SO WHY IS SHE STILL CLASSED AS MISSING?
My sister’s husband confessed to an undercover cop that he strangled her and incinerated her body...
TWO weeks ago, ex-children’s nurse Christine Weatherhead made her annual pilgrimage to a tree set amid the pretty grounds of a Leeds cemetery. In a ritual she has performed every year for more than three decades, she placed flowers by a commemorative plaque, tidied the overgrown foliage and swore again that she would continue to fight for her much-loved elder sister Patricia Hall.
This is the nearest thing to a grave Christine has for mother- of-two Pat. There has been no funeral, no inquest, nor even an official account of her sister’s death. Indeed, Pat — who vanished without a trace in the early hours from her home near Leeds at the age of 39 — is still classed as missing.
But this is no ordinary missing persons tale. Three decades ago, Pat’s husband of ten years, Keith, made an extraordinary murder confession to an undercover policewoman, admitting he’d ‘strangled her but it wasn’t easy’. He then told the officer he had dumped Pat’s body in an industrial incinerator.
He was arrested and in 1994 put on trial at Leeds Crown Court. But in a devastating twist, the judge ruled the confession inadmissible, saying it broke police interviewing guidelines.
Extracted as a result of an undercover sting — and secretly taped — Hall’s words were never heard by the jury and, after a nine-day trial, he was cleared of Pat’s murder and manslaughter.
In an equally unusual move, the judge agreed to the media’s request to publish transcripts of the confession after a group of editors appealed for reporting restrictions to be lifted. Hall, now 68, remains an innocent man.
For Christine, 62, the case has cast a long shadow over more than half her life. Still fighting, still determined to get answers, she says she will not rest until the family receives an official declaration that Pat was unlawfully killed.
SINCE the trial, she has repeatedly applied to the West Yorkshire Coroner and Home Office for an inquest so that at least her sister’s case can be reviewed — but has been told it would be prejudicial against Keith Hall.
‘But what about Pat?’ she asks now. ‘It is like she is worthless, doesn’t count as a person. How can that be right for any woman?
‘Pat is not simply a head and shoulders picture stapled to a police file gathering dust on their shelves as every year passes. She was vibrant, bubbly — just listening to her chatter on would bring a smile to my face.
‘We had so much to look forward to, raising our sons together. We have all missed out on that. Her disappearance has affected so many people, mentally and emotionally.’
As cold cases go, there is a remarkably clear account of the events leading up to Pat’s disappearance on January 27, 1992. Just 48 hours before, she spent the day at Christine’s picturesque 220-acre North Yorkshire farm, laughing, joking and talking optimistically about her future.
Having overcome postnatal depression after having her sons Andrew, then nine, and Graeme, five — which led to a spell in hospital — Pat was making plans to leave Keith and move to Scotland. ‘Pat had decided to divorce Keith and make a fresh start with her sons,’ Christine claims. ‘ She was happy and I just thank God that is my final memory of her.’
Hall agrees that Pat wanted a divorce. In a remarkably frank interview in a 2022 Amazon Prime documentary called The Confession, he says Pat told him she wanted a divorce the night before she disappeared and admits he feared losing half their home, his sons and his grocery business.
The sisters were due to meet the next day — Tuesday, January 28 — but Christine rang Pat’s semidetached home in Moorland Drive, Pudsey, that morning to cancel. Her young son Stuart, then six, was ill and she couldn’t leave him.
‘I left a message but Pat, unusually, never called me back,’ she remembers. ‘Keith rang me that evening and told me she had left their home the day before and he did not know where she was.
‘I asked if he’d reported her missing to the police but he hadn’t. I knew Pat would never leave her boys with him, so my brothers and I were suspicious from the start. Our cousin, who was a police officer, reported her missing the next day.’
At Hall’s trial, the couple’s neighbour Christopher Bennett said he heard them having a row with shouting, ‘doors banging around the house’ and Pat sounding ‘distressed’ late that Sunday night.
A short time later, the family’s car sped off from the house. Hall has always maintained that Pat, who worked as an Avon lady, left of her own accord.
When approached by the Mail, he also claims to have reported his wife missing to the police.
Retired Detective Inspector Jim Bancroft told the documentary: ‘We suspected that what might have brought this row to an abrupt end is that Keith Hall had killed his wife.’ As detectives launched a
search for Pat, the family car — a blue Ford Sierra — was found abandoned a mile from her home.
A witness also told officers that he saw an unidentified man lifting something into or out of the car on the same road, climb over a fence into a field and walk towards nearby lakes on the night Pat disappeared. Police were convinced that man was Hall.
Their suspicions mounted when Christine and Pat’s sister-in-law Jeanette Fox told officers he had allegedly tried to strangle Pat in October 1991 — three months before she vanished.
Now Jeanette, 61, is speaking out. In her first newspaper interview, she recalls an unsettling meeting with Hall, saying: ‘I was at Pat’s mum Edith Fox’s house and went upstairs to the toilet.
‘When I came out, I jumped as Keith was stood in the doorway with his arms across the door. I asked to pass him. “Say please,” he muttered. I ran downstairs as quickly as I could. I told Ian, Pat’s brother and my then future husband and he said: “He is odd.”’
Jeanette says she also witnessed Hall’s temper first hand.
‘It was Christmas 1983 and we were at Pat and Keith’s for lunch,’ she remembers. ‘Pat was serving lunch in the kitchen and there was a sudden commotion. Edith said, “Oh, he’s off on one again.” He’d wanted Yorkshire puddings served as a starter but Pat served them up with the meal. The plates of food were brought in and Keith simply picked his up and threw it against the wall before storming out for hours. I was stunned.’
And while Jeanette didn’t witness any other alleged incidents, she says: ‘Pat phoned me throughout 1991, often upset about Keith’s temper and moods. In October she rang, sobbing, “He’s gone too far. He was strangling me and he wasn’t going to stop. His eyes were terrible. His eyes were awful.”
‘Pat told me they were stood at the top of the stairs and she feigned fainting for him to stop.
‘I told the police all this but because it was classed as hearsay, the prosecution could not use it in the trial.’
Throughout the Amazon documentary, Hall remains defiant in his innocence, denying the strangulation incident ever happened, telling police: ‘There was only one person that was making up the story and that was Patricia, I’m afraid.’ He also denies throwing a plate against a wall at the Christmas lunch.
But Christine recalls a heartbreaking chat she had with her sister earlier that month.
‘She said, “If anything happens to me, will you look after the boys?” I said of course I would and thought she meant anything happening due to her depression.’
Six months after Pat’s disappearance, with the trail seemingly cold, Hall began to answer lonely hearts ads in local newspapers. Christine’s ‘stomach turned’ when she heard about it. ‘It is a very short time to start dating again, especially when you have two young children who’d be missing their mum,’ she says. ‘Unless Keith knew she was not coming back.’
ALERTED to his hunt for a new girlfriend and suspicious of his involvement in Pat’s disappearance, the police hatched a honeypot plan and put up an undercover policewoman codenamed ‘Liz’ as a romantic correspondent.
The ploy worked better than anyone could have imagined and after six ‘ dates’ over several months, Hall began talking about getting engaged to Liz, even though he was still married to Pat.
Now was the time to strike. Detective Inspector Bancroft was concerned at the pace of the ‘relationship’ and decided to call a halt to the liaison — but only after one final meeting. Sitting in her car — wired with a recording device — on a freezing February night in 1993, undercover police officer Liz told Hall she was worried Pat would turn up in his life again.
As they kissed, he confessed to killing her and burning her body. When she asked why he burnt her body, he calmly replied: ‘I didn’t. I dumped it in an incinerator.’
Within days, Hall was charged with the murder. Officers said his face visibly drained of blood when they played the tape to him in an interview room at Pudsey Police Station. And yet, as we know, the jury never heard it.
In The Confession, Hall said he thinks about Pat every day. He says he only admitted to her killing because he was ‘infatuated’ with Liz and ‘wanted to date again’.
‘Six months is a long time really,’ he said. ‘And I thought she [Pat] won’t come back to me, and that’s when I did start dating. I wanted the company of a female. That’s what I were missing.’
In previous interviews, the retired bread delivery man — who still lives in the Pudsey marital home — explained why he thinks the judge ruled the secret ‘confession’ tape inadmissible.
‘On the fateful night my opening words were, “Did I murder my wife? I did not murder my wife.” She [Liz] wanted to know if Pat would be coming back and I gave her three different stories as to why she wouldn’t be.’
Hall claimed Liz wasn’t happy with any of the stories he had spun, including that Pat had gone to Scotland to stay with family.
He said: ‘She still wasn’t happy so I said, “Shall I try again?” That’s when I gave her the last version. I just made it up from things I knew about the police investigation.
‘I talked about strangling because the police had talked about it to me [during an earlier interview] and I mentioned burning the body because I knew the police had been checking incinerators. I just said it because she kept going on.’
Just before his arrest, Christine and brother Ian went one evening to confront him. ‘I looked him in the face — I needed to look in his eyes as he answered it — and simply said, “Did you strangle Pat?” Keith just glared at me and said, “That’s your opinion, isn’t it?” I felt sickened by him and walked away.’
He later penned her a vitriolic six-page letter, banning her from seeing her nephews, Andrew, who is now 41, and Graeme, 37.
Contact with them has remained sporadic ever since.
When approached by the Mail, Hall said he did stop Christine from seeing his sons but denies writing her the letter, which this newspaper has seen, adding: ‘Please ask yourself why now, 30 years later, is such rubbish being told? Does it actually have any bearing on anything?’
Over the years, there have been some glimmers of hope for Christine, herself a mother to Stuart, 38, and Tim, 32 — but her relentless fight for her sister has suffered repeated setbacks.
Above all, what Christine wants is an inquest and an official declaration of unlawful killing.
Since Pat is still not officially dead, there can be no memorial service nor headstone — only the tree and the plaque.
In April 1994, West Yorkshire’s then Chief Coroner David Hinchliff wrote to the Home Office asking for an inquest.
After listening to the tapes and speaking to case detectives, his letter said: ‘I am definitely of the opinion that Patricia Anne Hall was murdered by her husband at a location within my jurisdiction and that her body has been deliberately destroyed by burning and cannot be recovered.’
A year later, the case was debated in Parliament by Pat’s then MP Sir Giles Shaw — but his request for an inquest was rejected by Home Secretary Michael Howard, who said it was not in the public interest.
Christine, who is married to farmer Robert, 69, appealed his decision in the High Court — but lost. In March 1995, she successfully applied to the Court of Appeal to hold a judicial review into the refusal but, in December, it upheld Howard’s decision.
Then, in 2001, Hall was jailed for four years for attacking former neighbour Christopher Bennett with a brick — the man who reported the row to police on the night of Pat’s disappearance — leaving him needing 14 stitches to the head.
Christine welcomed his conviction, saying it was a ‘small comfort to see him jailed’ — but it failed to help move forward Pat’s case and, of course, attacking someone with a brick does not make them capable of murder.
Prior to Mr Hinchliff’s retirement, he made a final appeal to England’s then Chief Coroner Mark Lucraft in 2017 to hold an inquest. Again, it was denied.
The constant defeats have left Christine fearful she will never see the investigation reopened. ‘As we progressed through the trial, then the High Court, and realised we were not going to achieve anything and I could not afford to take it any further, I felt bitter about the legal system,’ she says.
‘I’ve become a bit harder but probably that’s my way of coping. It has undoubtedly changed me. I feel let down, I can’t deny that.
‘I don’t understand how a good, law-abiding woman can disappear and the judicial system continue to dismiss her.’
JEANETTE adds that Pat’s disappearance has changed Christine and her husband, saying: ‘They were happy people and now it seems their souls are enveloped in sadness.’
Despite the case running cold for more than three decades, Hall maintains that he did not kill Pat and even appealed for her to get in touch in the Amazon Prime documentary. He said: ‘We’re all players in a game of life. It’s how we play the hand we’re dealt that’s important.’
In a statement, Assistant Chief Constable Pat Twiggs, West Yorkshire Police Force’s lead for Specialist Crime And Criminal Justice, said the force is ‘ committed to doing everything we can to support them [Pat’s family]’.
‘The investigation remains open and, regardless of the passage of time, we would still welcome any new information that could assist in getting her family the answers they need.’
‘I won’t give up my fight for her,’ says Christine, as once again she clears the foliage around the tree. ‘I owe it to her. I want to give her dignity — closure to her life. I want to hold a memorial service. It’s the last thing I can do for her.’
Pat would like the idea of a pilgrimage to a tree in her name, says Christine.
‘It is a living thing and she was such a lively person.’
But it is not the same as an official record, set out in black and white, to tell the world what happened to her. ‘ After more than 11,000 grief-filled days, our family deserves answers.’