Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  Multiple rapes by two men

  The first rape took place in June 1982, when a twenty-three-year-old woman walking near Hampstead railway station was dragged into a derelict building by two men who bound and gagged her. After the rape, they escaped via the North London line.

  There were another four rapes carried out by two men that year, and thirteen further rapes in the first six months of 1983. The men always ordered their victims not to look at them or they wore balaclavas which they partially removed during some of the sexual assaults. The women were sometimes threatened at knifepoint and ordered to remove their clothes. Some of the assaults stopped short of rape when the victims screamed or when the rapists heard other people nearby.

  But if a rape was completed, the men would order the young women to wipe out their vaginas with tissues – tissues which the duo took away from the scene. This wasn’t a fetishistic quirk, simply an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. At that time, however, the police weren’t doing DNA testing in forensic work.

  Meanwhile, John Duffy was sacked from British Rail for poor timekeeping and took to wandering around the neighbourhood for hours at a time. (Police would later speculate that he used these hours to suss out ideal locations at which to rape future victims.) Sexual fantasy and rape-planning was becoming more important to him than everyday life…

  Au pairs raped

  On Sunday 15th July 1984, two Danish au pairs were walking near Hampstead Heath at 2.30am, having become lost after a night out in the West End. Two men walked past them, one tall and one of average height. One of the au pairs thought that both men were black. Moments later the men donned dark blue woollen masks and walked alongside the girls before manoeuvring them up a grassy bank. The men separated the girls and the tall one told his victim ‘Now you have to be real nice to me. Okay?’ He moved the mask halfway up his face to kiss her and she noticed that he had thick lips.

  He told her to take off all of her clothes and lie down, adding that he’d do the same. The man then raped her for a few seconds before requesting oral sex.

  Meanwhile her friend was raped by the other man, after which their attackers robbed them of two pounds. The girls were found in a distressed state by a mini cab driver who took them to Hampstead police station.

  Other rapes

  This pattern was to be repeated, albeit more usually with one victim rather than two. The women sometimes found it difficult to give a detailed description as it was dark and they were often blindfolded. And terror made some of them overestimate both rapists’ heights. But several of them described one attacker as being five foot four with reddish hair and piercing eyes and the other as being around five foot ten with a tanned complexion and dark hair. The dark haired man sometimes apologised to his victim before fleeing the crime and on one occasion he burst into tears. The victims noted that he often failed to get an erection and that when he did, he sometimes failed to ejaculate. The man later identified as Duffy often raped and sodomised the victims whilst the other man (who on at least one occasion was described as being shorter than the five foot four Duffy) performed oral sex or demanded fellatio.

  As the men became more confident about their ability to control the situation, they spent longer with the victims, ordering them to commit specific sexual acts.

  The rapes abruptly stopped for a time in the second half of 1983. In the same period, John and his wife Margaret briefly got back together and tried to have a baby – but, fearful of his brooding temper, she soon left him again. Other trial reconciliations would follow but fail and she saw her once quiet husband turn into a cold-hearted man with staring eyes.

  By 1984 some women were being raped by two men and others by a solo rapist. One July evening, three separate women were sexually assaulted by a man, and their statements showed many similarities and included a description that could have been John Duffy. That November, acting alone, he raped a woman at knifepoint on Barnes Common.

  In June 1985, Margaret left John for good. By now she had a lover (by whom she would have a child), something which incensed her estranged husband. That August he viciously attacked and raped her and also assaulted her lover with a knife. The police arrested him and noted that he lived in Kilburn, the area of many of the sexual attacks so they added him to their long list of possible rape suspects. He was only 1505 on a prioritised list of over 2000 suspects as in those days domestic violence wasn’t taken seriously.

  At the start of December 1985, John Duffy went to Hendon Magistrates Court to answer these domestic abuse charges. Whilst there, he recognised one of the women he had raped. She didn’t recognise him, but it was a close call and Duffy knew that the next time he wouldn’t be so lucky. He saw his options as ending the rapes – or killing the next victim. Twenty-seven days later, he murdered for the first time. (And twelve years later, in late 1997, he would suggest that he did so in tandem with David Mulcahy, his one-time friend.)

  The first murder

  During the rapes, Duffy and his co-rapist had trawled an area close to home – but Hackney Wick in East London was the locale for the first murder. Duffy would later say that this was a deliberate ploy to stop the police associating the murder with the rapes.

  On 29th December 1985, a nineteen-year-old secretary called Alison Day was grabbed and subdued on a quiet railway path. She was dragged into a derelict garage where some of her clothes were cut off with a knife. These pieces of cloth were then used to gag her, though there were few people in earshot on that quiet Sunday night. Her arms were bound behind her back with coarse string and police would later note that the teenager’s thumbs were tied together and her hands were bound in a praying position, forms of bondage that John Duffy had used on his wife.

  The teenager was raped and battered unconscious with a brick. Thereafter, a strip of cloth torn from her blouse was made into a ligature with a piece of alderberry wood. Again, police would later note that Duffy was familiar with ligatures and had once tried to commit suicide by using one. This Spanish windlass was used to slowly strangle Alison Day to death.

  Her corpse was weighed down and dumped it into the River Lea, where it wouldn’t be discovered until the following month. The only remaining forensic evidence would be some fibres from a tracksuit – and Duffy often wore a tracksuit whilst stalking victims as it made him look like a jogger rather than a predator.

  The second murder

  The second murder – four months later in April 1986 – was even more fiendishly planned, taking place beside a lonely footpath near Horsley which was clearly used by cyclists. Someone stretched a piece of rope across the path, knowing that a cyclist would either run into it and be thrown from their bike, or else see it and have to dismount. Either way, the person who tied the rope would have access to a vulnerable female but could just remain hidden amongst the wild bluebells and bushes if a male cyclist came along.

  Sadly, fifteen-year-old Maartje Tamboezer was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The schoolgirl cycled through the sunlit woods that lunchtime, straight into danger. She too was tied in an unusual way, stripped, raped, brutally beaten and strangled with a Spanish windlass. Burning paper tissues were stuffed into her vagina post-mortem to burn away any semen. Her body was found in the midst of hundreds of bluebells, so the police named the case The Bluebell Enquiry.

  Another rape

  John Duffy now went out trawling for another victim, finding a fourteen-year-old girl at a train station. He put his razor-sharp butterfly knife to her throat, dragged her to the nearby woods and raped her. But for some reason he let her live.

  The third murder

  A month after the second murder, the third sexual killing took place. The date was 18th May 1986, the place another quiet railway spot, Brookmans Park in North London. The victim was twenty-nine-year-old Anne Lock, a recently-married secretary who had caught the late train home. She entered the station bike shed to collect her bicycle but was pounced on and dragged to a remote part of the railway line. One of her socks was u
sed to gag her and the other to blindfold her. She was raped and terrorised – many years later Duffy would suggest that she was made to walk along the outside of a bridge, so that, if she fell, she’d plummet into the freezing water to her death.

  Anne Lock was eventually strangled and her genitals were burnt post-mortem in an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. It would be ten weeks till her decomposing body was found, weeks in which her completely innocent and grieving new husband was regarded with deep suspicion by the police.

  A convenient amnesia

  The police interviewed Duffy again as semen traces found on Maartje Tamboezer’s body indicated that he was the right blood group – in those days the police couldn’t actually match semen samples. He must have realised that the net was closing in so came up with a plan, persuading a martial arts friend, Ross Mockeridge, to beat him up and slash his chest. (Mr Mockeridge would later deeply regret this act.) Afterwards, John Duffy staggered into a police station claiming that he’d been mugged and had lost his memory. The police took him to hospital, where doctors believed he had amnesia and admitted him.

  Later, when the police came round to interview him about the rapes, the medics turned them away, explaining that their patient mustn’t be subjected to further stress. But Duffy recovered enough to be treated as a part-time patient – and whilst out for the day he raped a schoolgirl. Unfortunately she was too traumatised to give a clear description of him.

  The memory loss man was let out on bail in September, and his release coincided with another rape, this time in Copthall Park near Barnet.

  The profile

  Meanwhile, the police had brought in a psychology professor, David Canter, to help them identify the solo rapist. After looking at where the rapes had occurred, Dr Canter drew up a profile which suggested the rapist would have an indepth knowledge of the railways and would live in Kilburn. John Duffy had been a British Rail worker and he lived in Kilburn. Canter noted that the rapist liked to talk to the victim before the sexual assault: this suggested to him that the man had previously been in a long-term relationship with a woman. As he combined sex with violence, that relationship had also probably been violent. Duffy, who had viciously sexually assaulted his ex-wife, again fitted the bill.

  The professor said that the killer wouldn’t have children, and indeed he did not. David Canter suggested he’d have two close friends, and this was indeed the case. In total, Canter suggested seventeen factors about the rapist, thirteen of which would apply to John Duffy. As a result, he became the first criminal to be identified from an offender profile.

  Arrest and trial

  On 7th November 1986 Duffy was arrested but he remained aloof when interrogated by the police. He stared at them unblinkingly, occasionally muttering ‘What’s the worst they could give me? Thirty years? I can do thirty years.’ Five of his victims identified him in a line-up and he was charged and subsequently sent to trial.

  Trying to find the identity of the second rapist, the police put John Duffy’s friend David Mulcahy in several line-ups but none of the victims identified him so he remained a free man. The police also questioned him about the murders but there was nothing to link him to them and he was released without charge.

  When Duffy went to trial in 1988, the jury heard that several rape victims had identified him – his short stature, reddish hair and staring eyes made him very distinctive. There was also forensic evidence: detectives had gone to his mother’s home and found the unusual string he’d used to bind his victims. Fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat had been found on one of Duffy’s sweaters and a man matching his description had been seen running from one of the rape scenes and catching a late night train.

  Moreover, Ross Mockeridge had admitted that he’d beaten Duffy up and slashed him with a razor at Duffy’s request so that he could fake amnesia and avoid being interviewed by the police. Duffy himself was a martial arts expert – and Maartje Tamboezer’s corpse had been found with a bone in her neck broken by a martial arts blow. He’d also kept keys from each of the victims as a souvenir, and had thirty-seven of them. Rather than attempt to explain this, John Duffy claimed that he was still suffering from amnesia and this formed part of his defence during his trial.

  In court he showed no emotion, not even when found guilty of the murders of Alison Day in East London and Maartje Tamboezer in Surrey. He was found not guilty of the murder of Anne Lock, as her body was so decomposed that it no longer bore his distinctive bondage signature. He was given seven life sentences with a recommendation that he serve at least forty years. The hunt to find the man known as the Railway Killer had cost three million pounds.

  Prison sources now suggested that John Duffy wanted to be as infamous as possible, to go down in history like the Yorkshire Ripper. He was allegedly devastated when the Stockwell Strangler’s trial started on the same day and the press devoted equal attention to it. (The Stockwell Strangler, Kenneth Erskine, had killed seven elderly victims as they lay in their beds.)

  For the remainder of the Eighties and most of the Nineties, John Duffy served his sentence in various Category A prisons. Meanwhile his childhood friend David Mulcahy remained married to Sandra and raised their surviving children. He worked as a plasterer for Westminster Council and liked to go roller-skating with family and friends.

  The police still believed that he was the second rapist, so they questioned him every time that another local rape was committed, but none of the victims identified him and, where forensic clues were available, his DNA did not match.

  A new statement

  The police occasionally interviewed John Duffy, hoping that they could tie him to other unsolved rapes or that he’d ‘remember’ the name of his co-rapist. (He was still claiming amnesia.) By 1998 he’d formed a good relationship with his prison therapist, Dr Jennie Cutler, and hinted that the killings had been committed in tandem and that he wanted to talk to the police again. Eventually he told them that his partner in crime for the rapes and killings had been David Mulcahy.

  He talked about the joy of ‘hunting…finding a victim and travelling to an area’ and said that he and David used to drive around at night in David’s car, playing a tape of Michael Jackson’s album Thriller and fantasizing aloud about what they’d like to do to women. He said that these fantasies included a great deal of violence.

  He told the police that he and David Mulcahy would target a victim, sometimes tossing a coin to decide who got to rape her first. One of them would then blindfold and gag the woman, threatening to mutilate her with a knife if she offered resistance. The other would walk a short distance away, keeping a lookout for witnesses, until his friend finished the sexual assault. Then they’d swap places. On other occasions, one man would rape the victim whilst his friend offered crude encouragement. The violence escalated with time.

  He added that rape had become addictive, saying ‘We would have balaclavas and knives…We did it as a bit of a joke, a bit of a game…It is very difficult to stop.’ But the second man in the series of rapes appears to have eventually stopped – and there was no forensic evidence to suggest that the murders had been committed by two men.

  Duffy’s second trial

  The forty-year-old was taken back to the Old Bailey where he admitted to seventeen more sex crimes, namely nine rapes, six conspiracies to rape and two burglaries with intent to rape. The assaults had taken place between 1975 and 1986 in London and Hertfordshire. The judge asked for psychiatric reports, explaining that he would pronounce sentence after Duffy gave evidence against another man in a forthcoming trial. (The man was David Mulcahy though he couldn’t be named at this stage for legal reasons.)

  David Mulcahy reinvestigated

  According to the police, David Mulcahy’s reinvestigation hadn’t just come about because John Duffy decided to confess. They said that by coincidence they were investigating a new series of rapes committed in Hampstead and wondered if an earlier rapist had resurfaced. As a result, they looked at the forensic materi
al they had kept from various old cases, including the Railway Rapes. By now advances had been made in DNA testing – and the police were able to rule David Mulcahy out of the new Hampstead rapes. But when they looked at the semen they’d retained from one of the 1984 rapes (found on one of the Danish au pair’s panties and the crotch of her trousers) they found that they had a match.

  In 1998, David Mulcahy was arrested. He was very relaxed at the police station because he’d often been accused of rapes which he hadn’t committed. But when the police said that they’d forensically tied him to one of the 1984 rapes, he apparently paled and was violently sick.

  David Mulcahy’s trial

  On 3rd October 2000, John Duffy went back to the Old Bailey to testify against his former best friend. He steadfastly refused to look at David Mulcahy as he gave his evidence.

  Mr Mulcahy had said that his friendship with Mr Duffy had ended after Duffy went into hospital to avoid being questioned by the police – but prosecution witnesses, including John Duffy’s relatives, stated that the friendship had continued. In contrast, Mr Mulcahy’s friends noted that he didn’t even mention John Duffy’s name to them.

  The prosecution said that the two men had formed an evil bond after being bullied at school, and that by their early twenties they’d started stepping out from behind trees in the nearby woods to shock both gay and heterosexual courting couples. The police would later describe the men’s behaviour as immature.

  The CPS suggested that ‘both seemed able to disassociate themselves from the awful reality of what they were doing and treated their victims only as objects rather than people.’ In contrast, the defence noted that David Mulcahy had never been identified by any of the victims and that his wife didn’t recognise the prosecution’s description of him as ‘evil.’ She was standing by him, as were his friends.