After six days on the run, police finally closed in on the man who’d killed four people...
IT was a killing spree that shocked the nation and kept rural folk in terror for a week. Twin sisters and an elderly couple had been savagely beaten and stabbed to death in incidents 25 miles apart in North Yorkshire over the course of one weekend in Jul
THE bodies of Mark Hobson’s 27-year-old girlfriend Claire Sanderson and her sister Diane had been discovered in the killer’s flat at Camblesforth, near Selby, by Diane’s boyfriend and the girls’ father on the morning of Sunday, July 18, 2004.
Police said the two women had died several days apart, and that Diane had been sexually abused and strangled.
Both had been stripped naked and Claire’s body had been wrapped in bin liners.
Hobson killed Claire with 17 hammer blows after a drinking spree.
After wrapping her in the bin liners he left her corpse decomposing in the bedroom.
It would later emerge he had told a fellow refuse collector he had “picked the wrong sister” after he set up home with Claire.
A week later he tricked her sister Diane into the couple’s maisonette and subjected her to a degrading sexual attack before strangling her with a rope.
Broken
Around three hours after the girls’ bodies were discovered an elderly disabled couple, 80-year-old former Spitfire pilot James Britton and his wife Joan, 82, were found dead at their detached house at Strensall on the outskirts of York. They had been severely beaten and stabbed in the back after Hobson had broken into their home looking for food and money.
Det Supt Javad Ali, who led the murder hunt, revealed Hobson had visited his mother Sandra and asked to be driven to York District Hospital.
The hospital is only a few miles from the village of Strensall.
Sandra Hobson had made a plea for her son to give himself up to police or contact to a solicitor.
“I know things are difficult and you might be thinking about what to do next,” she pleaded.
By then the case had received nationwide publicity and police were deluged with hundreds of “sightings” of the shaven-headed ex-bin man.
In one day, North Yorkshire Police had recorded 175 reported sightings, one coming from as far away as New Zealand.
The killer had in fact barely travelled more than a handful of miles from the site of the elderly couple’s home and was hiding out in the countryside.
Detectives were looking carefully at reports of petty thefts from washing lines, burglaries and reports of missing persons in an effort to pinpoint where food or extra clothing may have been taken by the fugitive.
For a week, hundreds of officers and dog handlers scoured vast tracts of the county’s rolling countryside looking for signs of anyone living rough.
Off-licences, pubs and shops selling alcohol were urged to keep an eye out for Hobson, who, Mr Ali said, “was known to like a drink”.
Pressure
As police turned up the pressure and intensified their searches, Hobson’s ex-wife Kay pleaded with him through a Sunday newspaper to give himself up.
After six days and seven nights of moving around fields and hedges, Mark Hobson
was driven out into the open to buy matches, cigarette papers and a bottle of water at a roadside garage on the A19 road at Shipton-byBeningbrough, north of York.
The garage owner, Derek North, recognised him immediately.
“It was roughly 1430 BST on Sunday and this chap came into the shop. I recognised him straight away with is earring, his hair, his nose and scar,” he explained.
“He bought a box of matches, a bottle of water and cigarette papers. He paid in change and just went.
“We watched him and by that time the laddie from the furniture place came in and we decided between us that it was him (Hobson) so he ran down to his place and rang the police.”
Officers arrived to find the man they had been scouring the country for sitting in a field close to the garage.
In court in 2005, Hobson admitted all four of the murders.
The court was also told that Hobson had previously stabbed a love rival five times in the chest in a daylight attack in front of shoppers in Selby in 2002, leaving him with a punctured lung.
Hobson had admitted grievous bodily harm and avoided a prison sentence, instead receiving a community punishment.
That lenient sentence came under fierce criticism in the light of Hobson’s later offending.
At Leeds Crown Court, Mr Justice Grigson told him: “The enormity of what you have done is beyond words.”
Destroyed
Sentencing Hobson to life in prison with a whole-life tariff, he said: “The damage you’ve done is incalculable. You not only destroyed the lives of your victims, but you devastated the lives of those who loved them.”
Before the court case case, Hobson had been placed in solitary confinement for three months after attacking Ian Huntley, the former school caretaker who murdered two female pupils at a Cambridgeshire school, scalding him with a bucket of boiling water.
A prison service spokesman at the time said that, due to the nature of high-security prisoners, “it really is impossible to prevent incidents of this nature occasionally happening”.
In January 2006, letters were released from Wakefield Prison where Hobson blamed alcohol for his killing spree.
It had been revealed in court that he was an alcoholic who regularly drank as many as 20 pints a day.
He was also addicted to heroin and also used other drugs.
Now he is serving his whole-life term in Wakefield Prison so will never to be released – one of the first times such a recommendation had been made for someone who had admitted their crime at the first opportunity.