Who was the man found on the moor?
Despite a new breakthrough, police are no closer to identifying a mystery body discovered on a lonely moor. Joe Shute reports
Since December 12 there has been a body lying on a slab in Royal Oldham Hospital morgue. It is that of a man close to 6ft, aged somewhere between 65 and 75, fairskinned with blue eyes and receding grey hair. Aside from these particulars he currently has no name, no family, and no home.
The technicians have taken to calling him “Neil Dovestone” after the name of the reservoir on Saddleworth Moor near to where he was found. Even those used to bringing out the dead feel uneasy spending so long with an untitled corpse.
What began, police presumed, with a simple missing person case on a foul Saturday morning three months ago has since turned into one of the great riddles this desolate landscape has ever witnessed. Detectives have trawled through historical records dating back to 1949 and made inquiries stretching as far as Pakistan, but still they are none the wiser as to who this mystery man was and why his life came to an end on the moors. Even a major breakthrough in the investigation last week has raised more questions than answers.
But first, the facts as we know them. On the morning of December 11 the man was picked up on CCTV walking towards Ealing Broadway Tube station from the southern part of the west London borough. Police still do not know his movements prior to that. He was wearing a white shirt, blue jumper, corduroy trousers, beige overcoat and black slip-on shoes with a fresh lick of polish.
At Ealing Broadway he bought a Tube ticket to London Euston, arriving at 9.50am. From there he purchased a return ticket to Manchester Piccadilly and boarded the 10am train. Once the train arrived at the station at 12.07pm, he spent 56 minutes wandering about, visiting Boots and Marks and Spencer and buying a sandwich. Then he left the station and disappeared from CCTV range.
At 2pm he walked into the Clarence Hotel pub in Greenfield and asked landlord Mel Robinson in a polite, placeless accent for directions to the “top of the mountain”. Despite being warned it would soon be dark he set off towards the hills overlooked by the towering 1,500ft rock formation called Wimberry Stones, known locally as Indian’s Head. He ascended past the Dovestone Reservoir and along a moorland path leading towards the summit, where he was spotted by two witnesses along the way. The last sighting of him was at 4pm, about three quarters of the way up, as darkness rolled in and temperatures plunged.
His body was discovered the next day at 10.45am by a cyclist who was out on the hills despite howling winds and terrible rain. He was lying 5ft from the path with his feet pointing downhill. In his pockets all police found was £130 in £10 denominations, the three train tickets and a vial of thyroxine sodium (a harmless drug taken to treat underactive thyroid glands) with the label written in Urdu.
“He seemed completely normal,” says Mel Robinson, seated in the bar of the Clarence Hotel, which he runs with his wife Ann. “He didn’t seem nervous or anything. The only reason I remembered him was because of how he was dressed, which was smart and very unsuitable for the weather. I told him, ‘You’ll not make it up and down
before dark tonight’.” Prior to the man’s entrance last December, the Clarence Hotel was no stranger to mystery – or tragedy. In the Sixties the moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady buried four of the bodies of five children they had tortured and killed only a few miles away. Regulars recall the pair used to come in on their trips to Saddleworth and bet sixpence on games of dominoes in the snug. When the police were later searching the moors for the victims they used the pub as a base.
The morning of December 12, 2015, police were back at the Clarence. “They were there when I opened up and told me a body had been found,” Robinson says. “Straight away I just wondered why. I just don’t think he wanted anybody to know who he was.”
After the first police appeal, the Robinsons received a desperate email from a family in Northern Ireland asking if he might be their father, who was of a similar age and had gone missing. Police have since been contacted by 40 other people also trying to identify missing relatives, although none has provided a match.
“We are desperate to identify him for the sake of his family and bring an end to this story,” says Detective Sergeant John Coleman of Oldham CID, who is leading the investigation. “For none of his relatives to have come forward is very unusual. I have never in all my 19 years in the job come on to a case where we have so many questions and so few answers.
“Certainly there is a story to be told about him, and hopefully we will get to the bottom of it. Of all the places in England why did he decide to go to that desolate point?”
One of the initial theories pursued by police was that the man may have been a childhood survivor of a tragedy on August 19, 1949, when a British European Airways Dakota DC-9 plane crashed near to Indian’s Head, claiming 24 lives. Two young boys were among the eight who made it out from the wreckage alive and would be a similar age to the dead man now. Police have traced one, Stephen Evans, now a 72year-old university professor living on the south coast, and expect to soon discount the other, Michael Prestwich, who they believe was later killed in a train accident aged 12 – although this is yet to be confirmed by a coroner.
With that trail seemingly gone cold, another has opened up with the postmortem examination, during which it was discovered that the dead man had a titanium plate fitted to his left femur, which at one point had been badly broken.
Det Sgt Coleman says they have traced the manufacturer to a company called Treu Dynamic based in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Even though there is no serial number, police have narrowed it down to 15 hospitals in Pakistan where this operation was done between 2001 and 2015 to a total of 7,000 patients. By filtering the man’s age and gender this falls to a potential 1,750. A professor at Manchester Royal Infirmary is currently analysing scar tissue from the man’s leg to further limit the field.
The Pakistan connection is an intriguing one, made even more so by two dramatic developments last week. On Tuesday, toxicology reports confirmed the man had died after taking strychnine, a lethal and highly controlled poison that is banned in Britain, Europe and the Americas but is available to buy over the counter in Pakistan. On Thursday Det Sgt Coleman confirmed the poison had been transported by the man in his thyroid medicine bottle.
While police initially reported that the dead man was Caucasian, Coleman says now they are not sure. One new line of inquiry is he may be a Pashtun, an ethnic group from north-western Pakistan, members of which often have fair skin and blue eyes.
Even if true, the question of why he came to Saddleworth to end his life appears to be no closer to being answered. Those desperate to solve the case live in hope that even people who wish never to be found will always leave clues behind. But for now, all the answers stay hidden with Neil Dovestone in the Oldham hospital morgue.
‘People who wish never to be found will always leave clues behind’