The killer and his victim were complete strangers
David Wilson and Daniel Johnson were complete strangers, a fact which meant police were forced to make repeated appeals to the public for help in identifying the killer.
“From the outset, this was a stranger murder which, in effect, means that the offender and the victim are not known to each other and our investigations have shown that David Wilson had never met Daniel Johnson,” said Detective Superintendent Mark Ord, who led the investigation into David Wilson’s death.
“Our inquiries necessarily meant that we had to make numerous media appeals and appeals to the community in a variety of forms with the support of David’s family and those appeals focused on two key things.
“They focused on the CCTV footage we had of that robbery at the post office – and we asked the community to come forward and tell us who they thought that was – and they focussed on the call.
“We released extracts of the call and asked the community to come forward and tell us, did they recognise the voice on that call and, if they did, who was it?
“We got exactly what we asked for – we got several dozen nominations of people who could either have been captured on the CCTV or, in fact, were the caller.
“Each of those nominations needed to be the subject of a detail investigation and we had to either implicate those individuals in the murder of David Wilson or eliminate them completely from it.
“It was only in March of 2016 when we get that breakthrough. The final media appeal led to a member of the community, as many had done before, ringing up and telling us that they had recognised the voice and they gave us the name of Daniel Johnson. “We were able to prove that Daniel Johnson was, in fact the caller and that he was in fact the person who robbed David Wilson’s partner of his keys.
“Further inquiries into Daniel Johnson revealed he had told us he had been to a house party in Town End Farm on that call but actually he had really been to a house party 500 metres way from where David Wilson was murdered.
“Interviews and inquires with those partygoers identified that many of them had recorded photographs and video imagery of people at that party that night.
“We were able to go back through social media, through Facebook and capture those images, which showed Daniel Johnson at that party, on that night, wearing the distinctive red bobble hat, the two-tone jacket, the white trainers and the two-tone T-shirt, clothing he was later captured in on the CCTV at the Post Office when he robbed David Wilson’s partner of the keys .
“So, in effect, we had imagery of him at a party wearing clothes identical to the clothing worn by the person who had robbed David Wilson’s partner.
“We, in effect, then interviewed every family member, every friend of Daniel Johnson and we were able to identify , with their assistance, that the caller was categorically Daniel Johnson, a fact that he later accepted in court and that also the imagery was that of Daniel Johnson.