The Cannock Chase murders were the murders of three girls aged between 5 and 7 in Staffordshire, England between 1965 and 1967. The bodies of all three children were discovered on Cannock Chase; a vast area of countryside in the county of Staffordshire. Raymond Leslie Morris was arrested for the attempted abduction of an intended fourth victim in 1968; he was convicted in February 1969 of the 1967 murder of seven-year-old Christine Ann Darby at Stafford Assizes. Although never charged with the murders of the first two victims discovered on Cannock Chase, following Morris's conviction, a police spokesman informed the media all investigators involved in his apprehension remained convinced that all three children had been murdered by Morris, who is also believed to be responsible for the abduction, sexual assault, and attempted murder of a fifth girl in 1964.
At 9 p.m. on 2 December 1964, a nine-year-old named Julia Taylor was lured into a blue Vauxhall Velox in Bloxwich by a man claiming to be a friend of her mother and referring to himself as "Uncle Len". The child was informed her mother had asked this individual to transport her to her aunt's home to "fetch Christmas presents". She was driven to a pile of slag heaps near the mining village of Bentley where she was sexually assaulted, manually strangled and thrown half-naked from the car into a ditch, having endured grievous internal injuries. Taylor was found alive by a passing cyclist approximately fifty minutes later. This individual would later state he had overheard "weak, sobbing" noises as he cycled in the pouring rain and darkness and had stopped his bicycle to investigate the sounds. The cyclist immediately flagged down a passing van, which drove the sobbing and bleeding child to a hospital.[16]
Had the cyclist not overheard, then observed the child in this ditch, she likely would have died from exposure within twenty minutes.
Taylor could remember little about her ordeal, her abductor or his vehicle beyond sobbing and begging her abductor to drive her home when she noticed he had driven past her aunt's home and his conversation suddenly became more lurid in nature. However, one eyewitnesses to Taylor's abduction was certain the abductor's vehicle was a large car with two-tone paint, small fins at the rear and a hand spot-lamp mounted close to one wing "at the end of the windscreen, near the driver's door". Despite intense efforts to locate this car, the vehicle was not traced.
On the afternoon of Wednesday 8 September 1965, a six-year-old girl, Margaret Reynolds, disappeared from a location close to her home on Clifton Road, Aston as she walked the short distance from her home to the Prince Albert Primary School. She was last seen alive by her older sister, Susan, when the two parted company to walk in separate directions to their respective schools, having returned to their home for lunch. When the child failed to return home from school, her parents quickly learned she had not attended any classes that afternoon. The Reynolds immediately reported their daughter missing to police.
In the weeks following Reynolds' disappearance, 160 police officers questioned over 25,000 individuals in and around Aston. Two hundred posters featuring a composite photograph of the child in the clothes she was last seen, with an accompanying appeal for witnesses to contact police were printed by the Birmingham Evening Mail. These posters were distributed in and around Aston, Lovells and Handsworth. With assistance from members of the public, investigators extensively searched all houses and landmarks within an eight-mile radius of where Reynolds was last seen alive. Despite these efforts, no trace of the child was discovered. In the months prior to Reynolds' abduction, investigators in and around the vicinity of her disappearance had received numerous reports of a lone white male in a car who had attempted to entice prepubescent girls into his vehicle and who, if successful, had sexually assaulted the children, with his assaults often including digital penetration.