The case
Michael Sams was a toolmaker in Nottinghamshire with an artificial leg and a lifelong obsession with railways. On July 9, 1991, he picked up eighteen-year-old Julie Dart in the Chapeltown area of Leeds and took her to his workshop in Newark-on-Trent, where he kept her in a plywood box. When she tried to get out, he killed her. Her body was left on a farm near Grantham, Lincolnshire, and found about ten days later.
His ransom demand of £140,000 to West Yorkshire Police came to nothing. On January 22, 1992, he booked a house viewing in Great Barr, Birmingham, and abducted the estate agent who showed him around, twenty-five-year-old Stephanie Slater. He held her for eight days in a coffin-sized box inside a wheelie bin at the same workshop. After her employer left £175,000 at a bridge over a disused railway line near Barnsley, Sams collected the money and let her go.
On February 4, 1992, the BBC programme Crimewatch broadcast recordings of the kidnapper’s voice. Sams’s first wife recognized it and contacted police, and he was arrested the next day. At Nottingham Crown Court on July 8, 1993, he was convicted of Julie Dart’s murder along with kidnapping and blackmail, and he received four concurrent life sentences. He admitted the murder three days after the verdict.
Case photographs
Where it happened
Newark-on-Trent, site of the workshop where Sams held his victims