25 years on: Monster’s sick murder of frail gran in the wrong place at wrong time
‘SEXUAL DEVIANT’ FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE AFTER CHANCE ARREST BY POLICE
A QUICK visit to the toilet as she waited for a bus cost Shirley Leach her life.
The shocking, senseless murder – 25 years ago – puzzled police for more than two decades and cast a long shadow in Bury as one of Greater Manchester’s most notorious unsolved cases.
In the end, a chance police traffic stop, and advances in DNA profiling, led to the killer’s capture and eventual justice for Shirley’s family.
The mother-of-two was 66, a widow and grandmother who lived with her son in Bury. She was small and frail.
Her killer, former soldier and bus driver Ian O’Callaghan, held a string of previous convictions for crimes against women, including indecent assault. He harboured his dreadful secret for 12 long years until he was stopped for drink-driving in Moston, north Manchester.
After visiting her sick daughter Beryl at Fairfield Hospital in Bury on January 6, 1994, Shirley caught a bus to Bury Interchange in the town centre, but her connecting bus home had already left when she arrived.
She decided to wait and went to the toilet in the interchange.
It was there – in a dirty, browntiled cubicle at gone 9pm – that O’Callaghan pounced. He was just 25 at the time.
Shirley was found stripped naked and mutilated by a woman returning home from a night out the following morning. Her murder was described later in court as a ‘determined attack’ and held features too graphic to print.
Her clothing and dentures were found strewn on the cubicle floor and detectives believe O’Callaghan mutilated her body to hide incriminating evidence.
It was the start of the biggest manhunt in the town’s history.
DNA samples were recovered from the cubicle at the time. They included a sample of blood from a door and a profile from Shirley’s clothing. Police, after numerous public appeals, began a screening operation which eventually involved hundreds of men, but there was no breakthrough.
O’Callaghan, who was working as a moulder at a road cone manufacturer at the time of Shirley’s murder and lived a 20-minute walk away from the Interchange in New Cateaton Street, was finally caught after he was stopped for drink-driving in February 2006.
A mouth swab was taken from him, then a blood test – the results of which matched the profile taken from the crime scene. Married father-of-one O’Callaghan, a former TA soldier, also strongly matched a description given to police by a woman at the time of a man she had seen acting suspiciously in the bus station.
The woman, who was waiting for a bus, was said to have been so scared that she got a taxi home. Police then compiled an e-fit image of the ‘bobble hat’ man, but until the chance crash, O’Callaghan was never traced or even considered to be a suspect, despite his violent convictions.
Charged with a murder he denied, O’Callaghan stood trial over three days at Manchester Crown Court in front of High Court judge Mr Justice Henriques.
It was there that the facts of the horrific case were laid bare, as detec-