The murder case solved by a piece of Sellotape
The detective who identified a small boy’s killer 28 years after the event tells Charlotte Lytton how he unearthed the facts
Foreign fibres were found to match Watson: ‘a billion to one’
Ayear after the horrific murder of Jamie Bulger, Rikki Neave’s death in 1994 meant the pressure was on police to ensure another child killer wasn’t walking the streets.
But it was only last week that a 28-year-old piece of Sellotape brought one of Britain’s most notorious cold cases to a close. The “taping”, pressed on to the coat of six-year-old Rikki and stored in an archive decades ago, picked up fibres that would ultimately be linked to James Watson, then 13, who followed the younger boy into a Peterborough woodland in 1994 – and strangled him from behind with the zip of his coat.
Justice was served just days ago when Watson was found guilty of murder in “the most complex and challenging investigation that I’ve ever been involved in”, says Paul Fullwood, former assistant chief constable for Cambridgeshire Police and senior lead investigator. A “career detective,” Fullwood – who retired in 2020, but sat in the Old Bailey every day of this year’s three-month trial – is “very, very proud” of the outcome.
The case had dominated news headlines at the time. After the horrific Bulger murder, public sensitivities were heightened. The case became more “iconic” still when Ruth Neave, Rikki’s mother, was charged with murder and child cruelty six months later. Neave was sentenced to seven years in prison following a trial that painted a harrowing picture of life for Rikki – classified as “at risk” by social services – and his sisters, who were routinely abused by their “wholly unfit” mother. Following another trial in 1996, the murder charge was rescinded and she was released in 2000.
Had Neave’s treatment of her son not been so brutal, Rikki’s case could have looked very different, believes Fullwood, 52. The murder “should have been reviewed a lot more times” than it was, he says, but “there was always a feeling that Ruth might have done it”. Fullwood adds that many were “uneasy around potential reinvestigation of this case, because this brought back a lot of bad memories – there was still a little bit of unconscious bias”. Had Neave not remained so inextricably linked with child cruelty in both officers’ and public minds – a mother convicted of scrawling “idiot” across her son’s head and squirting washing up liquid in his mouth – “then there might have been a different outcome”.
Fullwood’s own involvement began eight years ago, when he’d agreed to meet Neave, now 53, and her partner at Parkside Police Station in Cambridge. He went “with a completely open mind because I was never involved in the original investigation... I had no baggage”. He agreed to conduct a proper review and, five months later, was confident that reopening the case could secure a conviction. In June 2015, a press conference and public appeal launched Operation Mansell.
Reopening the case meant combing through the oceans of information a public case yields, including 15,000 documents, and handling decades-old evidence – much of which had either been destroyed or returned to the family in the mid-1990s. Almost everything was gone, and Rikki’s body had been cremated; DNA detection “wasn’t even on the radar” by the time of his murder. But digging through the forensic archives Fullwood found papers, “and within the papers were envelopes containing Sellotape tapings,” he recalls.
Using modern forensic techniques, foreign fibres from these tapings were found to match Watson’s: “a billion to one”. But that alone could not be enough to convict him.
However, it turned the spotlight on Watson, whose name had already been identified by Mansell officers as one of many needing “more thorough” questioning than they had originally received during the original investigation.
“I think it was tricky for them because they discounted James Watson early doors. A lot of the focus was on Ruth Neave, taking them down the wrong path,” Fullwood says of the investigation in 1994.
He says that it was only in 2013 that “we really professionalised major crime” in the UK; that nowadays, murders like Rikki’s would be handled by experts from further afield. “We are far better trained now and far more experienced… [the officers] tried to do the best job they could at the time with the people that they had. I just think that they made the wrong decisions.”
By 2016, Operation Mansell led to the arrest of Watson on suspicion of murder. He was bailed and fled to Portugal, posting photos of himself on the beach and bragging to local papers about how easily he had fled. The Crown Prosecution Service had told Watson that no further action would likely be taken against him due to a lack of evidence, but Fullwood urged the Neaves to appeal via the Victims’ Right to Review scheme, which they won, with the murder charge issued in February 2020. Due to legal issues and Covid delays, the trial only began at the Old Bailey in January this year.
Last Thursday was a particularly challenging day in court for Fullwood, who has “built my entire retirement around this case”. Watson – who has been charged with other offences including sexually assaulting a man in 2018 – appeared in court every day except the trial’s conclusion. His insistence on providing “evidence” – such as references to a fence that didn’t exist, or stating that his father had been an officer with Cambridgeshire police – only further cemented Fullwood’s belief that “he’s a dangerous, manipulative individual”.
The more Watson spoke, the more of a “fantasist” he showed himself to be, Fullwood says. “I was convinced before, but even more convinced listening to his evidence.”
During deliberations, Fullwood was walking down the Millennium Bridge to clear his head when his phone began buzzing. When they announced they had found Watson, 41, guilty, Fullwood grabbed the leg of the senior officer next to him: “We were all in disbelief and amazement that we finally got there.” Watson had been absent in the morning but appeared that afternoon via video link from Belmarsh prison, and “didn’t flinch” at the verdict, Fullwood says of those “surreal” few moments. (Watson will be sentenced on May 9.)
The next day, he met Ruth Neave, who is suffering from ill health and had been watching the proceedings via a video link at the police station, where she hugged Fullwood and thanked him for finally bringing justice for her son. Her three daughters, who do not have a relationship with their mother, shared their relief privately with him, too. While he is thrilled to “bring some sort of closure” to the Neave family, Fullwood’s last hope for this case is that Watson’s conviction may bring about reconciliation.
“They may never ever be a perfect family, nor ever be a harmonious family,” he says. “But there might be some middle ground there.”