On the night of January 14, 1975, a man in a hood took seventeen-year-old Lesley Whittle at gunpoint from her bed at her family's home in Highley, Shropshire. Her family owned a coach firm and she had been left money in her father's will. He left a demand for a ransom of fifty thousand pounds, punched out on strips of Dymo tape, and drove her some sixty-five miles to Bathpool Park at Kidsgrove in Staffordshire. There he took her down a drainage shaft beneath a reservoir and left her, naked and hooded, on a narrow platform about fifty-four feet below ground, with a wire noose around her neck fastened to the wall.
The kidnapper was already the most hunted man in England. He was Donald Neilson, born Donald Nappey in Bradford on August 1, 1936. His mother died of breast cancer when he was ten. He did national service with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in Kenya and Aden, married, and later changed the family's name because his daughter was mocked for it. He ran a failing joinery business and trained himself in a private version of military discipline. From 1971 he broke into sub-post offices at night, in black clothes and a hood, and in 1974 he began to kill. He shot the sub-postmaster Donald Skepper at Harrogate in February, Derek Astin at Higher Baxenden near Accrington in September, and Sidney Grayland at Langley in the West Midlands in November, where he also beat Grayland's wife, Peggy, the sub-postmistress. After the Baxenden killing a reporter ended a news report by asking, "Where is this Black Panther?" and the name stuck.
Two attempts to collect the ransom failed amid police errors that became notorious. On the night of one of the failed drops, a security guard, Gerald Smith, challenged Neilson at a freight terminal and was shot six times. At the last aborted drop, in Bathpool Park itself, the police left without searching the area, only yards from the shaft. Neilson, furious that his instructions had not been followed, is believed to have gone down afterward, and Lesley Whittle was found on March 7, 1975, hanging from the wire. He later claimed she had been knocked from the ledge by accident.
He was caught by chance on December 11, 1975, when two constables in Mansfield Woodhouse, near Nottingham, stopped a man acting suspiciously near the post office. He pulled a shotgun on them; with help from passers-by they overpowered him. A search of his home turned up hoods, a model of a black panther and the rest of his equipment, and he confessed to being the Black Panther.
His trial opened at Oxford Crown Court on June 14, 1976, with queues out into the street. On July 1 he was convicted of murdering Lesley Whittle; he had admitted kidnapping her and extorting her family but denied murder. Later that month he was convicted of the three sub-postmaster murders. He was acquitted of attempting to murder Peggy Grayland and PC Tony White, one of the constables who caught him, but convicted of grievous bodily harm and possessing a shotgun with intent to endanger life. Gerald Smith had died in March 1976, but more than a year and a day after he was shot, so under the law of the time no murder charge could be brought, and a charge of attempting to murder him was left on file. The judge, Mr. Justice Mars-Jones, called him a man of exceptional wickedness and recommended he never be released.
He received a life sentence for each murder. Successive Home Secretaries ruled that life should mean life, and in June 2008 the High Court confirmed the whole life term after he challenged it. He fell ill with pneumonia in prison and died at Norwich on December 18, 2011, aged seventy-five, thirty-five years after his conviction.