Britain's most wanted man greeted police with "Oh, hello there" when he was finally arrested. Michael Sams, had been hiding in plain sight when Detective Sergeant Tim Grogan walked into the killer’s workshop.
The short, one-legged man accepted he was under arrest without complaint and knew his time was up. Speaking to the Mirror, Tim recalled: "He’s calm and cool. When you go down to the workshop and he comes in accentuating the limp, I remember being confronted by a shambling, one-legged trainspotter, and that was it!
"All this time we’ve been searching for this chap who’s outwitted West Midlands Police. He’s killed and he was prepared to kill again."
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The murderer even gave police cheery directions to the nearest police station in Newark, Nottinghamshire as he was bundled into the back of the squad car. He only began to show emotion when he was put in front of a young custody sergeant and was told he was under arrest for the suspected murder of Julie Dart and the kidnapping of Stephanie Slater.
"The blood drained through his face," Tim said. "He was a broken man. And that was the time to get him with an interview. That was the time we could have really got into his head and seen what he had to say for himself."
West Yorkshire Police have spent months trying to get their man, who is the subject of a new two-part Channel 5 documentary airing Tuesday and Wednesday. Sams was 51 when his tortuous game of cat-and-mouse was ended with the police.
On July 14, 1991, 18-year-old Julie’s body was found in a field near Grantham, Lincs. She was kidnapped days earlier from a red light district in the Chapeltown area of Leeds before Sams held her in a makeshift coffin-style box chained to the floor of his warehouse.
He made Julie write a haunting letter to her boyfriend begging for help. The letter read: "Hello Dominic. Help me please, I’ve been kidnapped and I’m being held as a personal security until next Monday night. Please go and tell my mum straightaway. Love you so much."
Sams also sent a threatening note that demanded £140,000 in cash, to be delivered by a female police officer, or Julie would "never be seen again". The cash didn’t appear where Sams had specified so he decided to kill Julie via two hammer blows to the head.
The letter still haunts Tim now more than 30 years after her death. He said: "When I read that letter Julie had written when she was in desperate need, knowing she was going to die... It’s a heart-rending letter.
"You think of somebody locked up, they’re not drinking or eating, they’re terrified to death. When I wake up in the early hours of the morning, I still think about her life being snuffed out.
"She had so much future. She was a victim that didn’t need to die. She died, I believe, because she escaped [the box].”
Stephanie, 25, Sams’ next victim, almost met the same fate in 1992, when she arranged to meet a "Mr Southwall" at an address in the city. She was working as an estate agent in Birmingham when Sams masqueraded as a prospective buyer.
The fiend abducted her and brought her to his workshop in Newark, where he raped her and locked her inside a filthy wheelie bin. Led by West Mids CID head John Plimmer, police were able to intercept a ransom letter Sams wrote to her firm demanding £175,000.
A carefully staged plan asked that her boss drive the money to an abandoned farm track near Penistone in South Yorkshire. Poor weather conditions and the murderer’s clever route however meant the police lost track of their courier, and the £175,000 – and Sams – vanished.
"It was incredibly frustrating. We’re sat there having a cup of coffee, licking our wounds, knowing that he’s got away with it, and we’re going to have a debrief about what happened. And the phone rang and Bob Taylor picks it up. ‘She’s home.’ We were gobsmacked."
Astonishingly, the killer had kept his promise and delivered Stephanie back to her distraught parents’ home that same day. More than 1,000 officers were involved in the case , and Tim’s job was to hunt down every clue Sams had left along the way.
A brick he had used as a marker for the abortive ransom drop for Julie was analysed and found to have been from a batch in Newark. Another brick of the same batch was found in Sams’ workshop therefore tying him to both crimes.
Sams was convicted in July 1993 and sentenced to life but, now aged 80, is applying for parole for the third time next month. Stephanie died of cancer aged 50.
The Girl in the Box: The Kidnapping of Stephanie Slater is tomorrow and Wednesday at 9pm on Channel 5.
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