Gunning for Barry Prudom

RETIRED police dog-handler Ken Oliver will never forget the day he stopped a car during a routine check in Dalby Forest. He came face to face with death. He walked up to the car and asked the man inside to step out. "I even called him sir," he says. "I said: 'Excuse me sir, out of the car'. Nothing. He never even looked at me. I said: 'I don't tell anybody twice. Out of the car, now.'"

Instead of replying, the man lifted his hand - with a gun in it.

"I knew for a fact he was going for my head," says Ken, interviewed for a new TV documentary about the hunt for the 'phantom in the forest', Barry Prudom.

"He shot me across the nose. The young dog came out then. He shot him twice, which just gave me enough time to start and run."

Ken ran to a nearby holiday cottage where two little girls were playing with their grandfather. "I was shouting 'I'm a policeman and I've been shot'," he says. "I thought he had followed me. I just had to get the kids out of the way. I thought if he took me out, he would take the kids out as well."

But the killer hadn't followed him. Instead, he had driven into the forest, where his car was later found burnt out. It was the seventh day of the hunt for a man who, up until then, had no face and no name.

Prudom's reign of terror began on June 17, 1982, when PC David Haigh was delivering a summons to a poacher in North Yorkshire's Washburn Valley.

When he didn't return, his colleague and friend Mick Clipston went in search of him.

Clipston found the police car with its doors open and David Haigh dead beside it. He had been shot in the forehead. It was the beginning of the biggest armed manhunt in British police history: one that lasted 17 days.

Having cleared the poacher of suspicion, police were left with a murder but no apparent motive - and almost no evidence. Written on a clipboard, found under Haigh's body, was a date of birth, a name and a car registration number.

But the name was false, and the car was found abandoned three days later, 25 miles away. The trail was cold.

Meanwhile, the gunman was on the move. In Lincolnshire he broke into a house. Then, 20 miles away, on the fifth day of the police hunt, he entered the home of Sylvia and George Luckett, shooting both in the head before escaping in their car. George died instantly, but his wife crawled next door for help. She survived, but to this day remembers nothing.

Two days later, up in the Dalby Forest, came Ken Oliver's encounter with the gunman. He immediately alerted his police colleagues to the gunman's whereabouts. Among the first to respond was a young Detective Sergeant from Scarborough, Jim Kilmartin. He remembers, with a handful of other men, finding the burning car the killer had escaped in. They were wary of approaching it.

"The car was only just starting to crackle and burn," says Jim, later head of York police. "We were only minutes behind him."

They tracked the killer with a dog, doubling through the trees. Eventually, as it was beginning to get dark, they came to a steep defile. The killer could have been lurking in the shadows, watching them. "I was not prepared to go down there," Jim says, drily.

By dawn next day, a huge operation had been mounted, involving marksmen, helicopters and 1,000 policemen.

Then came a breakthrough. In Leeds, PC Martin Hatton was cross-referencing the information on David Haigh's clipboard with police records. Working from the date of birth on the clipboard, he came across the name of Barry Edwards, wanted for wounding.

The police searched his flat and established his real name was Barry Prudom - a man known to them as a keep-fit fanatic, obsessed with weapons and the military. They also found a manual on survival techniques written by Eddie McGee - a former paratrooper and experienced tracker. Prudom had attended one of his courses.

Confirmation Prudom was their man came when Ken Oliver identified him from a photograph. After ten days, the phantom had a name. But he had vanished.

Then, on the twelfth day of the hunt, Prudom walked calmly into the centre of Old Malton. Sgt David Winter and Constable Mick Wood were on patrol when Wood saw his colleague challenging a man. There was one gunshot - and Winter lay dead on the grass, 200 yards from the police station.

North Yorkshire's then chief constable Kenneth Henshaw ordered the largest arsenal of weapons ever issued to a British police force and threw a cordon round Malton, sealing off the town. The siege of Malton had begun.

But still there was no sign of the killer. Prudom was lying low: until July 3 when, perhaps driven by hunger, he walked into the home of Maurice Johnson.

For 11 hours, Prudom held the Johnsons and their son Brian hostage: and, as the hours passed, he struck up a strange relationship with them. In a poignant interview for the TV cameras, Brian recounts what happened. "As the night went on, we got talking as though we had known each other for years," he says. "He was calling me Brian and my father he was calling dad."

Eventually, at 3.15am, Prudom left - after leaving Brian with a present, a US paratroopers' ring. "He said: 'Promise me that you will wear it', and I said 'yes, I will,'" says Brian.

After he had gone, Brian's father called the police. Once more, Jim Kilmartin was on the killer's trail.

Together, he and tracker Eddie McGee, who had taught Prudom his survival skills, followed the killer's trail through the early morning dew to the back of the nearby tennis club where some pine fencing was lying against a wall behind thick undergrowth. It was Prudom's hideout.

A firearms squad from Greater Manchester, led by Chief Insp David Clarkson, was called in. Clarkson, desperate to make sure it was Prudom, climbed the wall behind the hideout and tried to prise the top open. It was too heavy. Then he tried talking to the man they believed was holed up inside. There was no response.

Suddenly, a gunshot rang out. Clarkson, believing Prudom was firing on his officers, ordered them to open fire.

When police eventually opened the hideout, Prudom was dead. But the final irony was yet to be revealed. A post-mortem into the killer's death revealed the truth.

The single shot Clarkson had heard had not been aimed at police at all. Triple killer Barry Prudom had shot himself - becoming the last victim of his reign of terror.

Manhunt - Phantom In The Forest is screened on ITV1 at 10.20pm next Tuesday

Updated: 11:08 Thursday, December 13, 2001