A Sad Holiday Season:John Taylor·Leanne Tiernan

Leanne Tiernan was sixteen and lived in Bramley, on the western side of Leeds, England. On November 25, 2000, she spent the day Christmas shopping in the city with a friend. The two parted near Houghley Lane, and Leanne set off alone along an unlit path through Houghley Gill, a patch of wooded wasteland close to her home. She never got there.

Police searched hundreds of buildings and drained part of a canal without finding her. On August 20, 2001, her body was discovered in Lindley Woods, North Yorkshire. She had been strangled with cable ties, and experts believed she had been kept in a freezer for months. A leather dog collar on her body was traced to a mail-order pet supplier whose customers included John Taylor, a 44-year-old Parcelforce delivery driver from Leanne’s own estate. Twine, cable ties and carpet fibers linked him to the crime.

Taylor was arrested on October 16, 2001, and pleaded guilty to Leanne’s murder at Leeds Crown Court on July 8, 2002, receiving two life sentences. In 2003 he admitted two rapes committed in Leeds in 1988 and 1989. Further sexual offenses brought him a whole life order in October 2018. Detectives also reviewed unsolved killings in Yorkshire and Glasgow, but he was never charged with any of them.