Barry John Oldham

Barry Oldham was found semi-naked and mutilated at a beauty spot on the North Yorkshire Moors at Clay Banks near Stokesley on 12 May 1987

A 23-year-old man was convicted of his murder in December 1987 but his conviction was later quashed. However, the man later went on to murder another man in December 1999. After killing the man in 1999 he dismembered his body and dumped it in Loch Lomond in Scotland.

The man said that he had killed Barry Oldham in self-defence and that he had afterwards panicked and dismembered his body and taken it to Ingleby Bank near Stokesley where he disposed of it.

Barry Oldham's body was found by a gamekeeper on 12 May 1987. It was about 50 miles from where he had last been seen.

His throat had been cut, and attempted to dismember his body were made at the elbows, knees and neck.

Following the discovery of his body the police determined that he had not been killed where he was found.

Barry Oldham's body was identified after his fingerprints were sent off to the National Identification Bureau who had them on record and his parents were then traced to Bolton who told the police that Barry Oldham had recently moved to Aberdeen. It was then determined that he had left Aberdeen on 11 May 1987 for a job in Newcastle.

Barry Oldham had gone to Newcastle for a job as a barman. However, he died shortly having arrived in Newcastle.

It was heard that Barry Oldham had decided to go to Newcastle after having met two Newcastle men in a pub in Aberdeen who had offered him work at a club. A detective said, 'These men were regular attenders at the Rockshots club and one of the men talked about fixing Mr Oldham up with a job in a club in the city and invited him to contact him should he decide to go to Newcastle'.

He had arrived in Newcastle by coach and had then gone to the Courtyard pub after which he went to a house with some other men before heading back into the city. However, it was noted that within 15 hours of him arriving at the Courtyard pub that he had been stabbed to death.

Following the identification of his body the police turned their efforts towards Newcastle and early on 21 May 1987, a well-known homosexual and his boyfriend wen to the Newcastle central police station and told them that they had been with Barry Oldham with them on the night of 11 May 1987 into the early hours of 12 May. It was said that unofficial doormen at Rockshots had taken Barry Oldham to the club.

The police appealed for anyone that had seen him talking to anyone in the quiet part of the club on the night he vanished as well as anyone that had been drinking in the Courtyard pub earlier in the night.

The motive for his murder was not initially known.

The police then started to trace every person that had been in the club on the night of 11 May. It was said that there had been about 300 people there at the time..

Following a reconstruction at the scene, the police had been able to launch an appeal to trace a brown Mini Clubman estate car that had been used to dump Barry Oldham's body, which led them to the man.

At the same time, detectives on Teesside put the man later convicted, forwards as a possible suspect.

The man that was tried for his murder was arrested a few days later.

When the police examined the man's flat in Middlesbrough, they found traces of blood.

Barry Oldham had travelled to Newcastle from Aberdeen and had later gone for a night out at Rockshots, a gay nightclub in Waterloo Street, Newcastle, where he met Barry Oldham and later took him home.

The man said that Barry Oldham later made homosexual advances towards him during a camping trip.

He was convicted of murder at a trial at Teesside Crown Court, but his conviction was quashed 18 months later on a technicality. It was heard that the trial judge should not have allowed the jury to hear about his previous attacks on young men with a razor blade and the appeal judges said that they could not let his conviction stand.

The six-man, six woman jury, took almost five hours to reach a unanimous verdict.

At his trial he had also been charge with five counts of wounding:

1. Wounding a retired 51-year-old Tyneside schoolteacher in February 1987: Not guilty.
2. Wounding a flatmate in October 1985: Not guilty.
3. Wounding the same flatmate in November 1986: Guilty.
4. Wounding another flatmate in January 1987: Guilty.
5. Wounding a Teesside Polytechnic student in November 1987: Guilty.

After his conviction, a detective noted that the man had been unlucky in that three witnesses had seen him at Claybank on the morning Barry Oldham's body was found.

It was reported that, to the North Yorkshire detectives, it was both fascinating and bizarre. A detective said, 'I was amazed that such a club existed in the macho North-East and even more by the promiscuity of the gay community.

The investigation into the man then uncovered a number of sinister activities that he had been involved in, mainly students, that he had befriended. The police investigation found 14 incidents that the man had been involved in from early 1983 through to the time of his arrest, all similar to the charges that he was later tried for. It was noted that four of them were reported to the police, but that for a number of reasons, including the ages of the victims, bizarre circumstances resulting in the victims being unwilling to attend court, and a lack of evidence, the man was never prosecuted.

It was noted that only one of the man had admitted to being homosexual, the other one, Barry Oldham, having met a gruesome death.

It was said that the man would ply them with drink and commit the offence once they were asleep, or senseless with drink and that the assaults were usually razor or knife carvings, accompanied by acts of indecency.

It was heard that the man later moved back to Northern Ireland and then went to Kilmarnock.

Then, in 1991 he was convicted of attacking a church youth worker that he had taken back to his flat and then attacked with a razor. The church youth worker had dived through the window of the man’s first floor flat, naked, to escape him and the man was jailed for six years for it. However, he only served three years.

He then went on to murder another man, an 18-year-old, in 1999. He man's head was washed up on the shore at Troon in Ayrshire by a woman walking her dog on 17 December 1999. The man had been a Tesco shelf stacker from Kilmarnock and he had gone missing on 5 December 1999 after a works Christmas night out.

The man's legs were found next and then a week and a half after, the rest of his remains. It was noted that the man had had severe wrist and ankle marks that indicated that he had struggled whilst handcuffed. It was thought that he had either died from asphyxiation, or heart failure brought on by fear.

The man was at the time known to the police and a search was made for him and he was later found in Amsterdam and extradited to Scotland.

He was jailed for 20 years on 12 October 2011.

Barry Oldham was born in Bolton in 1958 and had been an only child and when he was 10-months-old his mother had left home and he was brought up by his father and grandparents and when he was six his father remarried.

Between 1979 and 1982 he had had a number of jobs as a salesman for short periods and it was heard that it was during that time that he had been introduced to an American based religious group called The Way and for a time he lived in the group's communal house in Manchester. In 1982 he went to America to the headquarters of The Way, in Kansas, to attend a training course, staying there for 18 months whilst keeping in regular contact with his father.

Following that, over the years he had several jobs, mainly as a barman in pubs and clubs in Blackpool, Birmingham and Jersey. He had also been a croupier at one stage.

It was whilst in Jersey in October 1986 that he met a man with whom he formed a homosexual relationship with and later went to live with him at his home in Aberdeen.

He had one previous conviction in 1978 when hr was arrested doe importuning males in the Whitworth Street West toilets in Manchester for which he appeared before the Manchester Magistrates and was given a conditional discharge for 12 months.