Mysterious death of the man with no name
A well-dressed corpse on bleak Saddleworth Moor. A lethal dose of Agatha Christie’s favourite poison — and why, one year later, detectives are still utterly baffled by the ...
LAST December Jeremy Lawton took a call from the police at his North London home. The officer’s voice was hesitant; there was the tell-tale pause that prefaces the disclosure of a personal catastrophe.
‘He asked: “Do you have a brother?”’ recalls Mr Lawton. ‘I said: “Yes.” I confirmed his name and date of birth. There was a silence for a few beats. I could hear a man steeling himself to give me bad news.’
Then came the shocking disclosure: Jeremy’s older brother David Lytton, 67, was dead. But the manner of his passing away was far from natural.
For a year, police had been baffled by what seemed to be a dead man with no name, and had only just discovered who he was.
The unmarried former London Tube train driver had perished alone on remote moorland in the Pennines exactly a year earlier, after taking a lethal dose of strychnine. Yesterday an inquest at a Manchester coroner’s court returned an open verdict, with coroner Simon Nelson saying that ‘on the balance of probability’ the poison was the cause of Mr Lytton’s death — but that a series of ‘fundamental questions remain unanswered’.
The awful revelation shocked and confounded Jeremy, 62, who had not seen his brother for a decade. He had assumed David was living in the U.S. after selling his London home some 12 years earlier.
‘David used to write to me two or three times a year and his letters were always postmarked California,’ recalls Jeremy. ‘He’d just disappeared.’
What had actually happened was more baffling and mysterious. David had, in fact, been living in Pakistan during the years of his absence. Quite why he pretended he had emigrated to America is one of the abiding conundrums of his enigmatic life, which ended in an equally puzzling death.
The unresolved story of David Lytton’s death began on a bleak December day in 2015 when a body was found by a passing cyclist on Saddleworth Moor. There were few clues to the identity of the elderly man, who carried no wallet or mobile phone, and was wearing clothes ill-suited to the harshness of the terrain and elements.
In his pocket were just three train tickets, £130 in cash and a plastic bottle, labelled as medication for a thyroid condition and manufactured in Pakistan.
However, toxicology tests disclosed that it actually contained the deadly poison strychnine and that the man had taken a lethal dose. That the corpse was dressed in a light mac, expensive Bally slip-on shoes and trousers more appropriate to a city stroll than a strenuous mountain hike, was only one of the riddles that perplexed detectives given the task of finding out who he was.
And as they began an investigation into why he chose to travel to such a desolate spot, apparently to take his own life with a dose of poison, his story became more intriguing than ever.
THe last person to see him alive was Mel Robinson, landlord of The Clarence, a pub in Saddleworth at the foot of the 1,500ft Indian’s Head peak above Dovestone reservoir.
He described Mr Lytton — who was tall and white with receding grey hair and a prominent nose — as apparently ‘neither stressed nor unhappy’.
The stranger had walked into the pub and asked for directions, ‘to the top of the mountain’.
‘I explained to him that he wouldn’t get up there and back before dark,’ recalls Mr Robinson. ‘It was a three-to-four-hour walk and there was only an hourand-a-half of daylight left.’
Pointing him in the right direction, however, Mr Robinson watched him set off.
The next morning Mr Lytton’s body had been found and mortuary workers nicknamed him Neil Dovestone after the spot (near Dovestone Reservoir) where he was discovered. The pseudonym was used for a year, because the man’s real identity was to prove elusive. Oldham-based Detective Sergeant John Coleman headed the team in charge of the investigation, which is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, Mystery Of The Man On The Moor, to be shown tonight.
The three train tickets in Mr Lytton’s pocket — a single from ealing Broadway to central London and a return from euston to Manchester Piccadilly — bought the day before, offered a lead. DC Ben Miller began an exhaustive trawl of hundreds of hours of station CCTV footage.
Finally, he spotted Mr Lytton milling aimlessly around the Manchester station. ‘He wandered as if he was exploring or lost or didn’t quite know where to go or what to do,’ recalls DC Miller.
‘He didn’t appear to be in a hurry. There was nothing remarkable about his behaviour. He even paused for a bite to eat.’
There is footage of him sitting on a bench, eating a sandwich and drinking from a water bottle. He shows no hint of disquiet. ‘He looks like a perfectly normal member of the public with nowhere to go in a hurry,’ concludes DC Miller.
However, it seems he was anxious not to be traced. The food he bought was paid for in cash. He carried no bank cards or passport.
After 53 minutes he left the station, walking towards Manchester city centre, and the final CCTV images of him show him mingling with crowds in a busy street. Meanwhile, as detectives scoured these films for clues, his unidentified corpse still lay in Oldham mortuary.
Four months had elapsed before a shocking fact emerged. Results of toxicology tests revealed that the plastic canister found with his body did not actually contain medication for hypothyroidism — as the label stated — but the lethal toxin strychnine. And he had taken enough to kill him.
‘When the results were phoned through to me I nearly fell off my chair,’ recalls DS Coleman. ‘Strychnine is known as the Agatha Christie drug because she often used the poison in her storylines. It’s a painful death, arching spasms … not a drug you’d choose to take to end your life.’
But this, it seemed, is what Mr Lytton had done — no one was with him on that bleak moor, and so murder was discounted.
A Pakistan connection was reinforced when a second post-mortem examination revealed a metal plate inserted during surgery on a broken left femur had been manufactured in the Indian subcontinent.
The man’s fingerprints were sent to Islamabad. It was a long shot — and there were, indeed, no matches.
Meanwhile, as worldwide appeals went out for information about the man on the moor,
theories began to emerge about his possible identity.
Could he have been Basil, the missing member of the infamous Hatton Garden gang of jewellery robbers? He appeared to bear a passing resemblance.
Or was he a survivor of a plane crash in 1949 near Indian’s Head, the outcrop near to where he was discovered, which had killed 24 people? Had he been making a pilgrimage back to the site?
Several relatives of missing people also came forward. But all inquiries drew the same frustrating blank.
Six months had elapsed and despite exhaustive publicity, the trail was getting cold. DS Coleman pinned his hopes on the Pakistan link, and sent an officer to Karachi to track down the surgeon who had performed the operation on the dead man’s leg some time during the preceding decade.
That, too, proved fruitless. The doctor disclosed that he carried out more than 500 such procedures every year in Karachi alone, and that it would be impossible to single out every patient who’d undergone the operation.
Then, just as detectives were poised to abandon their search, they had a breakthrough. A trawl of flight manifests revealed a passenger, David Lytton, had flown from Pakistan to Heathrow in the days leading up to December 12, when the body was found. CCTV footage from Lahore airport disclosed Mr Lytton, who bore a striking resemblance to ‘Neil Dovestone’, preparing to board the London-bound flight.
It seemed a breakthrough on the man’s identity had been made.
‘We thought with the help of electoral rolls and genealogy websites we’d track him down quickly,’ says DS Coleman, ‘but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that we didn’t.’
As with everything else about the investigation, confirmation of the facts was to prove exasperatingly difficult.
Meanwhile, information about David Lytton was flooding in. A solicitor contacted police to reveal that he had carried out the conveyance when Mr Lytton had sold his home in South London for £220,000 some 12 years earlier.
There had been £215,000 equity in the property; cash which he had, presumably, taken to Pakistan. Further inquiries revealed that Mr Lytton had studied Sociology and Psychology at Leeds University between 1966 and 1970 and was expected to do extremely well, yet went on to fail his course.
Next, an unidentified man, who had been friends with Mr Lytton for 40 years, came forward to add that he was of Jewish decent and was a former Tube train driver.
The friend revealed that he had travelled to Lahore with Mr Lytton in 2006, but while David had stayed there, the friend had come back to London.
FUrTHer, they had remained in touch — perhaps he was the only person who knew Mr Lytton was, in fact, living in Pakistan — and he had picked his friend up from Heathrow airport and driven him to a hotel in ealing a couple of days before the body was found.
evidence was accruing that David Lytton was, indeed, the Man on the Moor, but a confirmatory birth certificate was proving illusive. Then, buried among national archives in London, detectives uncovered another secret.
The dead man had renounced his Jewish family name, Lautenberg, because of anti-Semitic feeling, and had adopted the surname Lytton instead.
A birth certificate suggested his parents were Hyman and Sylvia Lautenberg; that he was born in April 1948, and had a younger brother, Jeremy. He, too, had changed his surname, but to confound matters further, he had adopted a different one, Lawton.
Was Jeremy, in fact, David Lytton’s brother and the final key to the dead man’s identity?
DNA tests confirmed incontrovertibly that they were siblings. Yet this unlocked only a part of the mystery.
Jeremy Lawton, unmarried and a delivery driver for a luxury car company, told the inquest: ‘David was incredibly bright and spent a lot of time studying, but as he went into teenage years became more and more insular and by the time he came back from university he didn’t want to be with anybody.
‘The family absolutely adored his company. He was hilarious and well read and guided me a lot. The more insular he became, the more we missed him.’
Mr Lawton said David wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge universities and was disappointed with himself when he ended up at Leeds instead. He said his brother had ambitions to be a psychiatrist in his younger days, but instead worked as a croupier until 1984 and for Transport for London until about 2005.
Today, Mr Lawton remains perplexed as to why his brother moved to Pakistan and told no one of his whereabouts. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘The more questions you ask, the less you know. Basically that’s David. He was a brilliant but troubled guy, and we were polar opposites.
‘I had no idea he was living in Pakistan. He disappeared and told no one where he was going. That he was living in Lahore was a real surprise to me.’
His death on a remote moor; his life in Pakistan: both remain complete riddles.
‘We know in the days before his death he travelled from Pakistan to ealing and from ealing to Dovestone. But why in God’s name would he do that?’ asks Stuart Copley, from the National Crime Agency, who tracked Lytton’s final movements in Lahore.
He had, apparently, rushed into a travel agent’s ‘in a panic’ asking to buy a single fare ticket to London in the days before he flew.
‘It was clear to staff he wanted to travel urgently,’ says Mr Copley. ‘But strangely, although he’d lived in Pakistan for more than ten years, he didn’t speak a word of Urdu (the local language), so they had big communication problems.’
Mr Lytton had rushed out and returned two hours later, along with two native speakers who translated for him.
AMONG the many unresolved questions that remain are those of Mr Lytton’s passport and luggage, neither of which has been found.
And a final bizarre twist in the mystery reveals just how impenetrably secretive David Lytton was.
Those few people who knew him described him as a loner. He was also a man who eschewed home comforts and lived austerely.
Yet for more than 20 years he had a relationship with Maureen Toogood, and despite their closeness, she, too, was kept in the dark about his move to Pakistan.
Today, she looks back on the mix of hurt, shock and bewilderment she felt when she discovered David Lytton had fled the country ten years ago.
It was his next-door neighbour in Streatham who phoned her. ‘She asked if I was aware that David had sold his house and moved to the States. I said I wasn’t. It hurt.
‘I could imagine him buying a house in California. But never in Pakistan.’
She struggles to articulate the utter bafflement she felt when she learned that he had returned to Britain only to die a lonely death on a desolate moor two days later.
‘Why didn’t he pick up the phone?’ she asks. ‘Why didn’t he just say: “Hi”?
‘Why did he travel up North? He didn’t know anyone up there. Why on the moors?’
These unresolved questions will no doubt continue to perplex and haunt her.
For Jeremy, meanwhile, fraternal guilt mingles with bemusement, and a thousand unresolved questions clamour for answers.
‘You always think you could have made more effort. Always,’ he muses. ‘I did try. I tried often. But David didn’t do friends. He certainly didn’t do brothers.
‘I always thought that if he went I’d be OK with the effort I’d made. But, of course, then it happens and it’s “could have, should have, would have . . .” ’
Jeremy Lawton’s voice trails off. even to his brother, the mystery of the man on the moor is likely to remain unresolved.
Mystery Of The Man On The Moor is on Channel 4 tonight at 10pm.