Police Dig For Bodies

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30886, 20 October 1965, Page 26

Police Dig For Bodies

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright J MANCHESTER, Oct. 18. One of Britain’s biggest murder hunts entered a new phase today when more than 100 police dug for bodies believed to be buried on lonely moorland near Manchester.

The remains of a 10-year-old girl, who had been missing since last December, were unearthed from a shallow grave on the moors at the week-end, and police are confident that more bodies will soon be found nearby. Police are re-examining the files on eight people—three of them children—who have disappeared from the Manchester area over the last three years.

They are believed to have been the victims of a maniac killer. Her head covered in a black shawl, Mrs Anne Downey visited a police mortuary last night and identified the body unearthed the previous day as that of her daughter, Lesley Ann. The child went to a fairground but did not return. The search for Lesley beban anew last week when . n informant told police that at least two of the missing children had been murdered.

A man had bragged about burying a body or bodies in the area. Police went to a house in Manchester and searched it from top to bottom. They took away floorboards, but they found no graves or remains to indicate that a mass killer had hidden his victims there.

Then a girl remembered seeing a man digging near the edge of a moor nearly two years ago and the large-scale police search was switched to that area.

Late yesterday a policeman came across Lesley’s shallow grave almost by accident. Today police were still guarding the area where the grave was found.