Hi, and welcome back to The Unseen Podcast, a podcast dedicated to missing
people, unresolved cases, and UK true crime. Today we're going to be
exploring the tragic murder of twenty year old Deborah Wood from Leeds in nineteen ninety
six. Her murder was violent and the lengths that the killer went to cover
up the crime caused huge concern for West Yorkshire police. Her murder is still
unsolved and her family desperately want more answers to what happened. This episode contains
descriptions that some listeners may find distress in, so listener discretion is advised.
On January the fourteenth, nineteen ninety six, a fire was reported to emergency
services in the West Yorkshire village of Burleigh, around eleven miles northwest from the
city of Leeds. The passers by noticed the fire at Burley train station,
and becoming worried about it spreading, they made the emergency call. Firefighters immediately
went out to the scene to investigate the situation and to put out the flames.
When they arrived, they weren't prepared for what they were about to see.
When the flames were extinguished, what they found was a horrific sight.
The charred body of a woman who had been set alight was the source of
the fire, and nobody could have been expecting such a terrible cause. The
scene was now quite rightly a crime scene and West Yorkshire Police were now involved.
The woman's body was damaged to the extent that her features in any distinguishing
marks were not able to be discerned or identified. The police had just a
few details to work with, namely evidence of her clothing, red fingerless gloves
of age, skirt and boots. This wasn't a lot to go on,
however, it was the only indication that they had. Why was this woman
at the train station, why had she become the victim of a crime,
and who was she? Someone did recognize the clothing and had come to a
horrific conclusion. Linda Vernon heard the news about the body that had been found
on TV. She was immediately concerned by it. When she heard about the
clothing that the woman had been found in, she was sure that her fears
were right and her heart sank. She rang the police and told them that's
my last She would later say, I knew it was our Deborah. Linda
had recognized the small pieces of clothing that had been recovered, she later told
the press. They said there were only bits of clothes left. Red fingerless
gloves, boots and a skirt. I knew then Joanne, her sister,
had given her the gloves, and I'd bought her the beige skirt. Linda
had become concerned about her twenty year old daughter, Deborah, would when she
had had plans to meet up with her and go shopping in the market town
of Marley in the Borough of Leeds. Deborah hadn't turned up to meet her,
and Linda knew that this was unusual. Linda would later explain that Deborah
had recently moved out of the family home in Wakefield and into her own flat
in Leads. Linda stated that Deborah was the baby of the family, having
grown up with two older sisters and a brother, so Deborah moving out was
a big deal for her and her family. Deborah seemed to be happy with
the move though, and continue to keep in contact with her family and meet
up with them often. It was normal for her to meet up with her
mum and do a bit of shopping, and so when Linda turned up but
Deborah didn't, this rang alarm bells Linda explained, we were supposed to meet
outside the town hall in Marley. I remember it was freezing cold and foggy.
I waited for more than three hours, but she never turned up.
This was highly unusual and out of character, and it made Linda immediately worried.
The fact that the worst imaginable was now reality when Deborah's body was recovered
must have been horrendous. And also the fact that Linda had found this out
on a TV report is such a tragedy. Now that police had an identification,
they began trying to establish Deborah's last known movements, as well as sending
her body for analysis. They discovered that Deborah seemed to have last been seen
ten days before her body was recovered. She had met her dad for drinks
at Big Lille's public house in Leeds City Center on the fourth of January.
Deborah left her around five p m. That evening, and this appeared to
be the last time that any one had seen her alive. Where had she
been during this time and what had happened to her when she left? These
were the questions that police were hoping to get some answers to through the analysis
of Deborah's body. Her body had undergone an awful lot of damage due to
the fire, and it was confirmed that it had been doused with petrol before
being set alight. This damage made a cause of death very difficult to establish.
One thing that the forensic examiners did find was both shocking and surprising.
Forensic evidence that was recovered suggested that before her body was set alight, it
seemed to have been kept in cold storage, and this was thought to have
been for up to ten days. This news was alarming and completely fit the
theory that whatever had happened to Deborah was definitively a murder. It also raised
some questions why had some one murdered her and kept her in cold storage before
setting her a light. Where had they done this, when had they done
this? Given there were only ten days between Deborah going missing and her body
being recovered, there was a very narrow window when this could have occurred,
and suggested that some one had done her harm. Not long after she had
disappeared, police began looking at all angles of the investigation, trying to take
into account all of the possible things that could have happened to Deborah. But
given there wasn't a lot of forensic evidence or witnesses placing anyone specific at the
scene. It was proving difficult. They appealed for information and for anyone to
come forward to help. The police were optimistic that the appeal would bring forward
important information, and Deborah's case was featured on crime Watch at the end of
March nineteen ninety six. This gave the case a much needed public platform,
and this was a step in the right direction for the investigation. Unfortunately,
despite this national attention, few leads came in that were relevant to Deborah's case
or identified a possible suspect. This was, of course disappointing, and as
time went by, Deborah's family were left wondering who had committed this awful murder
and why there were things that just didn't make sense to her family. Why
was she in that area in the first place. Deborah's brother, Craig would
later confirm that she had no links to the area in which her body was
found and there was no reason why she would have been there. Deborah had
been behaving like her usual self and there was no indication that anything was wrong
during that last time that she was seen in Leeds. What had happened and
how Deborah had become the victim of such a brutal crime was a real mystery.
Something that remained a mystery for the police was that Deborah's body had been
kept in cold storage for up to ten days before her body was then set
on fire. Why had someone done this, where had she been kept and
why had her body been left where it was in that location. There were
features of the case that didn't make sense, and they had little information to
answer any of them. Deborah's case began to grow cold when information and evidence
wasn't forthcoming and there were no immediate breaks in the case. The year two
thousand came around and Deborah's family were still waiting for answers. However, another
tragic murder would soon make connections that nobody was expecting. On the twentieth of
August two thousand and one, the body of sixteen year old Leanne Tiernan was
discovered close to Ottley, on the border between North and West Yorkshire. Leanne
had been missing since the previous November after she'd been on a shopping trip with
her friend in Leeds and was on her way back to her house in Bramley
when she suddenly vanished. When her friend Sarah arrived home, she rang Leanne's
house, but was shocked to find that she wasn't there. She hadn't arrived
back. Leanne's family were immediately worried and phoned the police to report her missing.
The investigation until Leanne's disappearance was large, with Detective Superintendent Chris gregg in
Madge of the missing person inquiry. Thousands of house to house inquiries were made,
along with searches of the area where she had last known to be seen.
Some DNA samples were taken from local men in the area, and Leanne's
face was printed on the side of milk cartons as the months passed, though
Leanne had not been found until nine months later by someone walking their dogs.
The fact that Leanne's body had been found in that location was also quite concerning,
given that just around a hundred yards from where she'd been found, another
woman's body had also been discovered. Yvonne Fit was just thirty two years old
when her body was found in a shallow grave in September of nineteen ninety two,
close to where Leanne Tiernan had now been found. Yvonne had an eleven
year old daughter and had been working as a sex worker in the red light
districts of Bradford and Leeds at the time that she had been murdered, and
she had last been seen in January of that year in Bradford. When her
decomposing body was analyzed, it was discovered that she had been stabbed to death
and that her body transported either dead or alive, to the location where it
was eventually found. It was thought that this had occurred in around July of
nineteen ninety two, two months before she was found. Yvonne's murder had been
featured on Crime Watch and there was an anonymous caller who phoned into the show
in November of nineteen ninety two with the name of a possible suspect. This
caller was not able to be traced. Yvonne's family were distraught by the news
that she had been found murdered and described her as being left without any dignity.
Despite the publicity that Yvonne's case received at the time, her case grew
cold without any real suspects or evidence to identify who was responsible for the murder.
When Leanne's body was found very close to where Ivans had been, the
police were concerned about what exactly they were dealing with. There didn't appear to
be any tangible links between the two cases, given that almost ten years had
passed and the two women were very different as victims, but the proximity was
both strange and problematic. Liane's body was taken to be analyzed and the way
in which she was concealed was looked at closely. Her body had been wrapped
in green plastic bin liners, which were then tied with twine. Her head
had also been wrapped in a black bin liner, which was held in place
with a dog collar. Her hands had been tied together with cable ties,
and there were also cable ties around her neck with a scarf. Her body
was then finally wrapped in a floor or duva cover. The post martem brought
up something strange. Leanne had been missing for nine months, but her body
was inconsistent with this, leading forensic experts to believe that her body may have
been kept in cold storage or in a freezer for some period of time.
This meant that the decomposition was not as severe as it may have been if
this hadn't been the case. This, in a way would help the investigation
later on, during the inquiries in Leanne's murder, a name was given to
police by two separate people who had once dated the same man, John Taylor.
Taylor lived on the same housing estate as Leanne and had bragged to both
of these women when passing the woods where Leanne was found that he often went
poaching there. Taylor often went hunting and poaching, and was known to be
cruel and violent towards animals. When police investigated Taylor, they found that he
often put adverts in Lonely Heart columns after his wife had divorced him in nineteen
ninety six, and these women that he met up with told officers that he
had a bondage fetish. He would regularly tie up women with cable ties,
and this made many of the women uncomfortable. When Taylor's house was searched,
they found other items that linked him to the crime, and they ended up
with a wealth of forensic evidence against him. Scientists were able to use mitochondrial
DNA testing to match a hair found wrapped in the knot of the scarf around
Leam's neck to Taylor. They also found the twine that had been used to
wrap the body up was usually only used by the Ministry of Defense but a
small batch had been sold for nets to catch rabbits in This batch matched the
twine used at the scene and was also found in Taylor's home. Red carpet
fibers were also found on Leanne's clothing, and when Taylor's home was searched,
it was discovered that he had removed a lot of the carpet and burnt it,
but nails in the floorboards still had some carpet attached, and this was
a match to the fibers found on Leanne's body. Pollen analysis of Leanne's body
also showed that she had been in Taylor's garden not long before she had died.
As distinctive types of pollen was found in Leanne's nasal cavity, there was
no getting around it. John Taylor was responsible for lean Tenan's murder. He
was convicted of Leanne's murder in two thousand and two and was sentenced to life
in prison with a minimum term set in two thousand and six of thirty years.
Police began to believe that Taylor had been involved in other crimes before,
with Detective Superintendent Chris Gregg dating that they do not believe that this was the
first major crime he had committed. In fact, they used his DNA profile
to match him to two sexual assaults in the nineteen eighties. One occurred in
nineteen eighty eight when he attacked a thirty two year old woman wearing a mask
and a knife as she was walking across some waist ground in Leeds. He
raped this woman and then let her go. In nineteen eighty nine, he
broke into a twenty one year old woman's house in Bramley and Leeds at lunchtime.
He blindfolded and gagged her and then raped her. Her baby was in
the other room at the time of these attacks. These were brutal attacks with
a clear sexual motive, and in two thousand and three he pled guilty to
the two attacks. He was later charged with sixteen other offenses in two thousand
and eighteen, including another three rapes between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen nine six.
These were all discovered through DNA testing. The judge stated, you carried
out a twenty year campaign of rape and assaults fueled by sadistic desire to inflict
pain for sexual gratification. John Taylor was clearly a sexual predator and killer,
and therefore it was no surprise that the police wanted to check if he had
been involved in any other possible murders. One of them that stood out was
the murder of Deborah Wood in nineteen ninety six. Deborah's case began to be
talked about in relation to John Taylor for several reasons. One of the main
things that made a connection between the two was the fact that Leantinan's body had
been kept in cold storage before being buried in a shallow grave. This odd
and distinctive fact was also the same as Deborah's, whose body was kept frozen
before later in set alight. There was also the fact that the area where
Deborah's body was found was only around a twelve minute walk away from John Taylor's
home in the area of Bramley. The suspicion that Taylor had something to do
with the murder is at this moment still a suspicion, as forensic evidence is
yet to conclude whether he had anything to do with it. Taylor is being
looked at for several unsolved murders in the area, including that if Yvonne Fit,
the nineteen ninety five murder of Lindsay Joe Rymer, who disappeared from hebden
Bridge and whose case we've covered previously on the podcast, and the nineteen ninety
one murder of Donna Healey from Bradford, whose body also appeared to have been
frozen before being dumped. Deborah's family believed that Taylor did have something to do
with Deborah's murder and hope that this can be confirmed so that they can finally
get some justice our closure. Craig Would, Deborah's brother, told The Mirror
in two nineteen, I really believe he killed my sister, and I'm going
to write to him and ask him to see me. There's far too many
coincidences. The police told us she was jumped in a blanket and wrapped him
bimbags like his other victim. It also said in the coroner's report that she
was kept in cold storage and why would she be in that area. She
had no links there and Taylor only lived a short walk away. He's not
getting out now, so he should admit to this crime. If I saw
him, I'd say you've had a bad life and it's time to come clean.
You've caused so much misery for all these years. He needs to let
people like me and my mom and our family get some peace while we're still
alive. Deborah's mum Linda also stated, I want him to put me out
of my misery before I go. I'm sure it him. When I saw
his eyes, they sent chills through me. I want to see him face
to face and just ask him tell me the truth. This has been twenty
three years of her I can't describe the pain at this moment. There is
nothing concrete linking Taylor to the other murders and they're still unsolved. Police have
to, of course keep an open mind about what could have happened to Deborah,
and there may be many other people out there who are possible suspects and
could be responsible for her murder. In twenty twenty one, Detective Inspector Paul
Conroy from West Yorkshire's Operation Recall Team appealed for information about Deborah's murder, saying
this crime may now be twenty five years old, but time doesn't diminish our
resolve to bring the person or persons responsible for this horrendous crime to justice,
and likewise, her grieving family want answers about what happened to Deborah. I
would appear to anyone who knows anything about this case. To examine the conscience
and come forward. Your information could make all the difference. Deborah was given
no dignity in death, with her body being burned to the extent that she
was only identified using dental records and DNA. Previous attempts to bring her killer
to justice, including an appeal and reconstruction on BBC's Crime Watch, have so
far failed. Hopefully, with the passage of time, people may feel more
comfortable are able to come forward and tell us what happened. As with all
unsolved murder inquiries, the case remains under investigation and a thorough forensic review remains
ongoing. This is where Deborah's case is at the moment, with appeals still
being made by the police to try and track down Deborah's killer. It's tragic
that all of these years later, we still do not know who did this
to her, and this is the same for yvon Fit, Donna Healy and
Lindsay Joe Rymer, who are often spoken about together. Was this the work
of one person? Are any of these crimes connected. We don't know,
and police have certainly not officially connected any of them. I'm sure there's a
lot of work happening behind the scenes on DNA profiling and matching, and this
may well eventually crack the case. However, it could also be cracked by
someone coming forward with any information that they have. If you know anything about
Deborah, Yvonne Lindsay or Donna's murders, then please contact West Yorkshire Police on
one oh one. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you'd like
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show notes. As always, I'm Caprice and this has been unseen