A Breakthrough:

A police officer in West Yorkshire was called to an incident whereby the lead had been stolen from a disused hospital roof. He visited a police call box to make his Sergeant aware of the theft. The Sergeant sent other officers to check the local scrap yards to enquire if anyone had taken in a substantial amount of lead.
The Sergeant’s enquiries proved fruitful as a worker at one of the scrap yards had noted the registration number of a pickup truck that had indeed, bought in a large amount of scrap lead. Back in 1979 if an officer requested the registered keeper of a vehicle it took some time to get the answer. So the officer and the Sergeant, thinking that the vehicle would be local, drove around the Huddersfield area to try to locate it.
They were successful and spotted the pick up on the road parked outside a house. The officers visited the house which was occupied by a young man who was known to them. He admitted to stealing the lead and weighing it in at the scrap yard, he was arrested. The officers searched the house to obtain any further evidence and in doing so found a shotgun and cartridges. When they questioned the detainee, he stated that it wasn’t his gun, it belonged to a man called Stephen Anderson.

Stephen Anderson (23) was arrested later that day on an unrelated minor matter and was taken into custody at Huddersfield Police Station. The officers asked him about the gun and he denied that it was his and related a story as to the ownership of the gun. He told them they could confirm his story by asking his girlfriend.

Further enquiries were made and the officers received information that Stephen Anderson and two associates, Paul Hebel(31) and Philip Jennings (25), were responsible for the murders in Scholar Green, Cheshire. The West Yorkshire officers contacted the incident room in Cheshire and the information was relayed to them. Although there had been coverage of the double murders in the newspapers, it had not been revealed that one of the victims had been shot in the back as well as the head. So when the information from the source in West Yorkshire was given to the incident room, it was obvious that this was a detail that the informant knew.

Cheshire Officers travelled to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire on Friday 9th November 1979 and liaised with the local officers. The arrests of Hebel and Jennings were made the following day.

Initially Anderson, Hebel and Jennings denied the murders but as the hours ticked by they admitted they were at Boarded Barn Cottage and they had shot and killed the victims. Jennings had hired a car to travel with the others from the Huddersfield area to the house at Scholar Green. Their plan was to take hostage the wife of a local businessman who had recently sold his chain of supermarkets for millions of pounds. It was a story that had been reported in the media. Having heard of such a wealthy man they would hold his wife captive at their home and take the businessman to the bank where he would withdraw £50,000 and pay the three men. But their plan failed, when they arrived at Boarded Barn Cottage, believing that was the home of the businessman and his family, they found the two friends Ann and Christine.

Realising their mistake all too late they ordered the women to strip naked so they wouldn’t try to escape. They put them in separate bedrooms, placed them face down in the beds, tied their hands and shot them both. Jennings raped Ann Carryer before she was killed. The women were left in the beds where they had been shot hidden with the bed covers. The three men then left the property and returned to Huddersfield where they spoke to others about their horrendous crimes. That revelation of the details of what had happened at Scholar Green was their undoing as that information was relayed to the Police.