Kidnapping and murder of Lesley Whittle

The Murder of Lesley Whittle was a noted murder of heiress Lesley Whittle, the last crime undertaken by Denis Neilsen who became known to the British press as the Black Panther.

Lesley Whittle

Lesley Whittle, born 1957, was the daughter George Whittle, the founder of Whittle coaches, and his second/common-law wife Dorothy.

Background

To avoid death duties well before he died in 1970 aged 65, George gifted three houses plus £70,000 in cash to Dorothy, £107,000 to his son Ronald and £82,000 to Lesley. As he had left othing to her, George's first wife Selina began legal proceedings in May 1972 to obtain reasonable provision from her husband's estate. The story was picked up by the Daily Express.

Kidnap and murder

Neilsen read about a dispute between Whittle and Selina. Incensed at Selina's treatment, he decided he was going to kidnap either Ronald or Dorothy Whittle and hold them until a £50,000 ransom had been paid. He had estimated that taking £50,000 from the Whittles would not affect their lifestyle too much because they would still have quite a bit of capital left plus their successful coach business.

On 14 January 1975, Neilsen entered the Whittle home in Highley Shropshire. Encountering Lesley by mistake, he decide to kidnap her instead; only her mother was asleep in the house at the time. Neilson demanded a £50,000 ransom from her family for her release.

Investigation

A series of police bungles and other circumstances meant that Whittle's brother Ronald was unable to deliver the ransom money to the place and time demanded by the kidnapper, who, it is widely believed, pushed Whittle off the ledge in the drainage shaft where he had tethered her in Bathpool Park, at Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, strangling her. An alternative to this scenario is that Neilson was not even there when Whittle died and that, in fact, he fled on the night of the failed ransom collection without returning to the shaft after he panicked, believing the police were closing in on him, leaving Whittle alive in the dark surrounded by rats and other vermin to slowly starve for a considerable period of time before falling to her death. If the police had searched the park and the shaft the morning after Ron Whittle's attempt to deliver the ransom the story might have had a very different ending.

Whittle's body was found on 7 March 1975, hanging from a wire at the bottom of the shaft. The subsequent post-mortem examination showed that Whittle had not, in fact, died slowly from strangulation but instantaneously from vagal inhibition. The shock of the fall had caused her heart to literally stop beating. The pathologist, Dr John Brown, reported that this would have been induced by high blood pressure in her carotid artery, caused by the constrictive wire loop around her neck triggering an alarm to her brain via the vagus nerve. The brain's response to this urgent signal for a reduction in artery pressure would be to slow down radically the heart and when that failed, her heart stopped altogether and she died.

The pathologist noted that Whittle weighed only 98 pounds (44 kg) when found, her stomach and intestines were completely empty, she had lost a considerable amount of weight and was emaciated. Even if Neilson's assertions that he fed her chicken soup, spaghetti and meatball and bought her fish and chips and chicken legs were callous lies and the last time she actually ate was around 7 o'clock on the evening of 13 January this would only leave a window of around 80 hours for her to have lost the weight if the allegation that Neilson pushed her to her death in the early hours of 17 January is to stand scrutiny.