Raymond Leslie Morris was a foreman engineer in Walsall. In August 1967 seven-year-old Christine Ann Darby was taken by car from a street in the town, raped and suffocated, and her body was left on Cannock Chase. Morris was convicted of her murder at Stafford Assizes in February 1969 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Two younger girls had been found on the Chase eighteen months earlier: Margaret Reynolds, six, from Aston in Birmingham, and five-year-old Diane Joy Tift from Bloxwich, both in a ditch at Mansty Gully on January 12, 1966. The investigating force said publicly that it held Morris responsible for those deaths as well. He was never charged with either, and no court has ever considered them.
Two things convicted him and both came from close to home. His wife had given him an alibi; she withdrew it, and became the chief witness against him. And a girl who had survived an attack four years earlier identified him from the public gallery during his trial.
He fought the conviction for the rest of his life. There was an appeal reported in 2001, an application rejected by the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2010, and a judicial review the same year that failed. He died in prison in 2014, having served nearly forty-five years, among the longest terms served by any prisoner in England.