THE TRAGIC MURDER OF SCHOOLGIRL HEATHER TELL

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about a case from tamworth in staffordshire england staffordshire is a seemingly safe friendly quite a large town or at least it was safe and friendly in the year 2000 which is when this case takes place there'd actually been no murders in tamworth for almost three decades but of course nowhere is ever 100 safe but before we jump into this case just a couple of things maybe there's a link on screen right now maybe there's a link in the description i don't know i'll talk about that a bit more at the end of the video and this video is kindly brought to you by nordvpn an amazing virtual private networking service that helps you protect your information online the vpn acts as a barrier between you and people trying to access your private information by making it seem as though you're operating from another ip address somewhere else in the world and because you're using a different location's ip 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that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video quick warning before we do get into this video this case does involve attempted sex crimes nothing actually happens i don't know if that's a spoiler but you know if that if you can't watch that kind of thing then click out now i'll be back again soon so like i said today's video takes place in tamworth a pretty big town in staffordshire just north of birmingham in the west midlands of england tamworth is a very friendly comfortable town it's one of those kind of towns where you don't really leave if you're born and raised in tamworth then you're likely going to stay in tamworth and move out and raise your own family in tamworth and like i said there'd been no murders in that town since the early 70s and this was the year 2000 so families were perfectly happy letting their kids just go out and play at parks or walk home alone from school stuff like that like people weren't overly cautious because it didn't have very high crime rates heather tell was a 17 year old schoolgirl from the area known for her beautiful smile and long flowing blonde hair but beyond her looks heather was one of those just really happy smiley positive people she was kind of known for this really positive kind energy that she had she was just one of those really bright people and she was known for just making others happy just by her presence she was a very nice normal girl with a nice normal group of friends she was well behaved she was just very like girl next door kind of character she had a huge passion for dancing and she was really good at it as well she spent a lot of nights a week practicing dance at her local dance studio she was actually studying dance in college at the time of this case she went to sutton coldfield college and eventually she wanted to make it her career somehow and one thing she was known for in her dance group was her ability to put immersion into her dance so whether it was like a serious piece or like just her smiling and bringing a lot of energy to her routines and at the time of this case she wasn't far off her 18th birthday and 18 is always a big one in england so her and her friends have been planning it for ages they wanted to go to london and have like a big shopping spree on august 25th 2000 17 year old heather tell was planning to meet up with a friend at the local dance studio and then go to the cinema to watch a film together this was the same dance studio that she used to go to multiple times a week for dance practice and she walked there every single time and she was a very responsible sensible girl and so her parents trusted her to do that walk alone she'd done it plenty of times before and she was fine she planned to meet her friend laura at belgrave dance studio which wasn't very far from tamworth town center at around 8 30 p.m that night however heather failed to turn up laura was waiting outside the dance studio for ages and heather was nowhere to be seen and so she started calling her but there was no answer on her phone so she was thinking well maybe she ditched her or maybe she was ill and she decided to stay at home or something and so laura called heather's home phone heather's father picked up and laura explained to him that heather hadn't turned up and he said oh well that's strange because she set off a while ago so she should be there by now the tell family were rightly concerned and so they started calling heather's phone but there was no answer and so they decided to go out and look for her go out and walk the path that she would have taken to get to the dance studio to see if they could find her so her immediate family set off from the house and they took the exact same route to belgrave dance studio that heather would have taken but they didn't see heather anywhere along the route and as time's going on it's getting darker outside more and more family members are joining the search because the family's getting more and more worried but still no sign of heather and then by 10 p.m the family had been looking for about an hour at this point and it was getting dark outside it was pretty much dark and the family knew that they couldn't do this by themselves and so they called the police and reported heather as missing so police came out to interview the tell family and just get a description of heather maybe some pictures some kind of idea of what she was doing that night what her life was like on the normal day-to-day routine that she had meanwhile other officers had formed a search party with heather's more kind of extended family her friends some volunteers from the town and they were just going out walking manually searching for heather and because of the severity of this case a minor missing in the middle of the night when it's dark they were pulling out all the stops there were even sniffer dogs brought to the initial search and that's not done often dogs are normally brought in a little bit later when they can't find people in the initial search but due to how serious this was they brought the dogs in right away the main focus of the search was the route that heather would have taken that night to get to the dance studio so from her house there were a few streets that she would walk down and then the last bit of her walk was through a park she took a shortcut through this kind of very overgrown grassy treey area this park that she walked through was called kettlebrook linear park but i think a lot of people a lot of locals called it belgrave park because it was near belgrave dance studios so a lot of the search was taking place in that park and on that path but of course other offices and other volunteers were searching pretty much the whole of tamworth at this point because it had been over an hour since she was last seen over two hours since she was last seen at this point so she might not still be on that route a lot of the search took place in that park because there was a lot to search like i said it was very overgrown there were a lot of bushes a lot of trees and you know there were a lot of kind of hidden places that needed looking through so that was where a lot of the searchers were this continued through the night and into the early hours of the morning of course volunteers and people like that were leaving to go to bed so the numbers of the search party got less and less through the night but the next morning when everyone woke up there was still no sign of heather tell she hadn't got in contact with anyone no one had seen her so now it was very concerning on the morning of the 26th a family friend of the tell family was cycling through that same park that heather would have walked through when he saw something in the bushes so he got off his bike and walked into the bushes to get a closer look and that was when he saw a naked human body lying there in the undergrowth and as he got even closer he saw the long blonde hair and he saw the face and that was when he realized that this was the dead body of heather tell he called for police to come straight to the body and the area was cordoned off immediately as this case had now turned from a missing person's case to a homicide investigation it was raining pretty badly on the morning that heather tells body was found and it had been through the night and so there were immediate fears that maybe this rain had washed away critical pieces of evidence like dna saliva blood fibers anything like that on the body but there's nothing they can really do about that they put up a tent immediately to prevent any further damage from the rain but what was done was already done and so they just had to do tests on the body as well as they possibly could and bear in mind this was 2000 and so tests were nowhere near as good as they were now 20 years later they were still quite basic back then but luckily heather's body was found like i said in lots of undergrowth under a few trees the damage to any like evidence or anything like that had been minimized because the body had been protected by all these trees so detectives got to work looking at the crime scene and right from the off they can already tell that this murder was probably sexually motivated if it wasn't sexually motivated then there would be little need for her killer to take off her clothes and heather was found naked i couldn't actually find if her clothes were found at the crime scene i know her underwear was found close to her body and some sources said that her knickers were even stuffed in her mouth however i did only read that on a couple of sources so i can't really say that as fact but she was naked she had her clothes taken from her body so this seemed to be sexually motivated why else would someone do that to her police could also tell just from looking at the body that heather's cause of death had most likely been strangulation you know this wasn't done with someone's bare hands this was done with an item and it seemed to be very thin because the line on her neck was very thin so it was like shoeless or rope or something as the crime scene investigators were working inside the tent by the body on the crime scene other officers were searching the rest of the park so all the other different bushes and things to see if anything had been discarded maybe a weapon a team of divers was brought in because there was a river that ran from one end of the park all the way to the other and this was a linear park so if you don't know what one of those is it's one that's more long than it is wide so it ran all the way from the top all the way to the bottom it was a big job and it ran right by where heather's body was found so it was very possible that her killer might have discarded a weapon in there or you know anything any kind of evidence that could identify them heather's earrings were found relatively close to her body so it seems as though they'd either been ripped out or maybe came out in a struggle her mobile phone was actually found in the grass on the opposite side of the path so it seemed as though that had maybe been thrown there some sources said that the phone was broken some say it was broken in two um so i don't actually know how broken the phone was if it was smashed at all and on a search of heather's mobile phone records it actually shows that she was trying to call her house phone around the time that police believe that she died so it's very possible that maybe she was being followed for a while by her attacker or maybe she saw them in the bushes or something and went to call her house and then the attacker ambushed her and threw her phone into the bushes which is how it could have broken if it was broken so as all of these searches were going on at the crime scene and her body was being tested for any kind of dna evidence police elsewhere were also questioning her family her friends people that she knew just to see what heather's life was like if there was anyone that maybe didn't like her anyone that might want to hurt her but like i said heather was a very positive very happy smiley girl she was very well liked and her family and friends couldn't think of anyone that might want to do this to her at all she didn't have any revengeful exes she didn't have anyone that she'd really fallen out with so this seemed like it was more than likely a crime of opportunity it seems as though heather had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and someone was there looking to hurt another human being and heather just happened to be the first one that they saw as the news of heather's murder began circulating around tamworth the streets pretty much deserted and this was a place where a lot of teenagers used to hang about on the streets kids would just go to the park alone and meet up with their friends and all of that stopped everyone was too scared to go outside of course there's an opportunistic murderer on the loose and the possibility of them striking again is very high so all of a sudden everyone started locking their doors while they were still inside they started traveling in groups they wouldn't let their children walk to and from school anymore so pretty early on in the case police theorized that the killer could have been local to the park or more than likely was local to the park because this was a very secluded area somewhere that you would probably only know exists if you lived in that town it's not like it's a known park in staffordshire it's like if you live in tamworth you know of it it seemed as though this killer knew exactly where they could kill and hide a body without being seen or heard so police were now looking at this case and wondering how they were going to go about it how do you go about finding a murderer when you have absolutely no leads there was no one that they could look at no one's suspicious and they had a body that probably didn't have any evidence on it they did appeal to the news and in newspapers and things like that but in the meantime while you're waiting for calls to come in what else is there to do so they began looking at past similar crimes from that area so sexual crimes within the last kind of year in tamworth because the likelihood is is that if someone can kill another human being in a sexually motivated way then they're probably capable of doing other things and they probably have done other things it's normally an escalation with crimes like these it's never normally someone's first crime murder so police looked through a lot of reports of indecent exposure recent reports of indecent exposure which is like getting naked in public like revealing your body in public and there were a lot of reports to go through from tamworth there were about 150 indecent exposure cases within the last year interestingly enough the autopsy of heather tells body revealed that she hadn't actually been raped or sexually assaulted from what they could tell from her body even though the crime scene of this murder pointed towards this being a sex crime with heather being found naked it didn't seem to be one but that doesn't mean it wasn't sexually motivated maybe the killer was planning on sexually assaulting or raping heather and maybe they killed her by accident first and then freaked out and ran away maybe they sexually assaulted her in ways that wouldn't show up on the body if you know what i mean penetration isn't the only way that someone can be sexually assaulted or maybe this was a sexually motivated crime but they never intended on sexually assaulting them so they could have got some level of sexual gratification from this without actually doing anything to heather although she was found naked like i said her underwear was found near her body so despite the rain and everything crime scene investigators were really hoping that maybe some dna had got caught or lodged in her underwear and then maybe that could be one of the things that leads to a killer being charged through the inspection of the crime scene it was discovered that the murder weapon used to strangle heather tell had actually been her own shoelace and it seemed as though the killer had taken their time with this so like i said tests were being done on her body and on the clothing found near her body to see if any dna could be identified but while that was going on other police officers continued investigating other avenues of this case they set about creating a suspect profile which is a set of characteristics that police believe that the murderer might have based on how they carried out the crime i hope that made sense so things like they believe this was a sexually motivated crime and because it was against a teenage girl that makes police believe that this was an older man that carried out the crime they also believe that the murderer probably has a criminal history particularly in sex crimes because like i said it's very unusual for murder to be someone's first crime they normally kind of work their way up so they're looking for people that have indecent exposure charges maybe sexual assault charges possibly even rape charges and again like i said closer to the beginning of the video they believe that the murderer probably lives within about five miles of the park for them to know that that would be kind of like a good place to commit a crime like this so now that they had this suspect's profile they were using that in the appeals on like news channels and in newspapers they were saying that they believe the murderer had these characteristics and if anyone had a feeling that they knew who had done this then they need to get in contact with police so by now this case was national news it was being shown on news channels up and down the country it was on every single newspaper and i think just a lot of the country really empathized with heather and her family she was a very normal teenage girl a child going about her normal life when she was viciously attacked and her life was savagely taken away from her and this really showed when it came to heather's funeral which actually had a turnout of over 2 000 people 2 000 people people were pouring out of the church people were queuing down the pavements along the road watching the cars go up to the church it was very clear that this murder had touched a lot of people and a lot of people were in support of heather and her family to get her justice it could have been anyone it could have been anyone's daughter anyone's sister anyone's friend it really hit the community hard and police kind of played on that relatability in their public appeals i actually have a quote from one of the newspaper appeals here that says there must be someone out there who for reasons of misguided loyalty is shielding someone that they have suspicions about i would hate to think that anyone could look at a photograph of this gentle kind-hearted teenager and knowingly harbour her killer and as these appeals started airing in the newspapers and things people started coming forward people were calling giving potential leads that they thought they had one of the first leads that police received was from a young man who was riding his bike in that same park that heather was murdered in on the night that she was murdered and he said that on this bike ride he'd seen the same man multiple times this suspicious looking man who seemed to be in his 30s or 40s which bear in mind is the kind of age bracket that the suspect's profile was putting the killer at or estimating the killer to be at this cyclist's name was johannes prinz and he'd been cycling to a friend's house that night when he rode past a middle-aged man hiding in a bush in that park which of course sounds weird right from the off but there are potential explanations for that you know maybe he lost something in the bush maybe he was looking for something i don't know as prince got closer on his bike this man in the bush spotted him cycling by and this man lifts his hands and covers his face until prince has cycled past so he could have easily made it look less suspicious that he was hiding in this bush but no he covered his face and fully made it look like he was hiding but you know prince didn't think anything of it he didn't know that anyone had been murdered or attacked in that area so you know you just think it's someone being weird in a bush however he went to this friend's house he was there for about an hour and then he began cycling back home he was cycling just along by belgrave dance studio which was where heather was supposed to be meeting her friend that night when he cycled into that same man again this man got right in his path and forced prince to like halt his bike and because he stopped when this man was right in front of him this meant that prince got a really good look at this man's face a really good look at his features and he was able to describe this man in a lot of detail to police even down to like the shape of the belt buckle he was wearing apparently he was wearing like all royal blue and the timing of this encounter lines up perfectly with just after heather's murder so police believe that heather was murdered anytime between 8 and 8 30 and prince ran into this guy just after 8 30. so it could well be heather's murderer another tip that police received from the public actually included a name so this was their first proper lead their first proper person of interest and this lead came from a group of co-workers at a stationary store in tamworth a young 19 year old girl that worked at this stationary store had confided in her co-workers that she had a bad feeling about her father in relation to this case of course this girl is hesitant to come forward about her own father i think anyone would be but she knew that she kind of hacked her because this was very serious but she was just very scared to her so her first step was confiding in her work friends she told her co-workers that her father had a history of sex crimes when she was very young he spent two years in prison for an attempted rape and on the night of heathertel's murder he didn't come home and when he finally came home the next morning he was soaking wet he was very disheveled very messy very seemingly exhausted he was tired and he didn't have an excuse as to where he'd been last night or where he'd been all morning and so she was very suspicious and after confiding in her co-workers that she believed her father might be responsible they knew that they had to go to the police they couldn't keep this information and just wait for their friend to kind of do it on her own this was a very serious matter and this was a very dangerous man on the loose and so they went to the police themselves this young girl was 19 year old lindsay chidgy accusing her 45 year old father michael chidgy a coach driver from tamworth and so police began looking into their first suspect michael chidgy and when they looked at his past criminal history they realized that he'd done way more than just that one attempted rape that his daughter knew of he had a long history of sex crimes mainly when he was younger he actually hadn't done anything criminal for around 17 years his first charge was when he was just 16 years old and that was for indecent exposure and there were nine other indecent exposure charges on his record one of which actually took place at the same park where heather tell was murdered but of course the main charge on his record that was causing the most concern was that attempted rape from 17 years prior this particular incident happened one day when he was driving in his car and he noticed that a woman on that same road had broken down so he pulled over and walked over and offered his help and this woman in her very vulnerable state she was rather desperate for help she let him help and he took advantage of that and when the course was clear he attacked her and tried to rape her luckily she managed to fight him off before he could do any major harm to her and he ran back to his car and drove away but not before she managed to jot down his license plate so she could report him to the police like i said he served two years in prison for that attempted rape and then once he left prison there was nothing else on his record so whether he had tried to commit a crime and it just wasn't reported i don't know but it seems from that point on that the prison time had deterred him from committing similar crimes so michael chidgy was brought into the police station for questioning and he denied all involvement in heather tells murder and nothing really came of this questioning and because they had no evidence against him they had to let him go police thought that their best bet in this case would be dna evidence but of course due to the rain on the morning that heather tells body was found it was going to be hard to find any dna of a perpetrator on her body they had to use a relatively new technique called dna profiling now i don't fully understand this but i'll try and explain it to the best of my ability basically a dna profile isn't quite as specific as a dna sample so each human in the world has a specific unique dna sample but multiple people will have similar dna profiles so a dna sample has more information in it a dna profile is a more kind of watered-down version of your dna sample which takes out a lot of the specifics which means that it would then fit a lot of people does that make sense basically it's hard to come across someone with your same dna profile or a similar dna profile it can happen but it's unlikely and that's what they're looking for here a dna profile because this was in the year 2000 technology wasn't amazing that was the best they could do really so basically if the dna profile was a match to michael chidji it wasn't exact evidence that it was his dna but it was pretty likely that it was his dna because there's a one in 70 million chance that someone else has the same dna profile so you know it it pretty much is so michael's dna was taken with a little swab on his cheek and it was sent off to the lab to test against anything that they could find on heather tell on her on her underwear on anything on anything and it was very unlikely that they were going to find something large enough to test against michael's dna because of the rain but they did find something a small sample on her underwear and it was tested against michael chuda's dna and it was a match and this dna match was enough evidence for police to arrest michael but maybe not enough for them to convict him because like i say it was a profile not an exact sample match but they were going to worry about that later right now they just needed to focus on arresting michael chidgy he wer if he had committed this murder he was a danger he was dangerous to have out on the streets so police immediately went and arrested him and took him to the police station chidji was questioned once again now that they had this new evidence and he was asked how is your dna on heather tells underwear and he explained how his dna was on her underwear by saying that he liked to go into women's underwear shops and fondle the underwear when it was still on the coat hanger still on the rack touch these women's underwear before they'd even been bought and he just kind of liked that he got off on the fact that he'd touch these women's underwear and then they were going to be bought and worn by women one day like he that was like his thing and so he tried to tell police that maybe he'd been into an underwear store touched this bra and then heather had been in maybe that same day or the next day and bought one of the bras that he fondled in the store and that is how his dna got on heather's bra it sounds ridiculous it really does but at the same time police have to look into it they can't not and so they got in contact with this specific underwear company it was quite a big brand i don't know what brand they got in touch with that company and they got a representative round to come and look at the bra basically if this professional from the brand said that this bra looked in relatively new condition then michael's story could be true but if this representative from the brand said no this bra looks worn it looks like it's been washed a few times like it's deteriorating a bit then it's obvious that heather's had this bra for a while it's been in the wash a few times there's no possible way that he could have touched it in the store and that dna has still been on it on the day of her murder so he must have touched it around the day of her murder and what do you know this representative comes they look at the bra and they say no this has definitely been washed a lot of times the stitching was kind of coming away this was a relatively old bra of heathers and that shows that michael chiggy must have touched the bra around the time of heather's murder at this point they had a pretty solid case against michael chidgy being the killer however the police just wanted as much evidence as they possibly could just to make sure that they could get this man behind bars and so police decided to call back in prince that cyclist that had seen the suspicious looking man twice on the night of heather's murder who actually saw this man close up and knew what he looked like they put chiji and a bunch of other kind of similar looking men in a police lineup an identity parade and they brought prince in and they said right okay are any of these men the one that you saw on that night and he picked out chidji he actually said that it was chidji without a doubt so he was pretty confident about that so that was it for police that was enough evidence for them to charge michael chidgy with the murder of heather tell and for this whole thing to go to trial so the trial began in december of 2001 a year and a half after the murder took place and they had all kinds of witnesses they had prince the cyclist they had michael chiggy's own wife or his daughter i don't know which one could have been both of course because he hadn't come home that night and when he came home the next morning he was soaking wet and dirty so they needed to testify that they had the representative from the underwear company as well as the physical evidence of the dna profile match because even though it wasn't a specific sample match there was still a one in 70 million chance that this was not michael chidgy's dna which is you know big enough for them to use it as evidence so the jury went to deliberate and they came back with a majority verdict eleven to one that michael chidgy was guilty of the murder of heathertel he was sentenced to life in prison as the judge deemed him a danger to women that must never be free again but yeah that's it for this case thank you so so much for watching thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video if you want to get 70 off of your subscription making it just 349 a month plus an extra month free then make sure you're going through my link nordvpn.com forward slash eleanor and using code eleanor at checkout and back to this look at that zoom in it says my name i have merch i have merch finally only a million subscribers and i've got merch by the way thank you so much for a million subscribers this is my first video since i hit that milestone which is freaking crazy but yeah i finally have merch i'll put a little thing on the screen of all of my merch i've got hoodies i've got long sleeves in black and white i've got mugs in black and white i've got phone cases the only official retailer of my merch is eleanorneal.shop link is on the screen right now link is in the description everywhere else is not official don't go there thank you to everyone that has 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 2,292,183

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, eleanor neale makeup, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, heather tell, michael chidgy, staffordshire, birmingham, uk, england, case, murdertown, murder documentary, born to kill, serial killer interview

Id: Gnv0amntU68

Length: 35min 13sec (2113 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020