On the afternoon of August 19, 1967, seven-year-old Christine Ann Darby was playing near her home in Walsall when she was taken away in a car. Her body was found on Cannock Chase days later; she had been raped and suffocated. It was the third time in two years that a little girl from the towns north of Birmingham had been taken and left on the Chase, and it set off one of the largest manhunts in British history: 150 detectives visited 39,000 homes, interviewed 80,000 people and checked more than a million car records.
The first two had never been solved. Margaret Reynolds, six, of Aston in Birmingham, vanished on her way to school on September 8, 1965. Diane Joy Tift, five, of Bloxwich, disappeared that December. On January 12, 1966, both were found together in a ditch at Mansty Gully on the Chase. A year before that, on December 1, 1964, a nine-year-old, Julia Taylor, had been lured into a car in Bloxwich by a man who said he was a friend of her mother's; she was raped, strangled and left for dead, and a passer-by saved her.
Raymond Leslie Morris, a foreman engineer from Green Lane in Walsall, a married father of two, was spoken to four times and slipped through each time. In 1965 his own brother walked into Cannock police station to say he believed Raymond capable of the Reynolds and Tift killings because of his interest in young girls, but Morris appeared to have alibis and was not thought a likely suspect. For Christine Darby his wife, Carol, told detectives they had been out shopping together that afternoon, and the incident room repeatedly told officers he had been eliminated.
What broke the case was a failed abduction and what his wife found at home. An attempt to snatch a ten-year-old, Margaret Aulton, in November 1968 brought police back to him, and Carol discovered indecent photographs he had taken of her five-year-old niece. She told police the shopping alibi was false. He had been cool and collected in interview until detectives told him she had withdrawn it. He was arrested on November 15, 1968.
His trial at Stafford Assizes opened in February 1969 before Mr. Justice Ashworth, who warned the jury it was a hateful crime of lust and that they must judge it calmly. Morris pleaded not guilty to Christine's murder and to the attempted abduction of Margaret Aulton and guilty to indecent assault on the niece; his counsel, Kenneth Mynett, said he was disgusted with himself about the photographs but could not have been the man seen on the Chase at 4:15 if the alibi held. It did not: Carol was the chief prosecution witness. On February 18 the jury returned unanimous verdicts after about two hours, and he was sentenced to life. "There must be many mothers whose hearts will beat more lightly as a result of this verdict," the judge said.
He was never charged over Margaret Reynolds or Diane Tift, whose cases were left on file, or over Julia Taylor, though police regarded him as the prime suspect in all of them. His appeal was dismissed in November 1969. He maintained his innocence for the rest of his life; late on, his solicitors alleged police misconduct and sought his release, but the Criminal Cases Review Commission rejected his case in 2010. Although never officially confirmed as a whole-life prisoner, he was never released. He died of natural causes on March 11, 2014, at eighty-four, in the health unit at HMP Preston, having been transferred from HMP Wymott, after almost forty-five years in prison.