The Manhunt for Barry Prudom

Murder of PC David Haigh

On Thursday 17 June 1982, Police Constable David Haigh left Harrogate Police Station in North Yorkshire at around 7:30 a.m. He was en route to deliver a court summons to a poacher, travelling through Norwood Edge in Knaresborough Forest, about 30 minutes from Leeds. As he passed the Warren Point beauty spot, he noticed a green Citroen GSX2 in the car park. It was unusual for sightseers to be there so early on a weekday, so Haigh pulled over to check on the driver.

Inside the car, a scruffy man with curly dark hair and a tanned complexion was asleep in the driver’s seat, wearing an olive-green military style jacket. Haigh knocked on the window, startling him awake. Suspicious that he was up to no good, the constable asked for his name and date of birth, noting them on his clipboard. He turned back towards his patrol car to radio in the details, not hearing the man get out of the car behind him. A single shot from a .22 calibre Beretta pistol echoed through the woodland. PC Haigh fell to the ground, and the gunman got back into his Citroen and drove away.

Discovery of PC Haigh’s Body

By 9:30 a.m. Haigh’s colleagues were concerned. He wasn’t responding to radio calls, so PC Mick Clipston was sent to look for him. Retracing his route, he arrived at Warren Point at around 10:00 a.m., finding the patrol car abandoned with the driver’s door open. A short distance away, PC Haigh lay on the ground, a gunshot wound to the centre of his forehead. Clipston immediately called for an ambulance and backup.

First Clue

As he waited, his thoughts turned to 29-year-old Haigh’s family; his wife and three sons, aged 11, eight, and three. Then something caught his eye. A corner of paper was protruding from beneath Haigh’s body. He had fallen on his clipboard, which still held a sheet of notepaper. The bloodstained page read:

Clive Jones

Date of Birth: 18/10/44, Leeds

No fixed address

Car Registration: KYF 326P

There was no weapon at the scene, so the killer still had the gun – and he had also taken PC Haigh’s handcuffs.

Police Investigation

The investigation was led by North Yorkshire’s Chief Constable, Kenneth Henshaw. When officers ran the name ‘Clive Jones’ through the Police National Computer, they found hundreds of matches nationwide. But a breakthrough came via the car. The Citroen had been purchased five months earlier in a shady cash deal at a London Underground station. The dealer remembered the buyer and described him as a man in his early thirties with a northern accent. He had given a bogus name, R.D. Carlisle, and said he’d just returned from working on an oil rig and was heading back up north.

At this stage, the police had no idea that the case would become the biggest manhunt the UK had seen at that time. Over the next two and a half weeks, officers would track him across the country in an extraordinary operation involving hundreds of armed police, a specialist wilderness tracker, and further casualties.

Police Discover Abandoned Car

Three days later, a farmer found the Citroen abandoned in a wheatfield 25 miles from Warren Point, with the registration matching the one Haigh had seen at Warren Point. Forensic teams found no fingerprints and the vehicle had been wiped clean, suggesting a suspect who was methodical and experienced in covering his tracks.

The Break-in at Blyton Carr

After abandoning his car, the fugitive travelled 70 miles south into Lincolnshire, partly on foot and partly by hitchhiking, still carrying the Beretta pistol and a duffel bag containing a radio, binoculars, a knife, and a machete. He hid in Laughton Forest over the weekend, an area spanning around 1,000 acres, but eventually hunger forced him to emerge. Using his binoculars, he watched an isolated cottage in the small parish of Blyton Carr. When he was satisfied that only one elderly woman lived there, he broke in after dark, cut the telephone line, and forced her to cook him egg and chips before tying her up and gagging her. He told her he was sorry, took £4 from her purse, and disappeared into the night. The 75-year-old, whose name was Vida (some sources refer to her as Frieda) Jackson, managed to free herself and alert the police, who suspected that her attacker and the killer of PC Haigh were one and the same.

The Phantom of the Forest

By now, the gunman had vanished into the woods. His ability to evade law enforcement seemed almost supernatural, and the media began calling him ‘The Phantom’. The shooter, still assumed at this point to be Clive Jones, walked four miles south to the town of Gainsborough, where he thumbed a lift from a husband and wife. The couple only realised later who he might be and contacted the police. The driver reported that he looked like a serviceman and was about 30-35 years old, with dark curly hair, a tanned complexion, a narrow forehead, bushy eyebrows, and a quiet, reserved demeanour. They dropped him off in the village of Torksey, on the border of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.

Around the same time, a local gamekeeper came forward. About a week earlier, he had found a man living in a makeshift shelter in Laughton Forest, with a green Citroen parked nearby. The gamekeeper had told him to move on as it was private land, but he was able to give the police a more detailed description – brown gloves, tan shoes, blue jeans, a blue beanie hat, and a light-coloured duffel bag. But the information came too late, and the ‘Phantom of the Forest’ had already moved on.

The Lucketts

Over the next few days, the fugitive spent the daylight hours resting, then moved at night under cover of darkness, drifting south into Nottinghamshire and entering the village of Girton just before dawn on Wednesday 23 June. He made his way through the narrow lanes until he reached an isolated cottage belonging to 54-year-old army veteran and electrician George Luckett, and his wife Sylvia. At around 5:00 a.m., a neighbour, Rita Ward, was woken by her dog barking. She went into the kitchen and saw Sylvia banging desperately on the window, her face covered in blood. Rita rushed to help her inside, noticing that blood had soaked through Sylvia’s clothes, and that she was barefoot. When the paramedics arrived, they realised that Sylvia had been shot in the head, and she was taken to hospital for emergency surgery. Meanwhile, police forced entry into the Lucketts’ cottage, finding George dead inside. Doctors later said it was remarkable that Sylvia had survived and managed to drag herself 300 yards across a field to reach help.

After lifesaving surgery, Sylvia was able to give a description of her attacker, which matched the man police were already looking for, but she could remember little about the incident. Detectives reconstructed the crime and deduced that the man on the run had been trying to steal the Lucketts’ car when he was disturbed. He forced George and Sylvia back into the house and cut the phone line, then tied George up and ordered Sylvia to make him a cup of tea and a sandwich. At some point, George managed to free himself and retrieve his shotgun. He crept past the glazed kitchen door, looking for an opportunity to catch the intruder off guard, but the gunman spotted him and fired through the glass door, killing him instantly. Sylvia was shot as she tried to escape, suffering life-changing injuries. The ‘Phantom’ took no money from their home, but drove away in their brown Rover SD1, registration VAU 875S.

Ballistics confirmed that the bullets used in the attack on the Lucketts matched the one that killed PC Haigh, and the investigation widened into a cross-county operation, with forces from Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and North Yorkshire working together. Search teams swept through Torksey, going house to house, but the fugitive was already on the move again, heading back towards North Yorkshire. His destination was Dalby Forest, a densely wooded area covering more than 25 square miles, with a network of tracks and paths winding through the hills and dales.

Police Constable Ken Oliver Encounters the Phantom of The Forest

At 5:30 p.m. on Thursday 24 June, dog handler PC Ken Oliver was on patrol when he spotted the stolen brown Rover parked in a layby. He pulled up behind it and began to get out of his van but didn’t even have time to call for backup. The door of the Rover opened, and the driver opened fire. A bullet grazed Oliver’s nose, knocking him to the ground. He scrambled up and ran for his vehicle, but the shooter followed and wounded him in the arm. Oliver had 14 years’ service and remembered his training, staying low and using the van for cover. When he reached the rear door, he opened it, and his Alsatian charged at the attacker but was hit by a bullet. That brief moment gave Oliver the chance to break away, though a final round struck him in the back as he ran. The distance reduced the impact, and he managed to reach a nearby cottage. On the way, he came across two young girls playing and ushered them indoors, warning the startled homeowners to lock all the doors and windows. From the safety of the house, he called the police to report the attack.

The shooter had already lost interest in Oliver and was covering his tracks before reinforcements arrived. He ripped out the radio from the police van and set fire to the stolen Rover, making sure the blaze had taken hold before leaving. When backup arrived, they found nothing but the burnt-out shell of the car. The desperado had vanished into the forest.

PC Ken Oliver and his dog both survived, but Oliver was left deeply affected by the incident and eventually left the force. His description of the attacker matched earlier sightings, but police still had no confirmed identity.

An Intensive Search of Dalby Forest

Detective Sergeant Jim Kilmartin led search teams and dogs deeper into Dalby Forest, where they discovered two concealed hides camouflaged with vegetation, where the killer had laid low, but the dogs struggled to pick up the scent as he had gone to great lengths to lay false trails. An armed response unit was called in from York, but by the time they arrived two hours later, the trail had already gone cold. 450 officers were deployed in squads to comb every square mile of the forest. An RAF search and rescue helicopter joined the operation, and road checkpoints were set up to stop and question every motorist entering or leaving the area. Marksmen were positioned in the trees, and police sharpshooters commandeered a Forestry Commission tower as a vantage point. The search continued day and night, and residents and holidaymakers in and around the forest were advised to leave until the suspect was captured.

The number of officers on the case rose to 800, with support from neighbouring forces, though only a small proportion were armed. Just 2% carried pistols or rifles, many of them outdated, described by one officer as looking like ‘something from a museum’. Even today, firearms are rarely used in policing in Britain, with less than 5% of the country’s police force authorised to carry them. For a manhunt on this scale, resources were stretched, with conditions in the forest making the search even more difficult. It was a chilly, wet summer in the north of England, and mist had reduced visibility to just a few yards. Photographers and journalists flocked to the scene, and the public were glued to the dramatic TV coverage. But despite the heavy police presence, the gunman remained at large. Unknown to law enforcement, he was using the survivalist tactic of laying low, choosing a hiding place and staying in the same position for hours to conserve energy. Searchers combed the forest around him, unaware they were being observed from the undergrowth.

Hatton’s Discovery

Back at headquarters, PC Martin Hatton had a theory. He suspected the killer had almost certainly given a false name to PC Haigh at Warren Point, but he pointed out that a date of birth is harder to invent on the spot. If he found someone on the warrant list with the same birthday as the one written on Haigh’s clipboard, they might have the killer’s real name. His hunch paid off. He found a match: Barry Edwards, born 18 October 1944, wanted for wounding a motorist with a tyre iron in a roadside dispute. He showed the mugshot to PC Ken Oliver, who said he would never forget the eyes of the man who shot him. He didn’t hesitate – it was the same man. Police raided the address linked to Barry Edwards and uncovered his real identity. He was Barry Prudom, a 37-year-old former electrician. Officers located his girlfriend, Carole Francis, and her mother, and brought them in for questioning, and over the next few hours, a clearer picture began to emerge of the assassin they were hunting.

Who Was Barry Prudom?

Barry Peter Edwards was born to Kathleen Edwards, a 23-year-old dressmaker from Glamorgan, and Joseph Peter Kurylo, a chemist from Leeds on 8 October 1944. One secondary source claims that Joseph was a soldier, but this has not been verified. They had met as teenagers, aged 15, and were engaged by the time they were 20. When Kathleen became pregnant, a wedding was hastily arranged, but Joseph never turned up, playing no further role in his son’s life. A family friend later said that Kathleen did her best to raise Barry under difficult circumstances, and a few years later she married a Yorkshireman named Alec Prudom, and Barry took his stepfather’s name. In 1950, Kathleen and Alec had a son, Derek, who was Barry’s half brother.

Barry attended Meanwood Secondary School in Leeds. As a teenager, he came to the attention of the police for housebreaking and theft but avoided jail time due to his age. He left school at 16 with a mediocre record and became an apprentice electrician. In 1965, aged 20, he married Gillian Wilson and they had a daughter the following year, followed by a son in 1970. Barry had a strong interest in the military, and enlisted as an SAS reservist, completing a six-week training course which included firearms and survival skills. He was bitterly disappointed when he was rejected for further service, due to his dislike of authority.

Barry saved enough money from his job to buy a small grocer’s shop, setting Gillian up in business. They lived in a flat above the shop and everyone who knew Barry described him as quiet, sensitive and caring. There were no obvious signs of violence, substance misuse, or instability. He was even granted security clearance to work as an electrician at military sites across the UK. One of these jobs involved helping to build an American Communications base just outside Harrogate, just 200 yards from the spot where PC David Haigh would later be killed.

In 1973, Barry’s mother, Kathleen Prudom, then 52, came to visit him and his wife in their home above the grocer’s shop. It was getting dark by the end of the visit, so Barry offered to drive her home, but Kathleen insisted on walking. On the way home, she was mugged. She wasn’t physically harmed, but Barry took the news hard. A friend later recalled, ‘He always felt very guilty about this, saying that if he had been firm and taken her home, it would not have happened. He would not listen to arguments, that it was not his fault.’

Not long afterwards, Kathleen told her family she was going away for a week, to stay at a hotel in Folkestone, on the Kent coast, paying for her room in advance. Five days later, her body was found washed ashore, and her death was ruled a suicide. Barry wept openly at the inquest and those close to him said he struggled with grief for a long time afterwards.

In the years that followed, Barry worked as a contract electrician at a Saudi Arabian oilfield, the generous salary allowing him to invest more money in Gillian’s grocery business. While he was abroad, he received a letter from Shirley Roberts, a friend of his wife, who broke the news that Gillian had been having an affair while he was working overseas. When he returned to England in 1976, his marriage was over. His Aunt Gwyneth later recalled finding him in tears. When she asked what was wrong, he replied, ‘What can I do? I still love her.’

Barry later began a relationship with 17-year-old Carole Francis. She was 16 years younger than him and lived with her mother, Enid, in Leeds. Despite the age difference, Enid thought highly of her daughter’s boyfriend and described Barry as mild-mannered, polite, and never boastful. Carole’s brother also approved of the introverted Prudom, even though he didn’t reveal much about his past.

Together, Barry and Carole led a nomadic lifestyle, drifting from town to town in an orange and white VW camper van, taking casual jobs here and there. At one point, they travelled to Canada, and later to Colorado Springs in the United States, where they camped close to an air defence facility. It was during this trip that Barry bought a .22 calibre Beretta pistol, which he later managed to smuggle back into Britain without Carole’s knowledge and without it being detected by Customs.

In May 1982, Barry got into an argument with another driver, which culminated in him striking the man with a tyre iron. He was due to appear at Leeds Crown Court to face an assault charge, but failed to attend, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He didn’t tell Carole, instead saying he had been offered another job in Saudi Arabia, so she returned to Leeds to stay with her mother. But rather than boarding a plane for the Middle East, Barry went on the run.

The Siege of Malton

Now the police knew who they were looking for, their sole focus was to find Prudom and bring him in, but he continued to evade them in the low visibility and swirling mists of Dalby Forest. He trudged six miles south on foot, and on Monday 28 June, suffering badly from blisters, he hobbled into Old Malton, a Yorkshire village surrounded by farms and woodland. People who spotted him from a distance thought he was older than he was, due to his dishevelled, unshaven appearance. He wore a blue hat pulled low over his eyes and carried a duffle bag with a radio aerial sticking out. He entered a local newsagent without attracting attention and bought some sweets. Then, at around 2:00 p.m., he went into the village post office, which also served as a small grocery shop. The owner, Leo Burke, later told the police, ‘He bought sausage rolls, a loaf of bread, a can of pilchards, and some other items of food. He looked like a very ordinary, mild-mannered man. I did not see him carrying any weapons.’

Murder of Sergeant David Winter

The local police had been warned to stay alert for strangers in the area, so when Sergeant David Winter saw Prudom leaving the post office, he decided to approach him. Across the road, Constable Mick Wood from the traffic division noticed his colleague heading towards the man. Seconds later, Winter turned and ran, with the shabby figure in pursuit. The two disappeared from view, followed by the sound of three gunshots. Wood ran towards the sound. When he reached a low stone wall near a row of cottages, he found Sergeant Winter lying dead on the grass, shot once in the neck and twice in the head. He was 31 years old, and the father of a one-year-old daughter. The scene was just 200 yards from the local police station, but Prudom had already escaped.

Police Search Intensifies with Eddie McGee’s Arrival

Old Malton now became the nerve centre of the largest manhunt the UK had ever seen at that time. Reinforcements poured in, and marksmen were posted on every corner. Shops were surrounded, and customers were ordered to come out with their hands up. Two police helicopters circled overhead while roads were sealed off, and motorists were stopped at checkpoints. But Barry Prudom was not among them.

Help soon came from a surprising quarter. Expert survivalist, former SAS paratrooper, and martial artist Eddie McGee offered to assist the investigation as a civilian volunteer. He was an experienced tracker and ran survival courses teaching people how to find safe drinking water, build shelters, hunt, and follow trails. He had learned many of these skills from indigenous communities around the world, including Borneo and Yemen. It emerged that Barry Prudom had attended one of McGee’s courses and had even bought a signed copy of his book, No Need To Die. The implication was concerning: the man they were hunting knew how to camouflage himself and live off the land for days, or even weeks.

Chief Constable Henshaw decided to fight fire with fire and accepted the offer, despite reservations from some other senior officers who were sceptical of McGee’s abilities. The hunt would now become a battle of wits between teacher and student. McGee’s first discovery was a goat on a nearby farm. He believed it had been milked within the last ten minutes – most likely by Prudom.

Their efforts were hampered by a constant stream of reported sightings, sometimes up to 50 a day, and every single one was followed up. On one occasion, a helicopter was dispatched to a field, only to find that the scruffy looking figure who had been spotted there was just a scarecrow.

Margaret Wolstenholme, a reporter for the Malton Gazette, later described the situation bluntly: ‘I don’t think anybody knew what to do. I don’t know how much brain power was applied to what was going on. There was this sense that people were rushing around like chickens with no heads.’ According to Wolstenholme, people in the community were far from convinced by expert tracker Eddie McGee, with some residents nicknaming him ‘Mr. Magoo’ after the short-sighted American cartoon character.

Frustration was growing. No matter how much manpower was allocated to Malton, there was still no trace of the man who had gunned down two police officers, shot a husband and wife in their home, and taken an elderly woman hostage. Suddenly, a single shot rang out near the police station. The press dived for cover, fearing that Prudom was launching an assault on the TV news crews. But there were no further shots. Many years later, it came to light that an inspector had accidentally discharged his gun into the roof of his own police car. To avoid embarrassment, Chief Constable Henshaw allowed the media to believe the shot really had come from the fugitive.

Over the following days, McGee continued to track Prudom across the countryside, searching for broken twigs and disturbed spiderwebs to indicate the killer’s movements. Around 80 officers travelled with him, which often worked against their efforts by disturbing potential traces. In fact, Prudom was hiding in plain sight. For the previous 48 hours, he had been less than 300 yards from Old Malton Police Station, lurking behind the tennis and bowls club in a makeshift hideout built from old fence panels. He slept there during the day under a blue tarpaulin, venturing out at night to eat tinned cat food from an unlocked shed nearby.

Barry Prudom Holds the Johnsons Captive

Prudom knew he needed more nutritious food to sustain him, as well as somewhere safe to wash and inspect his blistered feet. At around 5:00 p.m. on Saturday 3 July, he broke into the home of Maurice and Bessie Johnson. Maurice was a retired painter and decorator, and the couple had an adult son, Brian, who was out at their allotment collecting eggs from their chickens. When Bessie went into the dining room to prepare the evening meal, she was confronted by a man pointing a gun at her. He was around 5’8” with dark curly hair, blue eyes, and a slim build, with several days’ beard growth, high cheekbones, a tanned complexion, and tattooed forearms. Even with the village on high alert for an armed fugitive, Bessie’s first reaction was not fear, but confusion, assuming it was some kind of prank.

He asked her, ‘Do you know who I am?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Bessie replied. She was genuinely surprised to discover that this was Barry Prudom, the man who had been evading North Yorkshire Police for weeks. She later said he looked nothing like his circulated mugshot, and that his eyes were warm and kind.

The intruder bound Bessie’s and Maurice’s hands and feet, then waited for their son to return. Brian arrived home at 6:30 p.m. and was about to put the eggs down in the kitchen when he came face to face with the barrel of Prudom’s gun. His instinct was to run towards the living room, calling out for his parents.

‘You did the right thing,’ Prudom told him. ‘If you’d run the other way, towards the door, you’d have a bullet in your head.’

The Johnsons had the impression that despite his words, Prudom seemed relieved that he had not been forced to shoot. Brian was tied up next to his parents, while Prudom watched the latest news bulletins on TV about the search. ‘Eddie McGee can’t track me,’ he told the family, ‘But I can track him.’ Maurice urged Barry to give himself up, but Prudom warned him, ‘If you ring the police, they’ll come in here and shoot us all.’

He untied Bessie and asked her to make sandwiches for everyone, then released Maurice and Brian so they could all eat comfortably. He then went up to the bathroom to wash his blistered feet, leaving his pistol on the living room table. Did he trust the Johnsons not to turn the tables on him with his own gun? Or was there a part of him that wanted the ordeal to end, one way or another?

Prudom spent the next 10 hours with the family, eventually leaving at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday 4 July. Before leaving, he asked Bessie to make him some more sandwiches, which he called his ‘last supper.’ He gave Brian a United States paratrooper ring and asked him to promise that he would wear it. Before tying them up again, Prudom shook hands with each of them and thanked them for their hospitality. The last thing he said before slipping away into the night was, ‘It’s nice to meet such nice people. I didn’t realise such people existed.’

The Johnsons managed to free themselves after two hours and went straight to Old Malton police station.

Barry Prudom’s Hideout Discovered

Police officers and dogs fanned out across the village, while choppers continued the search overhead. Eddie McGee, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Jim Kilmartin and two armed officers, picked up the trail from the Johnsons’ house. Snapped branches and a footprint in the soil led them to a derelict wooden fence propped against a seven-foot-high wall behind the tennis and bowls club. McGee moved closer and spotted a blue sheet protruding from the side of the makeshift shelter. He took another step forward, then abruptly jumped back as a booted foot emerged from the structure. He signalled to Kilmartin that they had found their target, then withdrew to allow armed officers to take over.

How Barry Prudom Died

Detective Sergeant Kilmartin shouted to Prudom to give himself up, but there was no reply. Around 70 officers armed with handguns and ArmaLite rifles moved into position around the bowls club. Chief Inspector David Clarkson, protected by a riot shield, crawled across the bowling green and climbed the perimeter wall, trying to see into the hideout to get visual confirmation before authorising the use of lethal force. As he reached forward to lift part of the covering, a gunshot rang out. Clarkson fell backwards, believing he had been fired at. Once again, he warned Prudom to surrender, but neither his words nor a stun grenade had any effect.

Clarkson gave the order, and a deafening hail of gunfire ensued. When it ended, an officer used a five-foot pole to reach into the hiding place and check the body. Once he was convinced there was no movement, the roof was pulled back to reveal Barry Prudom’s lifeless form, a machete strapped to his chest, a gun in his hand, and 50 rounds of ammunition in his pocket.

Post-Mortem and Public Reaction

The 18-day manhunt was over. Among the police, there was a sense of relief and celebration. One witness said, ‘The coppers were laughing, shouting and slapping each other on the back, making the thumbs-up signs and saying they’d got him’. Their reaction was later called into question when the post-mortem concluded that Prudom had not fired at Chief Inspector Clarkson. Instead, he had shot himself in the head. The police sharpshooters had put 21 bullets into a man who was already dead.

Brian Johnson admitted to feeling sadness when he heard the news, describing Prudom as a ‘lost young man’. He said, ‘They filled him full of lead. They shouldn’t have done that, should they? All for revenge.’ His mother Bessie added, ‘He wasn’t a bit like the picture. He was very kind, actually.’ Brian later confirmed that he had kept his promise to Prudom and has worn the American paratrooper ring ever since.

Others who knew Prudom also spoke of him warmly. Carole’s mother, Enid Francis, told the Daily Mirror,

‘My daughter loved him, and he loved her. They had hoped to marry, and it would have been with my blessing. He was such a gentleman. Whatever Barry did, and God knows he did some terrible things in those desperate hours and days, being hunted like a wild animal – he did not deserve to be shot down like a stray dog. All the stories about him are not consistent with the mild-mannered man I have entertained in my living room. I felt only sadness when he died, and Carole is beside herself with grief.’

Prudom’s Motivations

Why did a man described as sensitive, kind, and unassuming, turn to violence? Criminal psychiatrist Dr Stephen Shaw suggested that Prudom’s fascination with the military and his disappointment at being rejected for the SAS may have played a role, prompting him to play an extended cat-and-mouse game with the police in an attempt to prove himself. But his curtailed SAS training had taken place 13 years before his moorland rampage, so was that really the trigger? Another interpretation points to a combination of factors, including a growing resentment towards the police, linked to their failure to catch the man who had mugged his mother – an event which may have contributed to her suicide.

Speculation and Theories Surrounding Barry Prudom

Prudom was buried in an unmarked grave, attended by eight family members. But the speculation surrounding the case did not end there. 250 miles away, in Aldershot, Hampshire, detectives wondered if Prudom had been responsible for two other murders – those of 66-year-old Margaret Johnson and 44-year-old Ann Lee, both stabbed while walking their dogs a few weeks prior to the shooting of PC David Haigh. A scruffy man in an army-style jacket had been seen nearby and was known to have travelled to the area in an orange and white van. A man named Peter Fell spent 16 years in prison after falsely confessing to the double murder, before being cleared in 2000. The case remains officially unsolved.

Questions were raised about the true nature of Barry Prudom’s military connections. PC David Haigh was killed just 200 yards from the American communications base which Prudom had helped to build. The home of George and Sylvia Luckett was near a sensitive RAF installation, and PC Ken Oliver was wounded close to the Fylingdales early warning radar system, which was linked to a North American air defence centre in Colorado Springs, not far from where Prudom had once camped. Margaret Johnson, stabbed in Aldershot, was the wife of Major Johnson, a former commander at the Junior Parachute Company at Browning Barracks, Aldershot, and the crime scene was close to the town’s military base. There were also reports that officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been present during the siege at Old Malton, along with two unidentified men in a camouflage army helicopter. This fuelled speculation that Prudom was, for some reason, considered a greater threat to national security. Or was he simply a man obsessed with survivalism who made bad choices after the pressure of personal tragedies? As BBC journalist Robert Hall put it, ‘There’s a feeling of sadness for his victims but there’s also regret that you never heard his story. What had happened in this man’s life to make him do these dreadful things? We felt cheated.’

As the coverage of the case focused on the unprecedented scale of the police operation and the sensational involvement of tracker Eddie McGee, Prudom’s life and his possible motivations have largely been overlooked. Whatever the explanation, it ended on 4 July 1982, and the answers died with him.

Researched and written by Prash and Melissa Ganendran. Published 23 July 2026.
© 2026 Prash Ganendran. All Rights Reserved.

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Sources

Ancestry.co.uk
Headline Crime: The Malton Manhunt
Manhunt: The Phantom Cop Killer
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