Information about Lesley Whittle

Donald Neilson (born Donald Nappey, August 1, 1936, nicknamed the Black Panther) is a convicted murdererer of the teenage heiress Lesley Whittle in Shropshire, England.

A jobbing builder, he turned to crime when his business failed to thrive. Already a multiple murderer, having fatally shot three postmasters in post office robberies, the Whittle case made him Britain's most wanted man in the mid-1970s.

Neilson was ultimately caught and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976 for the murder of Whittle and four other people.

Lesley Whittle

Lesley Whittle (1957 - 1975) was a 17-year-old girl who became the youngest and most famous victim of the British serial killer known as the Black Panther, later established to be Donald Neilson.

In January 1975, Lesley Whittle was kidnapped from the bedroom of her home in Shropshire, England, in order to acquire a £50,000 ransom from her family. Her mother was asleep in the house at the time. The kidnapper had read that Lesley had been left a considerable sum of money (£82,000 - almost half a million pounds in 2007 figures) by her late father George, who ran a successful coach company, one of the largest in the country, based at Highley and Kidderminster.

A series of police bungles and other circumstances meant that Lesley Whittle's brother Ronald was unable to deliver the ransom money to the place and time demanded by the kidnapper, who pushed Whittle off the ledge where he had tethered her in Bathpool Park, Staffordshire, strangling her.

Lesley Whittle's body was found on 7 March 1975. She was hanging from a wire at the bottom of a drain shaft in the park.

Capture and Arrest

In December 1975, two police officers spotted a man seen acting suspiciously in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. The man turned out to be Donald Neilson. He was armed with a gun and was only arrested with the help of several customers in a nearby fish and chip shop. His fingerprints were found to match one of those in the drain shaft.

Recriminations followed but Neilson was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1976 for the murder of Whittle and four other people. The trial judge recommended that the kidnapper should never be released unless he lived to a great age or endured infirmity. More than 30 years on, he is still behind bars as one of the country's longest-serving prisoners.

References

• 1975: Heiress Lesley Whittle kidnapped BBC On This Day archive
• Serial killer who chose Heywood to strike first, Heywood Advertiser, 8th September 2004
• Harry Hawkes, The Capture of the Black Panther, Harrap: 1978.
• Shari-Jayne Boda, Real crime: four crimes that shocked a nation, Granada:2003. [

External links

• Crime & Investigation Network feature

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