakthrough. Hidden under the stairs was a ball of a very specific string called Somyarn, which forensic experts were able to match with that used to bind the murder victims. Fibres found on Duffy’s clothes also matched those recovered from the body of Alison Day.

  For his part, Duffy refused to admit anything whatever, and remained impassive as he was charged with rape and murder. It was a stance that he retained fourteen months later at his trial in February 1988. He claimed he was suffering from ‘hysterical amnesia’ and was unable to remember any of the events surrounding the offences he was charged with between 1982 and 1986. But the evidence was overwhelming on five counts of rape as well as the murders of Alison Day and Maartje Tamboezer. The trial judge, Mr Justice Farquharson, directed that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of the murder of television secretary Anne Lock.

  After being found guilty by the jury, Mr Justice Farquharson proceeded to sentence Duffy to seven life sentences with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of thirty years. ‘You are obviously little more than a predatory animal,’ the judge told him. ‘The horrific nature of your crimes means thirty years is not necessarily the total you will serve. It may well be more.’ In fact, the Conservative Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was to increase the sentence to a whole life term not long afterwards.

  In a richly ironic statement, David Mulcahy told the Daily Mail after Duffy’s sentencing, ‘I don’t believe John was capable of doing all these things. He’s always been a mummy’s boy.’ Placing himself firmly above any suspicion of involvement in the rapes, he also announced that he was planning to sue the police for wrongful arrest and for damaging his reputation. That was precisely how Mulcahy was to present himself to the world for the next decade – as a happily married father of four whose name had been besmirched by his childhood friendship with the convicted rapist and murderer John Duffy.

  It was not until 6 August 1996 that Mulcahy’s façade began to fracture. Another rapist emerged on Hampstead Heath that evening when a sixty-six-year-old woman was attacked. That sparked a chain of events which would lead to Mulcahy joining his schoolfriend Duffy behind bars. The police launched an investigation into the rape, and by chance two officers noticed similarities between this attack and the ones carried out by Duffy a decade earlier; for example, knives and balaclava helmets were involved again.

  At one point the police even suspected that Duffy might have committed the rape while on day release from prison, but when they discovered that was not the case they began to re-examine the forensic evidence from the original cases, not least because investigative techniques had taken significant steps forward in the years since Duffy’s original attacks.

  Mulcahy’s name appeared again. Samples taken from the clothes of one of the au pairs he and Duffy had raped on Hampstead Heath showed there was only a one in a billion chance that he was not the attacker. Then it was found that a piece of tape used to bind the woman attacked on Highgate West Hill had not been tested for fingerprints before it was consigned to a storeroom at Euston station. Four experts confirmed the fingerprint they found on the tape belonged to David Mulcahy.

  Meanwhile, the police also discovered that Duffy was now being interviewed by prison psychologist Jenny Cutler, who told them he had given the name of his accomplice as David Mulcahy. Duffy had told her during a long series of sessions at Whitemoor Prison in Cambridgeshire that he ‘wanted to get things off my chest’.

  ‘I’ve been in custody for many years,’ Duffy told her, ‘and have had a hard time coming to terms with what I’m in for – rapes and murders. I feel a lot of guilt for what I’ve done and want to make a clean slate.’ The police immediately reopened the original railway murde
rs case and spent weeks re-interviewing Duffy, as well as taking him back to the crime scenes. During the debriefing he confessed to twenty-five sex attacks, as well as to the murder of Anne Lock.

  In the early hours of Saturday 6 February 1999 – eleven years after Duffy had finally been given seven life sentences for five rapes and two murders – Mulcahy was arrested and charged with seven rapes and five charges of plotting to rape, as well as three counts of murder. His trial began in early October 2000 and between the end of January and beginning of February 2001 Duffy spent no fewer than fourteen days in the witness box giving evidence against his old schoolfriend.

  Nevertheless, throughout his evidence in court, Duffy did not try and shift the blame to Mulcahy entirely. He admitted his own part in the crimes. ‘I feel a lot of guilt,’ he explained. ‘I have raped and killed young ladies. I accept that. I am not trying to shift the blame. I did what I did.’

  Significantly, throughout his imprisonment and up to that point, Duffy had never lodged any kind of appeal against his sentence or conviction. ‘I know I will die in prison,’ he told the jury at Mulcahy’s trial, adding that he was not ‘looking for anything in this’ but just wanted ‘to get on with my life in the system – to make a fresh start.’

  Duffy’s counsel told the court, ‘Having committed these crimes there is nothing more in his power that he could have done to make amends.’

  That assertion infuriated Mulcahy – who persistently condemned his childhood friend from the dock throughout his evidence against him. Mulcahy claimed that he had been framed by the police and that Duffy had been paid £20,000 to give false evidence against him. He steadfastly maintained his innocence during the rest of the trial, forcing six of his rape victims to relive their horrifying ordeals in court, but on 1 February 2001 the jury of six men and six women unanimously found him guilty of all the charges. They had taken five days to reach their verdict.