Running Wild

The Pangbourne Massacre: The Murderers Identified

During November, as I convalesced from the wounds to my wrist and palm, I had ample time to replay in my mind that terrifying scene at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. Discussing the episode with a CID superintendent, we came to the conclusion that the entire assault had taken no more than twenty seconds, from the overturning of the trolley to the kidnappers' flight with Marion Miller. In this time one uniformed policeman had been killed, a second constable and the woman Special Branch officer seriously wounded. Detective Carter's intervention almost certainly saved my own life-it seems probable that the kidnappers intended to shoot both of us after disposing of the police guards.

Their ruthless efficiency confirmed that the kidnapping had been carefully planned. No trace has been found of the gang, and we can only guess whether Marion Miller is still alive. The suggestion that two of the Pangbourne children were responsible met with strong resistance, both at the Home Office and in the national press. Too much emotional capital had been invested in the notion of the thirteen orphaned children.

However, Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger have been repeatedly identified, not only by Officer Carter and myself, but by the nurses and doctors of the two wards to which these murderous adolescents had been admitted for observation. They had arrived three days before the kidnapping, apparently referred to Great Ormond Street by the casualty department of a north London hospital. This gave them ample time to survey the security and layout of the building, and the exact location of Marion Miller. As children they were never challenged, a problem which would have faced any adult kidnappers.

Interestingly, they left their fingerprints all over the furniture and utensils in their wards, and this suggests that they are fully prepared to admit their part in the kidnapping and, by implication, in the murder of their own parents. However, I would guess that the children are now far beyond the point where questions of guilt and responsibility have any meaning for them.

Is Marion Miller still alive? The assumption at the Home Office and Scotland Yard is that she will have been killed before she could reveal the whereabouts of the gang, and that the kidnap was in fact a botched execution. Needless to say, I am confident that Marion is alive, and that the nightmare logic of the Pangbourne Massacre demands this. Just as the older children required Marion to play her part willingly in the murder of her parents, so they need her now to believe in the rightness of their cause. Fanaticism of that kind is rooted in total unity. Besides, the older children must realize that within a year or two at the most, when she ceases to be a young child, they will have won Marion forever.