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International
The triangle of fear
In the muggy and warm summer of 1984, residents of the Bedfordshire towns of Cheddington, Leighton Buzzard and Edlesborough slept with their windows closed despite the heat.
The reason? A series of rapes and burglaries, each more violent than the last, had the area in panic and it was dubbed the triangle of fear.
Between March and December of 1984, the perpetrator was to commit 79 crimes. To begin with, these were burglaries, but in April 1984, he committed his first sexual assault, on a 74 year-old widow in the village of Linslade, Bedfordshire.
In all probability he broke into the victim’s home to commit a crime of burglary, but for some reason he decided to sexually assault her, and from that moment onwards, his crimes changed.
The masked man becomes armed
Just a month after this attack, another serious crime took place. A 35 year-old man returned to his home in Cheddington at 11pm. Waiting for him was a masked man, and in his hands was the homeowner’s own shotgun.
With the gun aimed at him, the terrified man was forced to tie himself up and was then blindfolded. He was subjected to a sexual assault. Then the intruder made off, taking the shotgun with him.
A spate of burglaries followed, with the perpetrator, now known as ‘the Fox’ by the media, laying out belts and items as if to tie up victims, and in one case constructing a ‘hide’ to watch TV in and make himself a pot of tea.
A night of terror
Following these burglaries the Fox broke into several couples’ houses and threatened them with a shotgun as they slept.
In one incident he shot a man in the hand, in another he raped the man’s wife.
Just two days later he preyed on an 18 year-old girl, her brother and her boyfriend who he subjected to a night of terror. The Fox tied up the girl, raped her twice, then forced the boys to have simulated sex with her before assaulting them.
Vehicle paint provides a breakthrough
The teenage victims recalled that the man had at one point stood on the base of a standard lamp that was slightly dusty. When police examined it using a new technique called DLK, they found a footwear mark that matched the other marks from the other previous burglaries.
His next attack, in Rotherham, unusually outside his previous area of crimes, provided police with even more clues. Detectives could make out footprints in a trail away from the house where they recovered a pair of gauntlets, the weapon, and the plastic bag in which it was stored. From that they obtained fingerprint evidence.
