Hello everyone. My name is Gary and I’m a recently retired Police officer from a town in the North of England. I joined the force (as it was called then) as a 21-year-old in 1983. Worked 6 years in uniform then made detective in 1989. I was the youngest detective in the locality at that point. I’m not saying whether I believe in the supernatural or not. I’m honestly agnostic about the whole thing, but certainly hedge to rational and scientific solutions to problems as a rule. Here are some of the strangest and saddest things I came across in nearly 40 years’ service. Some have no explanations, some have obvious (but still very weird or disturbing) ones.
Before I start this, there’s just a bit of background. The town I worked in is a poor, former industrial town in the North of the country. The area of focus for me was large council estate that Police force personnel would refer to as the “Bermuda Triangle” given the amount mysteries that emerged from there over the decades. Half the estate was completed in the 1940s after the War and made up about 600 houses. The newer part of the estate was built between the mid-60s and mid-70s and made up about a thousand (inferior quality it must be said) such homes.
The estate was known to locals as “The Farm”. As the name suggests, it was built on a huge expanse of farmland and was still surrounded by woodland on one side and an area colloquially known as “the Scar” on the opposite side. The Scar was a patch of downward-sloped land about a square mile in size – mostly rough foliage and trees, cut through by a railway line and gravelly paths for dog walkers …it wasn’t a place you’d want to walk around after dark and a couple of very serious crimes took place on there in my tenure as that part of town’s go-to detective. (Maybe get into those later).
In the early 80s, The Farm was a bit like the Wild West. The estate was populated to the brim and low-level crime was an absolute constant. The place was poor. Built to serve industries that now hardly existed in England (steel, textiles, etc) and unfortunately had become a kind of social dumping ground. However, as with anywhere, there was still a rump of good and incredibly house-proud people. Since the early 90s the estate had been in decline. It was probably 70% populated, with entire streets becoming empty at the bottom end of the estate in particular (backing on to the Scar). The local authorities had started scheduling parts of the new side of The Farm for destruction only 20 years after they were built. The local Mayor (a good man) was terrified of what he called “poverty cycles”. I.e., that kids born to the roughest quarters would never escape the poor circumstances bequeathed to them. Anyway, I digress, here goes:
1989
After making Detective, I was assigned to shadow a superior colleague for 12 months. Derek. I really liked Derek. He was in his late 50s by that point. He was a real, what I would call, old school academic detective. He wasn’t too popular with uniform, or his own superiors, for that matter, mainly owed to an aloof and slightly holier-than-thou nature. But he was highly articulate, off-the-scale intelligent, with a photographic memory and simply never forgot a time or place. He took me under his wing straight away. About 2 months into the job, a wet Thursday evening in October 1989, he takes me for a beer at his favourite dive bar and tells me about this case he had back in ’64, when he was a young detective in his early 30s.
I’ll hand over to Derek, as I recall it in my memories:
“A woman from The Farm in her late-50s had called into the station to complain that a child had gone missing. She lived adjacent to a large family, just across a patch of grass from them, and her contention was that a girl of about 6/7 years old, whom she believed was called Catherine/Katherine, had simply walked off the face of the Earth. There was a problem back then with some of the very poorest and most socially outcast families simply not registering their kids as being born or sending them to school when they hit 5 years old… or at all. What would happen is, a home birth in what is already a poor family takes place, then the parents would just raise the child (in a neglectful fashion) without ever registering said birth with the designated authorities. I knew authority workers who would enter homes and find 7-year-olds who simply didn’t legally exist and should have been at school by that age. It wasn’t an everyday thing, but it happened too often.
The caller (we’ll call her ‘Edith’) was adamant that this was such a case, and that the child had now been missing for a year. Edith was a real, and I mean profound, curtain twitcher. She even made notes of people’s comings and goings in the street, and although I can’t say I exactly approve of that, it did lend credibility to her accusation.
The family in question was a living, breathing nightmare. An absolute sinkhole of neglect and depravity. 12 kids, degenerate alcoholic-gambler Father. The council had knocked through two homes together to form 1 home to house them.”
Derek said the house was like nothing he’d seen or even imagined about the worst of, say, Victorian London.
He continues …”Perhaps I should have been more careful given the implied nature of the accusation (kidnapping, imprisonment, or murder) but I find Edith to be highly credible given the depth of detail she can go into. Describing the kid as ginger haired, pale blue eyes. Almost always wearing the same blue material dress and holding a large plastic doll. After checks with the registrar and local schools showed Catherine to not exist, I decide to go right off the bat. I take a uniformed officer with me, we knock on the door and basically demand to be let in immediately. The house has a stench of dark age poverty. It’s beyond horrific. Dad is out somewhere. There are probably 8 kids sat at different locations on the floor in the downstairs of the property. Mum, a battered (literally and figuratively) woman of 45 or so, takes us into their filthy kitchen to talk. I don’t waste time -
“”Where’s Catherine, we’re here to see Catherine”” I snap at her. I watch the blood drain out of her face before my very own eyes. She stammers and stutters a non-response. “Where?”, I repeat, even more firmly.
I watch her shift gear as clear as day, and straight into what I call parrot mode. “You mean my Sister Catherine, she’s over in Ireland” she says with a nervous laugh yet traumatised expression. She denies ever having had a daughter by this name. The lies, and deflections pass through her feeble mind and out of her mouth in obviously rehearsed fashion.
I understand perfectly what is going on at this point. I know 100% there and then the kid has been killed, by accident or otherwise, or passed to another family member, or sold into de facto slavery, and this is a staged cover up. It may sound strange here and now that I’d jump to these wild conclusions, but I know this as sure as I know my own name. It’s not even the first case I’ve been made aware of where any of these things have happened.
I also know that I have no real evidence of anything, and this is going to be a long and painful process to get someone to crack. What kills me to this day is that despite being certain something was badly off, we never did. They just did not fold. We had both parents down the station. Dad was halfway to demented through alcohol abuse and had the IQ of a 10-year-old.
For a year we pressed them. The kids just gave stupefied silences when asked questions. The shrugging of shoulders or outright denials. It really woke me up about how evil can work and propagate itself, dealing with all this. The more immediate neighbours were no real help either, all elderly, to them, it was just a sea of children running around causing havoc in the summer, then mostly disappearing indoors in the Winter.
The one lead we had was another relatively elderly woman who lived 3 doors down at the end of the block, Francis. She, when questioned, did remember Catherine and recalled Edith’s description as absolutely correct. She herself had a 9-year-old granddaughter at that point, who would often stay in the summer holidays, and seems to remember Catherine playing with her and may have even come into her house on occasion. Said Granddaughter and her parents had moved to Canada the year before and getting a hold of anyone was proving impossible. She couldn’t firmly recall any further details, and her testament would surely be crushed in court by any half decent defence lawyer. We had next to nothing, but I really believed Edith (who by now was calling into the Station in person on a weekly basis to speak with me) and knew without any shadow of doubt that the family was lying to me. In 1973, the Dad finally meets his maker, steps out of a pub hammered drunk, directly in front of a bus. Fin!
Mum dies in ’87. But this bit really, really gets me. When she passed all the kids had flown the nest (there were 14 by this point) and a fumigation team was sent into clean the house. The guys whose day jobs are sewers and industrial accidents. Yes, those guys! And one of them finds a biscuit tin right at the back under the sink that’s full of random artefacts and passes it to us. One of the old pictures in there looks like it was taken in the 60s and I knew immediately that Catherine was stood there right in this picture, as clear as day. The picture is black and white but is clear enough to make the shades of her lightly coloured hair and eyes, it was taken literally on the doorstep to the property, didn’t match to any of the other children. And she looked exactly how Edith had described and how I imagined her to. It was taken on an old camera that belonged to the woman at the end of her block – Francis - and it was Catherine with Francis’ Granddaughter, the one who’d subsequently moved to Canada. I showed the picture to a then very old and quite poorly Edith who now lived in a nursing home, she looked at me and nodded firmly but tearfully the absolutely split-second she saw it, without any prompt whatsoever. The early and obviously insufficient searches we’d made back in the day yielded nothing. The tin was probably 3 feet from my leg as I’d stood in that kitchen back in ’64.”
1993
Back in ’93 a woman (Cheryl, we’ll call her) was a single Mum living with her 2 Daughters aged 10 and 15 on The Farm. Cheryl had problems – money (as did more than half the estate), booze and some general lifestyle excesses. But was generally, despite some social service involvement, regarded as a half-capable Mother. Her kids never went hungry, and both were doing decently well at school.
One Friday morning in November they get up to go to school and Mum isn’t in bed. The kids would usually get themselves up, make their own breakfasts and go to school. The younger girl’s primary school was only 5 minutes’ walk and the elder kid’s high school was a 10-minute bus ride. They each make their breakfast, eat it up, get their school gear ready and shout up to their Mum that they’re setting off. No answer. OK, occasionally Mum would go out for a few drinks the night before leaving her a bit of a hangover, but she’d always mumble something. But nothing! Eldest goes upstairs and the bed is empty. Not slept in, freshly made. No hint Mum was there at all. Clothes still in the wardrobes, affects still dotted around the room. They’d last seen her at about 9pm the previous evening when the kids went to bed. (Remember, Bermuda Triangle! This is the case that gave The Farm that name).
We never found her! Within half an hour of the kids going next door to call the police there were 3 uniforms and 2 detectives including me at the front of the house. 6 hours later there were 12 of us. The weird thing about this was despite never encountering this kind of missing person case previously, I knew deep down we weren’t going to find her. Despite all the most basic deductions telling us she no doubt went out when the kids were in bed, maybe met a guy and went back to his house, something like that, I just knew in my bones somehow it was more serious. I bet we interviewed 500 people in the next few days. Neighbours, shop workers, pub landlords and regulars at every single place in town she’d ever visited. Nothing for the night in question, absolute dead ends. We had dogs in a formation attempting to track her across the whole estate, surrounding woodland and the Scar. No sign of her! (We can get into what we did find later, totally disconnected from this case).
The investigation just cools off after 6 months or so. You’re just left with a feeling of helpless malaise in this kind of case. However, what came next, I will never forget or work out fully:
The Summer of 1994 a local man calls the station and asks to come down for a chat. I’m given the heads up to meet him. Let’s call him “Tim”. Tim went to school with Cheryl. They weren’t close friends or anything but did share a few classes and they’d bumped into each other a few times as adults over the years. Tim’s second cousin was actually her kids’ Father, although Tim wasn’t aware of that at the time. Tim had been on holiday to Bulgaria with his whole family - parents, kids, grandparents.
He says he goes out for stroll alone one evening and goes into a bar for a cheeky drink. He’s sat at a table while football (the USA 1994 World Cup) is on one of the TVs. Sat across in the next booth is Cheryl. Clear as fucking day it’s her. He literally can’t believe his eyes. He takes his glasses off to give them a quick clean before putting them back on but sure as one day follows the next, that is her. He recognises and describes very acute physical features, mole on left cheek, small scar on her nose from a fight back at school. He’s absolutely 100% sure and would stand up in any court in the world and say so. She’s dressed quite ostentatiously and is next to a large, suited man in his 50s. When she catches Tim staring at her she visibly panics. 10 seconds later she whispers into the suited man’s ear and leaves. Tim stands up, shouts her name but she ignores him and heads out in the other direction. Suited man stands up and comes over. Shakes Tim’s hand in a very over the top friendly fashion which also emphasises his physical superiority over Tim. Offers him champagne which Tim refuses, then slopes off out the opposite door himself.
Tim isn’t some random nutcase either. He’s one of The Farm’s success stories. Born to single Mum. Worked hard at school and is now working. Married with 3 kids. I believe every word of what he says and he is clearly distressed. How a 33-year-old girl vanishes from her house in Northern England and ends up in Bulgaria is anyone’s guess. The is pre-internet age remember. Broadband and dial-up technically do exist in 1993 but not in this part of the world and not on The Farm. The only hint of a clue I got, maybe 3 years later, was a tip about a barman who worked in a particular pub she occasionally ventured. He’d claimed to people he was Italian because he thought it would score him more women, but the bar owner claims he was from Bulgaria. He apparently went back home sometime around ‘93 after helping himself to cash from the tills. I still have no idea what happened or if this means anything.
The only silver lining from this case is the kids went to very nice foster parents and did well for themselves in later life.
Thanks all!
Edit 1: clarity