As Detective Sergeant Tim Grogan walked into the killer’s workshop, a short, one-legged man greeted him with a calm, “Oh, hello there”.
Michael Sams, Britain’s most wanted man, had been hiding in plain sight, no doubt plotting to kill again.
Despite knowing the gig was up, Sams accepted he was under arrest without complaint.
“He’s calm and cool,” Tim recalled. “When you go down to the workshop and he comes in accentuating the limp, I remember being confronted by a shambling, one-legged trainspotter, and that was it!
“All this time we’ve been searching for this chap who’s outwitted West Midlands Police. He’s killed and he was prepared to kill again.”
As Sams was bundled into the back of the squad car, he even gave DS Grogan’s detectives cheery directions to the nearest police station in Newark, Nottinghamshire.
It wasn’t until he was put in front of a young custody sergeant and told he was under arrest for the suspected murder of Julie Dart and the kidnapping of Stephanie Slater, that Sams finally showed any emotion.
“The blood drained through his face,” Tim said. “He was a broken man. And that was the time to get him with an interview. That was the time we could have really got into his head and seen what he had to say for himself.”
It had taken Tim and his West Yorkshire Police team months of hard graft to get their man, who is the subject of a new two-part Channel 5 documentary airing tomorrow and Wednesday
Sams, aged 51 at the time of his capture, had played a tortuous game of cat-and-mouse with the police after 18-year-old Julie’s body was found in a field near Grantham, Lincs, on July 14, 1991.
He had kidnapped her days earlier from a red light district in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, and held her in a makeshift coffin-style box that he’d chained to the floor of his warehouse.
He’d forced her to write a haunting letter to her boyfriend, in which Julie had begged for help.
“Hello Dominic. Help me please, I’ve been kidnapped and I’m being held as a personal security until next Monday night,” she had written. “Please go and tell my mum straightaway. Love you so much.”
Sams also sent a threatening note demanding £140,000 in cash, to be delivered by a female police officer, or Julie would “never be seen again”.
When the cash didn’t appear where Sams had specified, he killed Julie with two hammer blows to the head.
It’s something Tim still thinks about now, more than 30 years on from her death.
“When I read that letter Julie had written when she was in desperate need, knowing she was going to die... It’s a heart-rending letter,” he says.
“You think of somebody locked up, they’re not drinking or eating, they’re terrified to death.
“When I wake up in the early hours of the morning, I still think about her life being snuffed out. She had so much future.
“She was a victim that didn’t need to die. She died, I believe, because she escaped [the box].”
Sams’ next victim nearly met the same fate. Stephanie, 25, was working as an estate agent in Birmingham when she arranged to meet a “Mr Southwall” at an address in the city.
Sams, masquerading as the prospective buyer, abducted her and brought her to his workshop in Newark, where he raped her and locked her inside a filthy wheelie bin.
But Police, led by West Mids CID head John Plimmer, were able to intercept a ransom letter Sams wrote to her firm demanding £175,000.
A carefully staged plan meant her boss would drive the money to an abandoned farm track near Penistone in South Yorkshire.
But poor weather conditions and the murderer’s clever route meant the police lost track of their courier, and the £175,000 – and Sams – vanished.
“It was incredibly frustrating. We’re sat there having a cup of coffee, licking our wounds, knowing that he’s got away with it, and we’re going to have a debrief about what happened. And the phone rang and Bob Taylor picks it up. ‘She’s home.’ We were gobsmacked.”
Incredibly, the killer had kept his promise and delivered Stephanie back to her distraught parents’ home that same day.
More than 1,000 officers had been involved in the case so far, and Tim’s job was to hunt down every clue Sams had left along the way. A brick he had used as a marker for the abortive ransom drop for Julie was analysed and found to have been from a batch in Newark.
Another brick from the same batch was found in Sams’ workshop, tying him to both crimes.
Sams was convicted in July 1993 and sentenced to life but, now aged 80, is applying for parole for the third time next month. Stephanie died of cancer aged 50.
The Girl in the Box: The Kidnapping of Stephanie Slater is tomorrow and Wednesday at 9pm on Channel 5.
