Most Shocking Crimes: The young man took her to an abandoned building, picked up a piece of brick and battered her head. The seven-year-old might have been dead already by then, but he took no chances, and stabbed her “37 times”, before hiding her body. He went back home, like nothing happened, and moved house and town in due course of time. The body of a missing Nikki Allan had been found in less than 12 hours’ time, but it took the UK law enforcement authorities nearly three decades to catch the killer. The case made headlines widely as it saw many twists and turns, and the victim’s mother kept up her fight for justice for 31 long years.
After a three-week trial, a Newcastle Crown Court last week convicted David Boyd (55), who was arrested from Stockton-on-Tees in 2018 for the murder committed in October 1992. The quantum of his sentence will be pronounced on May 23, BBC reported.
The Northumbria Police, which investigated the murder, had described the case as one of the most complex and comprehensive.
According to the BBC report, Nikki lived with family on the ground floor of the Wear Garth flats in Sunderland, and 25-year-old Boyd was a neighbour. His partner at the time would babysit Nikki, whose grandparents also lived on the third floor of the same building.
Boyd was not among the initial suspects as the Northumbria Police focussed their investigation on another neighbour, George Heron, aged 24 at the time of the crime.
He was charged and prosecuted, but a trial in 1993 acquitted him, with the Leeds court judge ruling that the police had used "oppressive" tactics to extract a confession out of him, the BBC report said.
The case was heard in Leeds because Heron was found to be at the receiving end of immense hatred directed in north-east England, according to a report in The Guardian. It also said local people would travel daily to Leeds as the case was heard in front of a public gallery.
“Scientific breakthroughs” in recent years enabled the police to forensically link Boyd to the gruesome crime, the report said.
The Murder And The Conviction
Nikki was killed on October 7, 1992. According to the British media that tracked and reported the case, Boyd was well known to her family because he lived on the same floor as Nikki’s grandparents.
Boyd was also known as Smith or Bell then. The court was told how he was familiar with the abandoned building located around 300 yards from where they lived, and that Boyd got inside through a broken window. After killing the girl, he reportedly dragged her body down the steps to the cellar where he tried to hide it.
The jurors were also told that Boyd was the last man to admit having seen Nikki alive. The day before Nikki’s body was found, witnesses had apparently seen a girl skipping alongside a man in the area, and the police believed her to be Nikki.
The investigation was clear about one fact that the killer of Nikki, known as a “shy and clingy” minor, was someone she knew and trusted.
Not only did Boyd live in the same building, but Nikki's mother Sharon Henderson told The Guardian that he was also a friend of her sister's partner.
While Boyd initially denied killing Nikki, and never revealed his motive even after confessing to the crime, the prosecution told the court that DNA found on the girl's T-shirt and cycling shorts was a “one-in-28,000 match” to Boyd, the Guardian report said.
The court was also told that Boyd had been earlier, in 1999, convicted of indecently assaulting a minor nine-year-old girl, and that during interrogation he confessed to having sexual fantasies about young girls.
According to the BBC report, Boyd was also convicted for indecent exposure in 1997 when he flashed three young girls, and once prior to that in 1986 when he grabbed a 10-year-old and asked her for a kiss.
Prosecutor Richard Wright KC was quoted by BBC as having told jurors previously that the "irresistible conclusion" was that Boyd killed Nikki for a "sinister purpose", though they found no evidence of a sexual assault on the minor girl.
George Heron, The Wrong Man To Face Trial
The delayed justice and botched-up investigation not only left Nikki’s family suffering, but also devastated the life of an innocent man who was only 24 at the time of the crime.
George Heron, who had recently moved to the Garths with his sister, was arrested almost immediately after the crime. According to the reports quoted above, he had initially denied that he knew Nikki but changed his version when witnesses told the police that they did know each other.
Heron ‘confessed’ to the crime after three days of questioning. But before that, he had denied it “120 times”, according to The Guardian.
During the trial, the case against him fell apart as the Leeds court judge called six of the 12 police interview tapes “inadmissible” because officers had used “oppressive methods” to extract his confession, the report said.
Though the prosecution continued, with witnesses telling the court that they had seen Heron cuddle Nikki and also offer her crisps and money etc to “lure” her, the jury acquitted Heron after a six-week trial.
After his acquittal, Heron had moved elsewhere and started to live under an assumed name, The Guardian reported, adding that a tabloid newspaper finally tracked him down.
“There were times I wondered if I had killed Nikki…So many people said I had that I started to doubt myself,” he was quoted as saying.
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A Mother’s 31-Year Fight For Justice
In 1992, Sharon Henderson was a 26-year-old mother of four living an uneventful life, compared to what she was to experience soon, in the Sunderland locality. Barely an hour before Nikki went missing on that cold October night, Sharon was washing clothes.
Speaking to BBC, she shared what happened on the night that she never forgot. Sharon recalled how she went upstairs, with Nikki tagging along, to her parents’ flat to grab a painkiller for her throbbing head, and how Nikki found the sound of a vacuum cleaner being used by her grandmother noisy and decided to go back home on their own. That was the last time she saw her 7-year-old. Nikki never returned. They found her body in the abandoned building nearby the next day. Her head had been battered with a brick, and she had been stabbed 37 times, The Guardian reported.
The life Sharon had lived so far changed forever that day.
Over the next 30-odd years, in her own words, Sharon went “through hell” as she struggled with her alcoholism and even landed in a psychiatric hospital.
But she endured everything because “nothing mattered more in my life than seeing justice for her”, Sharon told The Guardian. “...I knew I’d get him, one way or another, however long it took … I’d see him locked up.”
The police had been quick in their initial action as they picked up George Heron as their prime suspect almost immediately after they found Nikki’s body.
Sharon did not have many reasons to believe that he was not the man. Hence, it devastated her when the court acquitted him in 1993.
According to the BBC report cited above, she even took him to a civil court. In the UK, a civil court and a criminal court are not the same. Civil law only settles disputes and orders compensation if a case so merits, but no one is sent to prison.
In Nikki’s case, the court found Heron responsible for her death, but he did not attend the hearing, the BBC report said.
With no closure, Sharon continued her fight, and gradually started her own investigation.
“…I never felt listened to by the police,” she told The Guardian.
She had the witnesses’ accounts to start with. One of them had seen “a young girl skipping to keep up with a man” around 10 pm on October 7, and they were heading towards the abandoned ‘Old Exchange’ building.
Sharon told The Guardian how she tried to track down every man who lived at the Garths and she was suspicious of. After eliminating each as the possible killer, she was left with David Boyd.
He had left Sunderland by then, but she managed to track him down. “I made it my business to become friends with his girlfriend and her daughter,” The Guardian quoted her as saying.
She even moved to a new place to be near them. “I wanted to be close to them and find out what they knew about who and where he was. I just knew he had something to do with it.”
Her struggle was not only to have the police keep working on the case, but also to keep Nikki in public memory. Sharon even appeared on a TV show, Crimewatch, in 2013 and spoke about the case and her own findings. This, the BBC report said, actually brought the case back to the people's minds.
Eventually, in 2018, the police were finally able to arrest him, with the help of DNA profiling.
“Thanks to forensic advancements, police were able to detect a DNA profile on Nikki’s clothing that matched Boyd when the case was reviewed in 2017,” the Northumbria Police said in a statement.
“In 1992 the use of DNA profiling in criminal cases was extremely limited. The science was in its infancy and in the intervening 30 years the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases has become almost routine,” Prosecutor Richard Wright KC told the court, as quoted by BBC.