82-year-old Christopher Harrisson was found guilty of murdering fellow academic Dr Brenda Page, who had fled their abusive marriage. He has been handed a 20-year prison sentence.
Dr Page was found beaten to death in her Aberdeen flat, on July 14, 1978 by a worried neighbour, after she begged her lawyer to get a post-mortem examination done if she died suddenly. Harrisson, from Aberdeen, spent decades denying his crime but was snared by DNA examination and forensic techniques.
A minute flake of paint found on Dr Page’s bedroom window - which had been forced open - matched the paint on Harrisson’s Mini Traveller car. One sperm sample found in bedsheets in Dr Page’s flat was 590 million times more likely to have come from Harrisson rather than any other male, the court heard.
Genetic scientist Brenda was 32 when she was killed, and was described as "extremely kind and intelligent". Police hailed greater understanding of domestic abuse for helping to boost the investigation when it was reopened in 2015.
National Procurator Fiscal for Homicide and Major Crime, David Green, said he hoped the sentence brought some degree of comfort to the family of Dr Page. He said: “The relatives of Dr Brenda Page have waited a very long time for justice and our thoughts are with them as they come to terms with today’s outcome.”
“Evidence collected at the time painted a picture of a bullying and manipulative man but it has taken breakthroughs in science and forensics to allow us to prove the case beyond any doubt. A man once recognised as a skilled scientist himself has been brought to justice through scientific expertise,” Mr Green added.
Similarly, some of the South Yorkshire defendants pictured here were caught following advances in forensic science and the creation of a South Yorkshire Police cold case team which led to some cases being re-examined, and to detectives finally tracing the criminals responsible.
In other cases included in this list, defendants were forced to finally take responsibility for their, after committing additional offences.
All of the information pictured here was correct at the time of publication on Sunday, March 11.
If you know of a cold case success that you think should be featured in this list please email: [email protected]
1. Gary Allen: Double murderer jailed 14 years after first killing
Following a trial last year, Gary Allen, 48, was jailed for life for murdering mother-of-three Samantha Class in Hull in 1997, and mother-of-four Alena Grlakova in Rotherham in 2018. The murders were branded "wicked" acts by a judge, Mr Justice Goose, as he ordered Allen to serve a minimum of 37 years in prison at his sentencing in June 2021. Allen was cleared of the murder of Ms Class in 2000, but this acquittal was overturned in 2019 after "compelling" new evidence was personally presented to Appeal Court judges by Director of Public Prosecutions Max Hill QC. Allen denied killing either of the women but was found guilty of two counts of murder by a jury that heard eight weeks of evidence. At Allen's trial, jurors heard harrowing details of how the body of 29-year-old Ms Class, who was working in the sex industry, was found by children on the banks of the Humber in October 1997. She had 33 different injuries. Ms Class left three children, Sophia, Aiden and Lewis. Ms Grlakova's body was found naked in a stream in Rotherham in April 2019, four months after she was last seen on Boxing Day 2018. The 38-year-old mum had been strangled. She was from Slovakia and moved to the UK in 2008 but, after becoming estranged from her husband and children, she started to work in the sex industry. Sheffield Crown Court heard how Allen attacked two sex workers in 2000 in Plymouth, just weeks after he was acquitted of Ms Class's murder. After he was jailed for those attacks, he told a probation officer about his dislike of sex workers and women in general, saying: "I like to frighten them. I like to cause pain. "I like to make them cry. I like blood. I like to hurt them. I enjoy it. It makes me feel good." Photo: SYP
2. Kevin Shaw: Vile rapist finally brought to justice almost 20 years later
For more than 18 years vile Kevin Shaw thought he had got away with his heinous crime, but in December 2006 he was arrested by police after he was found performing an indecent act in his car outside a Sheffield care home. The incident triggered a sequence of events which saw him jailed for 12 years in May 2008. Shaw's victim was just 19-years-old when she was raped, but by the time Shaw was finally caught for his crimes, she was a grown mum-of-three. Speaking in 2008, the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said: "About three years ago I read on Teletext about DNA matching and I knew someone who was capable of doing what he’d done would do something else one day and get caught." "When they asked me if I wanted to carry on through with it I was determined I was going to take it all the way. When you know there’s somebody like that out there you can’t just leave it. "The next time it could have been my daughter he attacked, or someone else who might not have got away." After jurors at Sheffield Crown Court returned their guilty verdict they heard a victim impact statement from the woman about the effect of the attack. She said from the night of September 15, 1989 onwards, her life changed completely. "I changed from a confident, happy, fun-loving young woman into a frightened, pessimistic, shell of a woman, " she said. "The girl I was vanished off the face of the world. I didn’t know what happened to her or where she went." Photo: SYP
3. Jeremiah Sheridan: Vile rapist who attacked woman with cerebral palsy in own home caught by police 18 years later
Sickening thug, Jeremiah Sheridan, got away with his crimes for years, but was finally jailed for 16-and-a-half years in September 2009 for brutally raping a woman in May 1991, then aged 45, who suffered from cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair. Sheridan, a traveller and door-to-door salesman from Billericay, Essex, was caught following 18 years on the run after officers from South Yorkshire Police's Cold Case review team re-examined their evidence following advances in DNA testing techniques. Sheridan's past began to catch up with him in 2005 when he was arrested for a public order offence in Cambridgeshire and gave a false name – Dan O'Brien. He was never charged but his DNA was stored on the National Database and, when South Yorkshire Police re-examined the case, a cross-match with a sample from the scene turned up the Dan O'Brien sample. When police cross-checked it with fingerprints they discovered Sheridan's true identity. Speaking in March 2010, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "It proved very difficult to trace Sheridan - but after the case was highlighted on Crimewatch in 2008, South Yorkshire Police got several new leads including one that Sheridan was in Australia. He was arrested on his return at Heathrow airport and, last September, having pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to 16-and-a-half years." Photo: SYP
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Harry Musson was jailed for six years in October 2010 after he admitted breaking into the house of a Barnsley single mum in 1996 and forcing the terrified woman to perform a degrading sex act on him as her two young children slept in the room next door. Musson was wearing a balaclava at the time. This came just a year after Musson, then of Foster Street, Stairfoot, Barnsley, was locked up for 12 years in 2009 after South Yorkshire Police's Cold Case Review Team used new forensic techniques to link him to a rape and burglary committed in 1990. He broke into the home of a 35-year-old woman who lived in Barugh Green, Barnsley, and raped her - then stole jewellery from his violated victim. Then in 2010, forensic scientists working with cold case investigators, linked his DNA to the second attack. Corinne Wilson, prosecuting Musson's 2010 conviction, said the woman had woken to find Musson at the foot of her bed on June 11, 1996. "She couldn't see his face. She tried to jump up and back away from him. He put his right hand over her mouth and grabbed at her," she added. She said Musson turned the woman on to her front and tried to rape her but she managed to push him off. He then forced her to perform a sex act on him. Afterwards he simply got up and walked out of the bedroom telling her to ‘be quiet'. Miss Wilson said Musson was caught because his DNA profile was on the national database and when police revisited the case it was compared with a swab taken from the victim in 1996. In a moving victim impact statement the woman said she had lived in fear for years as she didn't know the identity of her attacker. She would scrub her mouth with her toothbrush until her gums bled and binge ate, putting on three stone to make herself unattractive to men. Photo: SYP