THE CASE OF THE CLUELESS SNIFFER DOGS – Stuart Hazell
On the 10th anniversary of the Soham murders (actually the day before, on Friday, August 3rd, 2012), and during the national excitement of the London Olympics, 12 year-old schoolgirl Tia Sharp vanished after leaving her grandmother’s house in New Addington in south London to go shopping in nearby Croydon. The significance of this particular day is that a TV programme was scheduled to be broadcast that evening marking the 10th anniversary of the Soham murders, which was to feature victim Holly Wells’s father. The timing looked ominously significant and it soon became apparent that another such case was unfolding.
Three witnesses saw Tia Sharp leave her grandmother’s house at midday, including her grandmother’s boyfriend Stuart Hazell, who lived there. He had told the girl to be back by 6 o’clock, to which she had replied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” as she left. The grandmother was not present.
Police later arrested him after the body of Tia, 12, was found hidden inside her grandmother’s house.
Scotland Yard had earlier warned the public not to approach Hazell after the dramatic discovery of Tia’s body sparked a murder probe.
The 37-year-old painter and decorator may have been the last person to see her before she disappeared eight days ago.
Shop owner Prasanna Jayakumar, 49, said: “He came in and was very drunk, swaying all over the place and saying, ‘I’m Tia’s grandad and I need to find her’.
“He was crying and hitting his head with his fists.”
The following Thursday, while the search was still on for Tia Sharp and her abductor, Hazell appeared in a TV interview himself saying that he had not had anything to do with the girl's disappearance, public suspicion having fallen on him because he was the last person known to have had contact with the missing girl.
Then a very strange set of events occurred. The police suddenly changed their investigation from that of an abduction and sealed off the house in which he and Tia's grandmother lived, including that of the neighbour, Paul Meehan, who was one of the witnesses that had seen the girl leave her grandmother's house that day. The police now concentrated their investigation among the bins and surroundings of the house itself, and inside it, despite it having been searched several times before, including with sniffer dogs, and despite the witnesses who had seen her leaving the house.
Then a very strange development happened. Having switched their search to the house, the police announced the next day, a week after the disappearance, that a body had been found inside the loft, which supposedly had been lying there decomposing in the August heat for a week.
Suspicious Prasanna checked a paper and knew who he was.
He added: “He went out and started talking to people and they called the police.”
Schoolgirl Chloe Bird, 11, said she recognised Hazell in the shop while she was buying sweets.
She said: “I knew it was Tia’s grandad and he scared me.”
She added: “I was crying and shaking. I rang my nan and told her and she said call the police.”
Detectives now face urgent questions over why it took them so long to find Tia’s body in the property.
She was eventually found at 4pm yesterday in the terraced house Hazell shared with her grandmother Christine Sharp – despite police previously searching the home themselves and taking in a sniffer dog.
Among the various odd circumstances of this was that none of the residents of these two houses had smelt anything, including the sniffer dogs earlier in the investigation, and that the body was miraculously discovered after what seemed like a most unlikely and inappropriate change in the investigation.
Media attention having switched to himself, Stuart Hazell was soon recognized by a member of the public buying vodka in a shop in Merton, and he was arrested and charged with murder, while Paul Meehan, the witness who lived next door and had supported Hazell's account of Tia Sharp's exit from the house, was bailed on suspicion of having assisted an offender.
This case consists of an abduction and murder of a schoolchild on the 10th anniversary of the Soham murders, the first since then, and a decomposing body in the loft which had escaped the nostrils of the residents and sniffer dogs, and which was discovered by the police only after they had astonished everyone by turning their search to the house itself. The only apparent justification that they could have had for this switch was that the girl had disappeared soon after leaving the house and had not yet shown up in CCTV surveillance records.
Last night it was unclear if the body had been in the house since Tia’s disappearance or if it had been moved into the property at a later date.
Tension grew last night outside the terraced house in New Addington, South London, as a group of 150 locals gathered at the police cordon.
Their anger was directed at police as residents said they were baffled how officers had previously searched the house but failed to find her.
Simone John, 37, who lives one street away, said: “How on earth did the police go into the house and do a search and didn’t find her? That’s a real mess.
“If that had been a drugs offence every single piece of that house would have been turned upside down. Things have been missed.”
Marcia Linton, 47, another resident, added: “To think she’s been in that house and nobody knew. Where could she have been hidden? It’s incredible.
"They even had a dog in there but it obviously didn’t pick anything up.”
Witnesses had reported seeing a white van in the area bothering children the day before the disappearance, and earlier in the week, the police had conducted a search of a local wood 400 yards away from the house known as Birchwood. They had sealed off the entrances with tape and used sniffer dogs and long sticks to probe the undergrowth. If the body were to be found there, it would explain why she had disappeared so quickly, and the police would have been stuck with a body in an incident that resembled the Soham murders that the 10th anniversary commemorated.
The body was allegedly found in black bin bags, which resembles the Soham case, and it was wrapped in a black bedsheet, black being the colour of death and bad news. It seems unlikely that a bona fide killer would bother with this touch, unless it was to mark the Soham anniversary.
Hazell had been interviewed by detectives as a witness on Wednesday but not arrested.
But last night he was found by teams of officers searching Cannon Hill Common in Morden.
He is believed to have been hiding in woodland near allotments.
His childhood home, a terraced former council, borders the common.
He was arrested, handcuffed and placed in a white police van at 8.40pm following a search involving dozens of officers.
A man called Jamie, 37, who claimed he went to school with Hazell, said: “I knew he would come back here.
"He lived next to the common with his father. He had a tough upbringing.”
On Thursday Hazell gave an interview on ITV and insisted he would never harm Tia, who he “loved to bits” and was ‘”like a daughter to me”.
It was reported in the press that the sniffer dog that discovered the body had first sniffed at an area of carpet upstairs and then up at the ceiling under the loft, which indicates that the body was placed on the floor before it was put in the loft. But if this had been done otherwise than very recently, could the dog have spotted the trace of scent on the carpet given the smell from the loft? And if the body had been placed on the carpet soon after the murder, surely there wouldn't be any scent left there to trace?
One of the searches that involved sniffer dogs had occurred on the Wednesday, at lunch time, the day before Stuart Hazell's interview on TV, and two days before his arrest for murder.
He added: “Did I do anything to Tia? No, I bloody didn’t.” Hazell had described how after meeting Tia in nearby Croydon on Thursday afternoon they travelled home by tram and spent the evening allegedly playing computer games together, while Christine was working overnight as a carer.
He said the girl often spent the night at her gran’s. The following day he said he made coffee and did household chores.
According to Hazell, Tia said goodbye to him, telling him she was going shopping for flip-flops.
As police came under scrutiny over the length of time it took to find the body, retired Metropolitan Police Det Chief Supt Kevin Hurley said last night: “Police are so concerned about being criticised that they will not act promptly and robustly like they once did.
"So in this case they would be concerned about getting it wrong and being seen to have acted insensitively in the face of the family, and therefore their jobs would be at risk.”
Police officers had been at the house for a week and conducted a search of the property with a sniffer dog several days ago.
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The body was not formally identified until two weeks after the disappearance, using dental records, which suggests that decomposition was too advanced for a family identification when the body was found.
The police have apologized profusely for the errors of their investigation, but these excuses were made on behalf of the nostrils of the excellent Alsation breed and the police ground operatives, whose uniform was once iconic and represented Britain's evolving democracy as well as anything. Like their nation, they are being ripped off by Mrs Thatcher's free capitalism and its achievers, which are progressively replacing all the services and talents of Britain's democracy.
A few weeks before this murder, in July, one of the tabloid newspapers had commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Soham murders by featuring extracts from a book written by Ian Huntley's brother in which he expressed his hatred of him as the Soham murderer. If the Tia Sharp murder was committed by the real Soham murderer, this murder may well have been his response to that tribute.
http://www.justjustice.org/anniversary.htmlYesterday a large cordon was thrown up around the property and police confirmed they had found a body inside. It was not clear where in the house it was but police had been seen taking in ladders.
Hazell took part in a candle-lit procession last week wearing a white T-shirt publicising the Tia search.
Speaking to reporters earlier yesterday, Mrs Sharp said she did not know where he was, but claimed he was out helping the hunt for Tia.
She added: “I don’t know where he is. He’s had it hard.”.
Mrs Sharp said her daughter – Tia’s mum Natalie, of nearby Mitcham – was “in bits” and had left the area because “she needed to get away”.
But Natalie, who has two other children, had spent much of the time during the hunt for Tia at her mother’s home.
It was believed she may have slept overnight at the property where her daughter’s body was found.
Last night Christine and other relatives were seen sitting in a park near Addington police station after the discovery of Tia and before Hazell’s arrest.
Speaking to the media last night, Commander Neil Basu, who is in charge of policing for the South East London area, said: “Clearly there will be many questions about the investigation into Tia’s disappearance and I want to take this opportunity to clarify some of the speculation.
“When police investigate cases as difficult and challenging as this, it is important that we do not just focus on one line of inquiry.
"For example, we had over 60 reported sightings of Tia, 800 hours of CCTV footage to examine and 300 plus calls into the incident room.
“All of these lines of inquiry were in the process of being followed up. A number of searches took place at the address.
“When Tia was first reported missing, officers searched her bedroom as is normal practice in a missing persons enquiry.
"A further search of the house took place in the early hours of Sunday morning by a specialist team.
“This was then followed by another search of the house by specialist dogs on Wednesday lunchtime.”
