remember this ? I do.
(by the way -what weapon has this meathead got, that the police are so scared of ? 1 shotgun?? or has aquired more
from the police that they are not telling us?
Earlier manhunts that shocked us all
From the Evening Press, first published Monday 4th Apr 2005.
CHRIS TITLEY looks back at other manhunts which have occurred in North Yorkshire.
NORTH Yorkshire has been here before. The terrible events of last week inevitably brought to mind two other incidents which stunned the county: the murder of Special PC Glenn Goodman and the killings of Barry Prudom.
All three cases involved brutal murders and a massive police manhunt; and all three are indelibly burned into the collective consciousness of North Yorkshire people.
Barry Prudom's murderous spree took place in the summer of 1982. Prudom was a bitter and twisted man with a history of petty crime and an obsession with guns.
On June 17, 29-year-old PC David Haigh from Harrogate, a father of three, went to talk to a man parked in a car at a picnic site at Norwood Edge, near Beckwithshaw. It was 37-year-old Prudom, who had jumped bail from Leeds Crown Court following a violent assault.
This time Prudom, a self-employed electrician, did not stop at assault. He shot PC Haigh in the head with a .22 calibre pistol and left him, dead, outside his patrol car. Prudom then went on the run, arriving in the village of Girton, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, six days later.
There he shot George and Sylvia Luckett. Sylvia Luckett miraculously survived but her husband was fatally injured. Prudom stole their Rover car and headed back to Yorkshire. Murder was about to come to Malton.
On June 24, PC Ken Oliver was shot at when he came face-to-face with Prudom at Dalby Forest, near Pickering, as he checked a brown Rover car. He was hit in the arm and a bullet grazed his nose. He was lucky to survive.
By now a full-scale murder hunt was under way with more than 400 police on the trail of a gunman who had shot four people, killing two, in eight days.
Four days later, the day the police named Prudom as the man they were looking for, the death toll had risen to three. As the presses were rolling with Prudom's picture splashed all over the front page, Sgt David Winter saw Prudom leave the post office in Old Malton. Seconds later Prudom killed him.
Within hours Malton was turned into a massive armed police fortress. Officers from ten forces carrying all manner of guns were searching the town for Prudom, now known to have learned survival techniques while on a course with the Leeds B Squadron, 23 SAS Regiment (Volunteers). Survival expert Eddie McGee was brought in to help the police track down their man.
As the hunters closed in on their prey, Prudom was watching television in a house just yards from the police station.
He had taken the Johnson family hostage in their home in East Mount.
Pensioners Maurice and Bessie and their son Brian were tied up before Prudom left in the early hours of Sunday, July 4. A few hours later police cornered Prudom in his hideaway at Malton Tennis Club. A stun grenade was thrown over the wall and shots rang out. It turned out that Prudom had shot himself before police fired a hail of bullets.
Another policeman, SPC Glenn Goodman, paid the ultimate price for protecting the public ten years later.
SPC Goodman, 37, from Sherburn-in-Elmet, and PC Alexander "Sandy" Fraser, aged 32, from York, stopped a Ford Sierra on the York to Tadcaster Road in the early hours of Sunday June 7, 1992.
PC Kelly questioned the driver, who gave his name as Ryan. The police officer gave "Ryan" - actually Michael O'Brien - a form to produce driving documents to police within seven days.
With him was a man later identified as Paul "Mad Dog" Magee. They were members of the IRA.
O'Brien was asked to sit inside the police Astra to fill in the form then returned to the Sierra. The officers decided to check the two men's story and found it didn't add up. After questioning the men further, PC Kelly called for back-up. As he spoke to Selby control, Magee gunned down SPC Goodman.
SPC Goodman, who had a baby son, died later in hospital. PC Kelly managed to radio for help despite sustaining serious injuries. Gunman Magee shot the officer four times; a fifth bullet would have killed him if it had not been deflected by the radio handset he was holding to his ear.
The Sierra sped off and was later followed by another patrol car: they riddled it with bullets near Burton Salmon. The two officers inside were only saved from being killed when a member of the public arrived on the scene in his car, and the gunmen fled again.
One of North Yorkshire's biggest police manhunts was launched. Hundreds of officers, many of them armed, combed woods and farmland.
The two men on the run managed to evade justice for four days, during which they slept rough. Much of their time was spent hiding in a culvert, using bales of straw sitting on the dirty water as beds. It was close to the Heron Service Station beside the Al at Knottingley.
They were later spotted at the Granada Service Station at Ferrybridge where they bought drinks, sandwiches, Anadin painkillers and newspapers.
Later Magee went into Pontefract to buy items of clothing. But his accent and appearance aroused the shop staff's suspicions. Police were called to the arcade and an officer spotted and followed Magee, radioing for assistance. After a violent struggle, he was arrested.
Several hours later, unaware of what had happened to Magee, O'Brien went into Pontefract to buy clothing for himself. Again, shop staff became suspicious, the police were called and O'Brien was arrested without resistance. The pair were taken to separate police stations before being taken to London to be charged.
In 1993, O'Brien was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Paul Magee was convicted of murder and given a life sentence.
Both Magee and O'Brien are now free men.
Updated: 09:37 Monday, July 26, 2004
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From the Evening Press
http://www.thisisyork.co.ukhttp://archive.thisisyork.co.uk/2005/4/4/226868.htmlGunning for Barry Prudom
From the Evening Press, first published Thursday 13th Dec 2001.
Triple murderer Barry Prudom's 17-day reign of terror left scars that have still not healed to this day. STEPHEN LEWIS reports on a new documentary about the hunt for the killer once feared as Britain's most dangerous man.
RETIRED police dog-handler Ken Oliver will never forget the day he stopped a car during a routine check in Dalby Forest. He came face to face with death. He walked up to the car and asked the man inside to step out. "I even called him sir," he says. "I said: `Excuse me sir, out of the car'. Nothing. He never even looked at me. I said: `I don't tell anybody twice. Out of the car, now.'"
Instead of replying, the man lifted his hand - with a gun in it.
"I knew for a fact he was going for my head," says Ken, interviewed for a new TV documentary about the hunt for the `phantom in the forest', Barry Prudom.
"He shot me across the nose. The young dog came out then. He shot him twice, which just gave me enough time to start and run."
Ken ran to a nearby holiday cottage where two little girls were playing with their grandfather. "I was shouting `I'm a policeman and I've been shot'," he says. "I thought he had followed me. I just had to get the kids out of the way. I thought if he took me out, he would take the kids out as well."
But the killer hadn't followed him. Instead, he had driven into the forest, where his car was later found burnt out. It was the seventh day of the hunt for a man who, up until then, had no face and no name.
Prudom's reign of terror began on June 17, 1982, when PC David Haigh was delivering a summons to a poacher in North Yorkshire's Washburn Valley.
When he didn't return, his colleague and friend Mick Clipston went in search of him.
Clipston found the police car with its doors open and David Haigh dead beside it. He had been shot in the forehead. It was the beginning of the biggest armed manhunt in British police history: one that lasted 17 days.
Having cleared the poacher of suspicion, police were left with a murder but no apparent motive - and almost no evidence. Written on a clipboard, found under Haigh's body, was a date of birth, a name and a car registration number.
But the name was false, and the car was found abandoned three days later, 25 miles away. The trail was cold.
Meanwhile, the gunman was on the move. In Lincolnshire he broke into a house. Then, 20 miles away, on the fifth day of the police hunt, he entered the home of Sylvia and George Luckett, shooting both in the head before escaping in their car. George died instantly, but his wife crawled next door for help. She survived, but to this day remembers nothing.
Two days later, up in the Dalby Forest, came Ken Oliver's encounter with the gunman. He immediately alerted his police colleagues to the gunman's whereabouts. Among the first to respond was a young Detective Sergeant from Scarborough, Jim Kilmartin. He remembers, with a handful of other men, finding the burning car the killer had escaped in. They were wary of approaching it.
"The car was only just starting to crackle and burn," says Jim, later head of York police. "We were only minutes behind him."
They tracked the killer with a dog, doubling through the trees. Eventually, as it was beginning to get dark, they came to a steep defile. The killer could have been lurking in the shadows, watching them. "I was not prepared to go down there," Jim says, drily.
By dawn next day, a huge operation had been mounted, involving marksmen, helicopters and 1,000 policemen.
Then came a breakthrough. In Leeds, PC Martin Hatton was cross-referencing the information on David Haigh's clipboard with police records. Working from the date of birth on the clipboard, he came across the name of Barry Edwards, wanted for wounding.
The police searched his flat and established his real name was Barry Prudom - a man known to them as a keep-fit fanatic, obsessed with weapons and the military. They also found a manual on survival techniques written by Eddie McGee - a former paratrooper and experienced tracker. Prudom had attended one of his courses.
Confirmation Prudom was their man came when Ken Oliver identified him from a photograph. After ten days, the phantom had a name. But he had vanished.
Then, on the twelfth day of the hunt, Prudom walked calmly into the centre of Old Malton. Sgt David Winter and Constable Mick Wood were on patrol when Wood saw his colleague challenging a man. There was one gunshot - and Winter lay dead on the grass, 200 yards from the police station.
North Yorkshire's then chief constable Kenneth Henshaw ordered the largest arsenal of weapons ever issued to a British police force and threw a cordon round Malton, sealing off the town. The siege of Malton had begun.
But still there was no sign of the killer. Prudom was lying low: until July 3 when, perhaps driven by hunger, he walked into the home of Maurice Johnson.
For 11 hours, Prudom held the Johnsons and their son Brian hostage: and, as the hours passed, he struck up a strange relationship with them. In a poignant interview for the TV cameras, Brian recounts what happened. "As the night went on, we got talking as though we had known each other for years," he says. "He was calling me Brian and my father he was calling dad."
Eventually, at 3.15am, Prudom left - after leaving Brian with a present, a US paratroopers' ring. "He said: `Promise me that you will wear it', and I said `yes, I will,'" says Brian.
After he had gone, Brian's father called the police. Once more, Jim Kilmartin was on the killer's trail.
Together, he and tracker Eddie McGee, who had taught Prudom his survival skills, followed the killer's trail through the early morning dew to the back of the nearby tennis club where some pine fencing was lying against a wall behind thick undergrowth. It was Prudom's hideout.
A firearms squad from Greater Manchester, led by Chief Insp David Clarkson, was called in. Clarkson, desperate to make sure it was Prudom, climbed the wall behind the hideout and tried to prise the top open. It was too heavy. Then he tried talking to the man they believed was holed up inside. There was no response.
Suddenly, a gunshot rang out. Clarkson, believing Prudom was firing on his officers, ordered them to open fire.
When police eventually opened the hideout, Prudom was dead. But the final irony was yet to be revealed. A post-mortem into the killer's death revealed the truth.
The single shot Clarkson had heard had not been aimed at police at all. Triple killer Barry Prudom had shot himself - becoming the last victim of his reign of terror.
http://archive.thisisyork.co.uk/2001/12/13/293466.html
