Volume 10 · Chapter 1
A Sad Holiday Season
John Taylor
Victim: Leanne Tiernan
Case at a glance
- When
- November 2000
- Where
- Bramley, Leeds, and Lindley Woods, North Yorkshire, England
- Perpetrator
- John Taylor
- Victim
- Leanne Tiernan
- Outcome
- Pleaded guilty to murder in 2002 and sentenced to life; given a whole life order in 2018 for further sexual offenses
The case
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.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 10 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 10 on AmazonCase photographs
11 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“The detail I kept coming back to was the dog collar. A mail-order record, the kind of paperwork nobody thinks about twice, is what put a name to Leanne’s killer. Taylor had lived quietly on her estate for years, and the older rape cases showed how long his violence had gone unnoticed by the people around him.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
