SPARKY TURNED COP KILLER
ELECTRICAN and self-styled survivalist Barry Prudom’s reign of terror began on June 17, 1982, when PC David Haigh was delivering a summons to a poacher in North Yorkshire’s Washburn Valley.
When he didn’t return, his colleague and friend Mick Clipston went in search of him.
Clipston found the police car with its doors open and David Haigh dead beside it. He had been shot in the forehead.
It was the beginning of one of the biggest armed manhunts in British police history – one that would last 17 days.
Having cleared the poacher of suspicion, police were left with a murder but no apparent motive – and almost no evidence.
Written on a clipboard found under PC Haigh’s body was a date of birth, a name and a car registration number.
Escaping
But the name was false and the car was found abandoned three days later, 25 miles away.
The trail was cold but the gunman was on the move.
In Lincolnshire, he broke into a house. Then, 20 miles away, on the fifth day of
DOG-handler PC Ken Oliver will never forget the day he stopped a car during a routine check in the North Yorkshire Moors’ picturesque Dalby Forest.
Without realising, he had come face to face with death.
He walked up to the car and asked the man inside to step out. Instead of replying, the driver lifted his hand – with a .22 Beretta 71 pistol in it.
“I knew for a fact he was going for my head,” said Ken, who has since retired.
“He shot me across the nose. The young dog came out then. He shot him, too which just gave me enough time to start to run.”
Ken survived seven gunshot wounds during his getaway. His police dog, which had been shot twice, also pulled through.
He ran to a nearby holiday cottage where two little girls were playing with their grandfather.
Ken recalled: “I just had to get the kids out of the way. I thought, if he took me out, he would take the kids out as well.” But the killer hadn’t followed him. Instead, he had driven deep into the forest, where his car was later found burnt out.
It was the seventh day of the hunt for a man who, up until then, had no face and no name. the police hunt, he entered the home of Sylvia and George Luckett, shooting both in the head before escaping in their car.
George died instantly, but his wife crawled next door for help. She survived but was left with permanent brain damage and remembered nothing.
Two days later, up in the Dalby Forest, came dog handler Ken Oliver’s encounter with the gunman.
He immediately alerted his police colleagues to the gunman’s whereabouts. Among the first to respond was a young Detective Sergeant from Scarborough, Jim Kilmartin.
He remembered finding the burning car the killer had escaped in. They were wary of approaching it.
“The car was only just starting to crackle and burn,” said Jim, who would later become head of York police.
“We were only a few minutes behind him.”
They tracked the killer with a dog, doubling through the trees.
Eventually, as it was beginning to get dark, they came to a steep defile. The killer could have been lurking in the shadows, watching them.
“I was not prepared to go down there,” Jim said.
By dawn the next day, a huge operation had been mounted, involving marksmen, helicopters and 1,000 policemen.
Then at last came a breakthrough.
In a police station in Leeds, PC Martin Hatton was cross-referencing the information on David Haigh’s clipboard with police records.
Working from the date of birth on the clipboard, he came across the name of Barry Edwards, wanted for wounding.
The police searched his flat and established his real name was Barry Prudom, 37, a man known to them as a keep-fit fanatic, obsessed with weapons and the military.
They also found a manual on survival techniques written by Eddie McGee, a former paratrooper and an experienced tracker. Prudom had attended one of his courses.
The confirmation that Prudom was their man came when Ken Oliver identified him from a photograph.
After 10 days, The Phantom of the Forest had a name. But he had vanished. Then, on the 12th day
of the hunt, Prudom calmly walked into the village centre of Old Malton.
Sgt David Winter and PC Mick Wood were on patrol at the time when Wood saw his colleague challenging a man. There was a gunshot – and Winter lay dead on the grass, just 200 yards from the police station.
North Yorkshire’s then Chief Constable Kenneth Henshaw ordered the largest arsenal of weapons ever issued to a British police force and threw a cordon round Malton, sealing off the town.
The Siege of Malton had begun. But still there was no sign of the killer.
Prudom was lying low – until July 3 when, driven by hunger, he walked into the home of Maurice Johnson.
For 11 hours, Prudom held the Johnsons and their son Brian hostage and, as the hours passed, struck up a strange relationship with them, even sharing a meal he called “the last supper”.
Promise
In a TV interview, Brian recalled: “As the night went on, we got talking as though we had known each other for years. He was calling me Brian and my father he was calling Dad.”
Eventually, at 3.15am, Prudom left, leaving Brian with a present – a U.S. paratroopers’ ring.
“He said, ‘Promise me that you will wear it’, and I said, ‘Yes, I will’.”
After he had left, Brian’s father called the police. Once more, Jim
Kilmartin was on the killer’s trail.
Together, he and tracker Eddie McGee, who had taught Prudom al his survival skills, followed the killer’s trail through the early morning dew.
It took them to the back of a nearby tennis club, where some pine fencing was lying against a wall behind thick undergrowth. It was Prudom’s hideout.
A firearms squad from Greater Manchester, led by Chief Insp David Clarkson, was called in.
Clarkson, desperate to make sure it was Prudom, climbed the wall behind the hideout and tried to prise the top open. It was too heavy.
Then he tried talking to the man they believed was holed up inside. There was no response.
Suddenly, a gunshot rang out.
Clarkson, believing Prudom was firing on his officers, ordered them to open fire.
When the police eventually opened the hideout, Prudom was dead.
Terror
But the final irony was yet to be revealed. A post-mortem into the killer’s death revealed the truth.
The single shot that Clarkson had heard had not been aimed at police at all.
Triple killer Barry Prudom had just shot himself – becoming the last victim of his reign of terror.