00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to Night Tales, with me, your humble host, Catherine Marsh. I've got something special for you this week. In fact, I've been so creeped out by it, I don't know if I should even share it with you. It's one of those stories that really digs under the skin and makes you wonder if, by sharing it, you might unleash a little something of it back into the world. But it would be cruel to tease you like that. So don't worry, I'm not going to leave you hanging. So, without further ado, let's get into it. In 14 years of making this podcast, I've covered my fair share of murders, disappearances, hauntings and general weirdness. I have delved into the lives of all manner of people who have done all manner of things. And yes, I have read case files that I subsequently wish I hadn't. But by and large, I am not by nature someone who frightens easily. But this story is different. It begins in a small market town in the north-east of England. Ilsham is one of those typical northern towns that sprang up in the midst of the Industrial Revolution to service the ever-expanding mining industry. Its epicentre of grand Victorian town hall and quaint market square quickly flattening out into a suburban sprawl of red-brick semis and post-war council housing. And it was on one of those suburban streets that in the early hours of May 1st 1975, just as the sun was coming up, a man was spotted walking aimlessly, completely naked and covered in blood. The man was Peter Calloway, but the blood was not his. Shortly after, at his home on Dunwich Close, police officers discovered the grotesquely mutilated body of his 34-year-old wife, Rachel Calloway, on the living room floor. Their four sons, aged between three and nine, were still asleep upstairs. Mercifully, they had not been touched. Peter Calloway would later plead guilty to his wife's murder before being sentenced to 16 years in prison. Case closed, it might seem.
00:02:21
Speaker 2: Except....
00:02:27
Speaker 1: I first came across the Calloway murder about 18 months ago, when a listener sent me a box of documents which, at the time.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: I.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: Didn't quite know what to do with. I knew I had to cover the story and share it with you all, but I also knew it wasn't quite complete.
00:02:42
Speaker 2: For that, I needed time.
00:02:45
Speaker 1: But now, I think I have everything I need to share it with you in its entirety. The documents belonged to the listener's aunt, or so they told me, a retired North Yorkshire police detective named Edith Smith. But before Edith was a detective, she was a trainee police officer, working in Ilsham. Edith was the first officer on the scene on that harrowing May 1st morning back in 1975. She would spend the better part of 20 years trying to get to the bottom of the one question that no one else seemed to be concerned about. Just who on earth was Cassie? PC Edith Smith was 27 years old and eight months into her training when the call came in. It had been shaping up to be just another routine Thursday morning. She and her partner PC David Hartley were making a sweep of the town centre, just looking out for the usual things, teenage delinquents, drunks and rough sleepers, when their radio burst into life. There'd been a report of a naked man covered in red paint walking along Ashfield Road, a quiet residential street on the southern edge of Ilsham. Of course, when they got to Ashfield Road, the man was nowhere to be seen. After cruising around the area for a few minutes, they soon caught up with him. They quickly pulled the car over and got out to confront him, assuming he was probably just drunk. But, as Edith said in her notes, it was immediately clear they were dealing with something else entirely. Firstly, when they approached him, he seemed not to notice them at all. He just kept shuffling forward, staring into the middle distance. Then Edith caught a whiff of something metallic. Growing up the daughter of a butcher, she knew that smell anywhere. It wasn't paint the man was covered in.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: It was blood.
00:04:47
Speaker 1: As soon as she said as much to PC Hartley, everything changed in an instant. Hartley quickly grabbed his arms and hauled him over to the panda. Calloway didn't resist or even make a sound as Hartley pushed him up against the car and cuffed him. Only when Smith and Hartley got into the vehicle did he finally say something, muttering it under his breath. It was Cassie, he said. Cassie made me do it. At least, that is, according to Edith Smith. PC Hartley claimed not to have heard this, and Calloway also later denied making the statement. But perhaps we should just park that for a moment. At some point, after some gentle cajoling from Edith and some not-so-gentle cajoling from PC Hartley, Calloway finally told them his name and where he lived. And this is where we come to the grimmest part of the story. If you're of a delicate disposition, or you're listening to this in the car with your kids, may I suggest you skip the next few minutes. A lot has been written about what happened next, much of it exaggerated. so I feel it's best to stick to what Edith's official notes say from the time. 14 Dunwich Close is a red brick semi on a quiet cul-de-sac. It's a pretty street, right on the outskirts of the town, lined with cherry and hazelnut trees. At the southern end of it, the road narrows into a walking path that leads off into the surrounding countryside. In other words, there was absolutely nothing to hint at what Edith and PC.
00:06:21
Speaker 2: Hartley were about to discover.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Calloway was kept handcuffed in the back of the car as the two officers cautiously made their way toward the house, where they found the front door, unlocked. It swung open at a touch. Inside, the hallway was clean, almost comically normal. Coats on hooks, shoes by the door, children's drawings and family photos on the wall. For a moment, Edith wrote, she wondered if they had the wrong address. Then they reached the living room doorway. For this bit, I'll refer back to Edith's original incident report. Mrs Calloway was on the floor. The entire room was red. I have never seen so much blood in my life. Her eyes had been removed from their sockets, and her tongue, in its entirety, appeared to have been wrenched out of her mouth.
00:07:21
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00:08:20
Speaker 1: From what little I could find out, Rachel Calloway was 34 years old She grew up in Harrogate and met Peter at a mutual friend's birthday party in 1968 They got married two years later She was, by all accounts, a quiet and capable woman who couldn't possibly have seen any of this coming The forensic report records that she was killed by blunt force trauma consistent with repeated strikes from a human fist There was no weapon There was no instrument of any kind Peter Calloway had done everything, including removing Rachel's eyes and tongue, with his bare hands. Their four boys, Daniel aged nine, Thomas seven, Luke five and Samuel three, slept through it all. Edith noted one final detail before ending the report. On the kitchen table, two mugs of tea had been made and left to go cold. Two chairs pulled out, as if whatever happened had simply begun as a conversation. Later, when he was formally interviewed and after all the irrefutable evidence was presented to him, Peter Calloway confessed to killing Rachel, but claimed to have no recollection of.
00:09:45
Speaker 2: How it happened.
00:09:47
Speaker 1: Peter was 35 years old at the time of his wife's death. They had lived in Ilsham for 11 years, before that Harrogate, and before that, Peter had lived in Leeds. Neighbours on Dunwich Close described him consistently as quiet and well-mannered. He was the kind of man who remembered your name and asked after your children, they said. In 2008, his eldest son Daniel gave a single interview in the Daily Mail. He described remembering Peter as a devoted father who heaped love on his family, even when things had got difficult. And by all accounts, the 18 months prior to Rachel's death had been extremely difficult. Peter had been made redundant from his position as a logistics manager at a haulage firm in the spring of 1974. It was not, his former colleague Graham Lister told me, entirely unexpected. The company had been struggling for some time, but it hit Peter hard. As the sole breadwinner, it appears he felt deeply shamed by his redundancy and blamed himself for letting the family down. With the UK in the grip of a deep recession, he struggled to find another job, and by the autumn of 1974, he stopped looking altogether. Rachel, who'd previously worked part-time at a local primary school, was forced to take on work again. This, for Peter, only seemed to compound what had by then developed into depression. Friends noticed him withdrawing. He stopped returning calls. One neighbour, Janet Horbury, told me she'd seen him sitting in his car outside the house on several occasions, not going in, just sitting there, sometimes for over an hour. But then, in January of 1975, something shifted. A friend of the family, Barbara Hendy, suggested to Rachel that she and Peter might like to come along to a social evening she was organising. Barbara was involved with a local church group, a small charismatic congregation that met on Thursday evenings in the back room of a community centre on the edge of town. It was, she told Rachel, more of a social thing than anything religious, just people getting together and singing songs.
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Rachel was sceptical.
00:12:06
Speaker 1: The Calloways weren't at all religious and had never done anything like that before. But to her surprise, Peter agreed to go. By February, he was attending every week. By March, Rachel later told a friend, he was barely recognisable. He was engaged and energised, even more than he had been before the depression. He started sleeping properly for the first time in over a year. He even began looking for work again. But mostly, he just talked about the group, constantly. Seeing their future open up again before them for the first time in months, an overjoyed Rachel told her friend how happy she was. that Peter finally seemed to have found what he needed. But what he had found, it turned out, was Cassie. Cassie is where Edith Smith's investigation stalled. And Cassie is where I want to be careful about what I tell you and how I tell it. What I can say with certainty is this. The name Cassie appears in seven separate witness statements taken during the original investigation. It appears in Peter Calloway's own statement given in the weeks following his arrest. It appears in the notes of two members of the church congregation who spoke to the police in the months after the murder. Beyond the name, however, things become considerably less clear. In her own investigation, conducted many years later in her spare time, Edith Smith interviewed six ex-members of the congregation. All six remembered Cassie. When asked to describe her, their answers were all fairly vague. They described her variously as youthful with short dark hair, that she was softly spoken and had startlingly rich azure blue eyes. That was the one thing they all remembered. The eyes. Most seemed fairly indifferent about her, though one member, who has asked not to be named, said curiously that Cassie made her feel uncomfortable in a way that she couldn't quite articulate. But none of them knew or ever saw Cassie outside of the group, nor did they stay in touch with her after Rachel's murder. The one thing they were all sure about was that Peter was utterly transfixed by her. His account of Cassie is the most detailed of all, In one police interview, he describes her as someone he felt he recognised from the moment he met her, though he couldn't say from where. He described a growing closeness, a sense of being known by her in a way that was difficult to explain. He described confiding in her things he had never told anyone. He said she had a way of looking at him that made him feel. He paused here according to the interview transcript.
00:15:11
Speaker 2: Seen.
00:15:13
Speaker 1: Or rather, like, she could see exactly what I was, as he put it. When pressed on what he meant by that, he refused to elaborate. Edith spent the best part of a decade trying to find Cassie, but ultimately came up empty-handed. She found no surname, no address, no formal record of any kind. The congregation meanwhile had no membership list or register, meaning there wasn't even a record of her attendance at the community centre. It seems Cassie had simply been there, and then she had not been there, and nobody knew where she'd come from or where she had gone. Edith took early retirement in 1999, after which it seems her spare time was entirely devoted to finding Cassie. as though it had become an obsession for her. In 2004, she was diagnosed with cancer, and died two years later having never established who Cassie was, whether she had any connection to the crime, or whether she even existed at all beyond the accounts of people who claimed to have met her. If only for Edith, if nothing else, I couldn't let that be the end. So I went back to her notes, scouring through them for something, anything that might point me in the right direction. And then I found it. It was something she'd written in the margins of an early constabulary report detailing Peter Calloway's criminal history. The report stated that he had no record of any past misdemeanours.
00:16:57
Speaker 2: Edith's note was more a query. But why only as far back as 21, she'd written.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: She was so meticulous with everything, I was sure she would have followed this up herself, but there was.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: Nothing in all the documents I received.
00:17:12
Speaker 1: I asked her niece if she was absolutely sure she'd given me everything, but she was adamant there was nothing missing.
00:17:18
Speaker 2: So I looked into it myself. And here's the thing.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Peter Calloway's records, at least everything I could find on him, census details, employment history, all of it stops in 1961, when he would have been 21. It wasn't easy, but after a little more digging and pulling a few strings, the type of which is perhaps best left unmentioned, I managed to find his national insurance details.
00:17:53
Speaker 2: And there it was. The vital clue that Edith missed.
00:17:57
Speaker 1: Although I don't want to say missed exactly because I'm certain she would have got there herself. Perhaps she just ran out of time. Or maybe she just didn't have access to the, cough cough, search tools we have today.
00:18:09
Speaker 3: Anyway.
00:18:10
Speaker 2: Anyway.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: The reason there is no Peter Calloway before the age of 21 is because for those first 21 years of his life, Peter Calloway had a completely different name. Peter Calloway had in fact been born as Daniel Greaves. He had deliberately changed it. Once I knew that, I went looking for him. What I Found buried in the archives of West Yorkshire Police and partially digitised as part of a cold case review programme, was a report dated March 1961. The report involved a female student at the University of Leeds who accused another student of rape. His name was Daniel Greaves, a second year economics student who was 21 at the time. Now, I can't verify for sure that this is our Daniel Greaves, but the facts certainly suggest it could be. that both Daniel and Peter were known to have lived in Leeds, both were the same age, and the fact that Peter seems to have not existed at any time before this incident, all fits. For what it's worth, the police report states that Daniel denied the allegation. and also claimed not to have had any recollection of the night in question. The case was referred to the university's disciplinary board before being passed to the police and then quietly dropped. No charges were brought. No further action was taken.
00:19:56
Speaker 2: Now get this.
00:19:58
Speaker 1: The name of the young woman who made the complaint? Cassie Linton. I'm not exaggerating when I say that when I read that on my laptop at about 1am alone in the darkness of my kitchen.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: I nearly fell off my chair.
00:20:19
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00:21:20
Speaker 1: Cassie, born Cassandra Linton, was 20 at the time of the report and in her first year of a history degree. A former housemate, a woman now in her 80s living in Hull, who I managed to track down a few months ago, remembered her as exceptionally bright and disarmingly funny, in her own way. She was the kind of person who only revealed themselves if you gave them time, she said. She didn't have a picture of her, but she remembered her face as though she'd seen her only the day before. She had short, black hair and almost alabaster-like skin, but it was her eyes that she had never forgotten. striking azure blue eyes. She remembered the change in her after the spring of 1962, after the case was dropped. She seemed to stop eating, just spent all her time in bed. She stopped attending her classes, saying she couldn't face the humiliation of having to turn up every day and the thought of seeing Daniel again was utterly crippling for her. Cassie Linton left university without completing her degree and in the winter of 1963 she took her own life She was 22 years old. Armed with all this, I went back to the original witness statements. I looked at every physical detail anyone had offered about the Cassie they remembered from the church group in Ilsham in 1975. As I said, the descriptions are vague, but on the crucial points, they do seem to match. The short dark hair, the quiet disposition. and the strikingly blue eyes. Every witness placed her age somewhere in her early twenties, and every witness, when asked where they thought she might be from, said they had assumed she was local. But no one had actually ever asked. I don't know what to do with all of this, other than to simply lay out the facts as I know them to be. Now we come to the most complicated bit of it all, the bit that everyone remembers about the case. Most of what we know about it comes from Peter Calloway's own account, given across a series of interviews in the lead-up to his trial. No other member of the church group, the seven that Edith traced and interviewed, confirmed that it ever happened. Although, to be precise, two said they had no knowledge of it, while the others said only that there had been some kind of late-night meeting in which they tried to help Peter. The fact that a local Methodist priest was quite publicly reprimanded for his involvement in the meeting suggests there may be more than a little truth to Peter's account. What we do know is that roughly two weeks prior to Rachel Calloway's murder, Cassie appears to have left the church group. This seems to have sent Peter into a tailspin and his depression came back with a vengeance. His son Daniel, in that single interview he gave many years later, remembered his dad becoming suddenly violent and short-tempered in ways he had never known him to be before. He couldn't remember who first mentioned the word possession, only that he definitely remembered it being discussed. According to Peter's own confused and disjointed account, at some point he was introduced to the Methodist minister who promised him he would do whatever he could to help. He told him it wasn't Peter's fault, and that he suspected Cassie, who by then seemed to have completely disappeared, had something to do with it all. Peter remembered feeling relief that he had agreed to help, but had also begun to suffer terrible nightmares, filled with hideous bloody visions and earth-shattering screams. At some point he became too afraid to even go to sleep. and pleaded with his wife to keep watch over him, in case he did. There was an incident with the minister's cat during a later meeting at his home, which Peter wouldn't fully detail, saying only that he had never meant to hurt it. Rachel wanted to take him to the doctor, but the group insisted that only the church could save him. By then, some had openly begun to wonder if Cassie had in fact been some kind of agent of Satan, and had been secretly corrupting Peter against his will. Peter didn't remember how he got there, only that one night he suddenly found himself lying on his back, staring up at the rafters of a church he didn't recognise. There were lit candles all around him and about seven people standing over him. Some he recognised, others he didn't. He remembered some chanting and screams, although whether they had come from him or the others present that night, he wasn't sure. At one point, he was certain he saw Cassie too, standing watch at the back of the room. At another time, she seemed to leer over him, fixing him with a hideously intense stare. But where her eyes had been, there was only a dark black void. The next thing he remembered, he was sitting down at his kitchen table. He knew it was his from the bright floral pattern of the vinyl tablecloth. Rachel sat opposite him in her dressing gown, smiling with what seemed like relief. There were two mugs of steaming tea. Then everything went black. The next thing he claimed to remember was being sat in the back of the police car, wrapped in a blanket as bright golden light streamed in through the window. Edith Smith noted in her files that she found Peter's account of the exorcism deeply troubling. not because she believed it, but because she didn't know what she believed. One thing I find intriguing is that in all her time investigating the case, not once does it seem she attempted to speak to Peter himself. Perhaps the thought of it was just too uncomfortable, that to do so would risk opening herself up to the possibility that maybe he really couldn't recollect what he'd done, and that in some ways, none of this was actually his fault. I wrote to Peter Calloway in the autumn of last year. I found him through his solicitor, who passed my letter on without comment. I told him I was making a podcast about the events of May 1975. I told him I had access to Edith's files. I told him carefully and plainly what I had found out about Daniel Grieve and Cassie Linton.
00:27:56
Speaker 2: I asked him if he would like to respond.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: He wrote back within three weeks. The letter was two pages long, written in a small and careful hand on plain paper. There was an eerily measured quality to it, a.
00:28:15
Speaker 2: Sense of words chosen slowly. It read every bit.
00:28:19
Speaker 1: Like a man in his 80s sitting quietly somewhere, diligently trying to maintain a narrative.
00:28:25
Speaker 2: He spoke about Rachel.
00:28:27
Speaker 1: He said there was not a day that passed in which he did not think about what he had done to her, though he remained, he said, unable to access any memories of doing it. He spoke about his sons, neither of whom have spoken to him for the best part of three decades. He said, though it broke his heart, he understood why. Approximately two-thirds of the way down the second page, Cassie's name appears for the first time. He denied having any clue as to who Daniel Greaves or Cassie Linton were. I have read that letter a great many times. I've tried to read it charitably, and I've tried to read it uncharitably, and I've found that it does not change much either way. A man who cannot remember is a man who cannot be touched. Perhaps he's always known that. Or perhaps he's simply telling the truth. Cassie Linton had no family, no parents living by the time of her death, no siblings, no relatives of any traceable kind. She died entirely alone in a bedsit in Leeds in the winter of 1963. and there was nobody to ask questions on her behalf, and nobody to push for answers. Nobody to make sure that Daniel Greaves, who had taken something from her that could not be given back, ever paid for what he had done. Nobody, as far as I can establish, even attended her funeral. I do not know who or what the Cassie of 1975 was. I do not know if she was Cassie Linton, someone else entirely or or something that does not have a name. I do not know what happened in that unidentified church in October 1975, or who Peter Calloway was when he walked out of it. I don't suspect I ever will. Well, that about wraps it up for today, campers. I've been Catherine Marsh, and this is Night Tales. Thank you, as ever, for listening. And as always, stay safe out there.
00:30:38
Speaker 5: This was an unexplained Halloween special brought to you by Richard McLean Smith and AV Club Productions Ltd. Night Tales was written and produced by Richard McLean Smith. Catherine Marsh was played by the inestimable Beck Bowie.
00:31:10
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to Night Tales, with me, your humble host, Catherine Marsh. I've got something special for you this week. In fact, I've been so creeped out by it, I don't know if I should even share it with you. It's one of those stories that really digs under the skin and makes you wonder if, by sharing it, you might unleash a little something of it back into the world. But it would be cruel to tease you like that. So don't worry, I'm not going to leave you hanging. So, without further ado, let's get into it. In 14 years of making this podcast, I've covered my fair share of murders, disappearances, hauntings and general weirdness. I have delved into the lives of all manner of people who have done all manner of things. And yes, I have read case files that I subsequently wish I hadn't. But by and large, I am not by nature someone who frightens easily. But this story is different. It begins in a small market town in the north-east of England. Ilsham is one of those typical northern towns that sprang up in the midst of the Industrial Revolution to service the ever-expanding mining industry. Its epicentre of grand Victorian town hall and quaint market square quickly flattening out into a suburban sprawl of red-brick semis and post-war council housing. And it was on one of those suburban streets that in the early hours of May 1st 1975, just as the sun was coming up, a man was spotted walking aimlessly, completely naked and covered in blood. The man was Peter Calloway, but the blood was not his. Shortly after, at his home on Dunwich Close, police officers discovered the grotesquely mutilated body of his 34-year-old wife, Rachel Calloway, on the living room floor. Their four sons, aged between three and nine, were still asleep upstairs. Mercifully, they had not been touched. Peter Calloway would later plead guilty to his wife's murder before being sentenced to 16 years in prison. Case closed, it might seem.
00:02:21
Speaker 2: Except....
00:02:27
Speaker 1: I first came across the Calloway murder about 18 months ago, when a listener sent me a box of documents which, at the time.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: I.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: Didn't quite know what to do with. I knew I had to cover the story and share it with you all, but I also knew it wasn't quite complete.
00:02:42
Speaker 2: For that, I needed time.
00:02:45
Speaker 1: But now, I think I have everything I need to share it with you in its entirety. The documents belonged to the listener's aunt, or so they told me, a retired North Yorkshire police detective named Edith Smith. But before Edith was a detective, she was a trainee police officer, working in Ilsham. Edith was the first officer on the scene on that harrowing May 1st morning back in 1975. She would spend the better part of 20 years trying to get to the bottom of the one question that no one else seemed to be concerned about. Just who on earth was Cassie? PC Edith Smith was 27 years old and eight months into her training when the call came in. It had been shaping up to be just another routine Thursday morning. She and her partner PC David Hartley were making a sweep of the town centre, just looking out for the usual things, teenage delinquents, drunks and rough sleepers, when their radio burst into life. There'd been a report of a naked man covered in red paint walking along Ashfield Road, a quiet residential street on the southern edge of Ilsham. Of course, when they got to Ashfield Road, the man was nowhere to be seen. After cruising around the area for a few minutes, they soon caught up with him. They quickly pulled the car over and got out to confront him, assuming he was probably just drunk. But, as Edith said in her notes, it was immediately clear they were dealing with something else entirely. Firstly, when they approached him, he seemed not to notice them at all. He just kept shuffling forward, staring into the middle distance. Then Edith caught a whiff of something metallic. Growing up the daughter of a butcher, she knew that smell anywhere. It wasn't paint the man was covered in.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: It was blood.
00:04:47
Speaker 1: As soon as she said as much to PC Hartley, everything changed in an instant. Hartley quickly grabbed his arms and hauled him over to the panda. Calloway didn't resist or even make a sound as Hartley pushed him up against the car and cuffed him. Only when Smith and Hartley got into the vehicle did he finally say something, muttering it under his breath. It was Cassie, he said. Cassie made me do it. At least, that is, according to Edith Smith. PC Hartley claimed not to have heard this, and Calloway also later denied making the statement. But perhaps we should just park that for a moment. At some point, after some gentle cajoling from Edith and some not-so-gentle cajoling from PC Hartley, Calloway finally told them his name and where he lived. And this is where we come to the grimmest part of the story. If you're of a delicate disposition, or you're listening to this in the car with your kids, may I suggest you skip the next few minutes. A lot has been written about what happened next, much of it exaggerated. so I feel it's best to stick to what Edith's official notes say from the time. 14 Dunwich Close is a red brick semi on a quiet cul-de-sac. It's a pretty street, right on the outskirts of the town, lined with cherry and hazelnut trees. At the southern end of it, the road narrows into a walking path that leads off into the surrounding countryside. In other words, there was absolutely nothing to hint at what Edith and PC.
00:06:21
Speaker 2: Hartley were about to discover.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Calloway was kept handcuffed in the back of the car as the two officers cautiously made their way toward the house, where they found the front door, unlocked. It swung open at a touch. Inside, the hallway was clean, almost comically normal. Coats on hooks, shoes by the door, children's drawings and family photos on the wall. For a moment, Edith wrote, she wondered if they had the wrong address. Then they reached the living room doorway. For this bit, I'll refer back to Edith's original incident report. Mrs Calloway was on the floor. The entire room was red. I have never seen so much blood in my life. Her eyes had been removed from their sockets, and her tongue, in its entirety, appeared to have been wrenched out of her mouth.
00:07:21
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00:08:20
Speaker 1: From what little I could find out, Rachel Calloway was 34 years old She grew up in Harrogate and met Peter at a mutual friend's birthday party in 1968 They got married two years later She was, by all accounts, a quiet and capable woman who couldn't possibly have seen any of this coming The forensic report records that she was killed by blunt force trauma consistent with repeated strikes from a human fist There was no weapon There was no instrument of any kind Peter Calloway had done everything, including removing Rachel's eyes and tongue, with his bare hands. Their four boys, Daniel aged nine, Thomas seven, Luke five and Samuel three, slept through it all. Edith noted one final detail before ending the report. On the kitchen table, two mugs of tea had been made and left to go cold. Two chairs pulled out, as if whatever happened had simply begun as a conversation. Later, when he was formally interviewed and after all the irrefutable evidence was presented to him, Peter Calloway confessed to killing Rachel, but claimed to have no recollection of.
00:09:45
Speaker 2: How it happened.
00:09:47
Speaker 1: Peter was 35 years old at the time of his wife's death. They had lived in Ilsham for 11 years, before that Harrogate, and before that, Peter had lived in Leeds. Neighbours on Dunwich Close described him consistently as quiet and well-mannered. He was the kind of man who remembered your name and asked after your children, they said. In 2008, his eldest son Daniel gave a single interview in the Daily Mail. He described remembering Peter as a devoted father who heaped love on his family, even when things had got difficult. And by all accounts, the 18 months prior to Rachel's death had been extremely difficult. Peter had been made redundant from his position as a logistics manager at a haulage firm in the spring of 1974. It was not, his former colleague Graham Lister told me, entirely unexpected. The company had been struggling for some time, but it hit Peter hard. As the sole breadwinner, it appears he felt deeply shamed by his redundancy and blamed himself for letting the family down. With the UK in the grip of a deep recession, he struggled to find another job, and by the autumn of 1974, he stopped looking altogether. Rachel, who'd previously worked part-time at a local primary school, was forced to take on work again. This, for Peter, only seemed to compound what had by then developed into depression. Friends noticed him withdrawing. He stopped returning calls. One neighbour, Janet Horbury, told me she'd seen him sitting in his car outside the house on several occasions, not going in, just sitting there, sometimes for over an hour. But then, in January of 1975, something shifted. A friend of the family, Barbara Hendy, suggested to Rachel that she and Peter might like to come along to a social evening she was organising. Barbara was involved with a local church group, a small charismatic congregation that met on Thursday evenings in the back room of a community centre on the edge of town. It was, she told Rachel, more of a social thing than anything religious, just people getting together and singing songs.
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Rachel was sceptical.
00:12:06
Speaker 1: The Calloways weren't at all religious and had never done anything like that before. But to her surprise, Peter agreed to go. By February, he was attending every week. By March, Rachel later told a friend, he was barely recognisable. He was engaged and energised, even more than he had been before the depression. He started sleeping properly for the first time in over a year. He even began looking for work again. But mostly, he just talked about the group, constantly. Seeing their future open up again before them for the first time in months, an overjoyed Rachel told her friend how happy she was. that Peter finally seemed to have found what he needed. But what he had found, it turned out, was Cassie. Cassie is where Edith Smith's investigation stalled. And Cassie is where I want to be careful about what I tell you and how I tell it. What I can say with certainty is this. The name Cassie appears in seven separate witness statements taken during the original investigation. It appears in Peter Calloway's own statement given in the weeks following his arrest. It appears in the notes of two members of the church congregation who spoke to the police in the months after the murder. Beyond the name, however, things become considerably less clear. In her own investigation, conducted many years later in her spare time, Edith Smith interviewed six ex-members of the congregation. All six remembered Cassie. When asked to describe her, their answers were all fairly vague. They described her variously as youthful with short dark hair, that she was softly spoken and had startlingly rich azure blue eyes. That was the one thing they all remembered. The eyes. Most seemed fairly indifferent about her, though one member, who has asked not to be named, said curiously that Cassie made her feel uncomfortable in a way that she couldn't quite articulate. But none of them knew or ever saw Cassie outside of the group, nor did they stay in touch with her after Rachel's murder. The one thing they were all sure about was that Peter was utterly transfixed by her. His account of Cassie is the most detailed of all, In one police interview, he describes her as someone he felt he recognised from the moment he met her, though he couldn't say from where. He described a growing closeness, a sense of being known by her in a way that was difficult to explain. He described confiding in her things he had never told anyone. He said she had a way of looking at him that made him feel. He paused here according to the interview transcript.
00:15:11
Speaker 2: Seen.
00:15:13
Speaker 1: Or rather, like, she could see exactly what I was, as he put it. When pressed on what he meant by that, he refused to elaborate. Edith spent the best part of a decade trying to find Cassie, but ultimately came up empty-handed. She found no surname, no address, no formal record of any kind. The congregation meanwhile had no membership list or register, meaning there wasn't even a record of her attendance at the community centre. It seems Cassie had simply been there, and then she had not been there, and nobody knew where she'd come from or where she had gone. Edith took early retirement in 1999, after which it seems her spare time was entirely devoted to finding Cassie. as though it had become an obsession for her. In 2004, she was diagnosed with cancer, and died two years later having never established who Cassie was, whether she had any connection to the crime, or whether she even existed at all beyond the accounts of people who claimed to have met her. If only for Edith, if nothing else, I couldn't let that be the end. So I went back to her notes, scouring through them for something, anything that might point me in the right direction. And then I found it. It was something she'd written in the margins of an early constabulary report detailing Peter Calloway's criminal history. The report stated that he had no record of any past misdemeanours.
00:16:57
Speaker 2: Edith's note was more a query. But why only as far back as 21, she'd written.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: She was so meticulous with everything, I was sure she would have followed this up herself, but there was.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: Nothing in all the documents I received.
00:17:12
Speaker 1: I asked her niece if she was absolutely sure she'd given me everything, but she was adamant there was nothing missing.
00:17:18
Speaker 2: So I looked into it myself. And here's the thing.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Peter Calloway's records, at least everything I could find on him, census details, employment history, all of it stops in 1961, when he would have been 21. It wasn't easy, but after a little more digging and pulling a few strings, the type of which is perhaps best left unmentioned, I managed to find his national insurance details.
00:17:53
Speaker 2: And there it was. The vital clue that Edith missed.
00:17:57
Speaker 1: Although I don't want to say missed exactly because I'm certain she would have got there herself. Perhaps she just ran out of time. Or maybe she just didn't have access to the, cough cough, search tools we have today.
00:18:09
Speaker 3: Anyway.
00:18:10
Speaker 2: Anyway.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: The reason there is no Peter Calloway before the age of 21 is because for those first 21 years of his life, Peter Calloway had a completely different name. Peter Calloway had in fact been born as Daniel Greaves. He had deliberately changed it. Once I knew that, I went looking for him. What I Found buried in the archives of West Yorkshire Police and partially digitised as part of a cold case review programme, was a report dated March 1961. The report involved a female student at the University of Leeds who accused another student of rape. His name was Daniel Greaves, a second year economics student who was 21 at the time. Now, I can't verify for sure that this is our Daniel Greaves, but the facts certainly suggest it could be. that both Daniel and Peter were known to have lived in Leeds, both were the same age, and the fact that Peter seems to have not existed at any time before this incident, all fits. For what it's worth, the police report states that Daniel denied the allegation. and also claimed not to have had any recollection of the night in question. The case was referred to the university's disciplinary board before being passed to the police and then quietly dropped. No charges were brought. No further action was taken.
00:19:56
Speaker 2: Now get this.
00:19:58
Speaker 1: The name of the young woman who made the complaint? Cassie Linton. I'm not exaggerating when I say that when I read that on my laptop at about 1am alone in the darkness of my kitchen.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: I nearly fell off my chair.
00:20:19
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00:21:20
Speaker 1: Cassie, born Cassandra Linton, was 20 at the time of the report and in her first year of a history degree. A former housemate, a woman now in her 80s living in Hull, who I managed to track down a few months ago, remembered her as exceptionally bright and disarmingly funny, in her own way. She was the kind of person who only revealed themselves if you gave them time, she said. She didn't have a picture of her, but she remembered her face as though she'd seen her only the day before. She had short, black hair and almost alabaster-like skin, but it was her eyes that she had never forgotten. striking azure blue eyes. She remembered the change in her after the spring of 1962, after the case was dropped. She seemed to stop eating, just spent all her time in bed. She stopped attending her classes, saying she couldn't face the humiliation of having to turn up every day and the thought of seeing Daniel again was utterly crippling for her. Cassie Linton left university without completing her degree and in the winter of 1963 she took her own life She was 22 years old. Armed with all this, I went back to the original witness statements. I looked at every physical detail anyone had offered about the Cassie they remembered from the church group in Ilsham in 1975. As I said, the descriptions are vague, but on the crucial points, they do seem to match. The short dark hair, the quiet disposition. and the strikingly blue eyes. Every witness placed her age somewhere in her early twenties, and every witness, when asked where they thought she might be from, said they had assumed she was local. But no one had actually ever asked. I don't know what to do with all of this, other than to simply lay out the facts as I know them to be. Now we come to the most complicated bit of it all, the bit that everyone remembers about the case. Most of what we know about it comes from Peter Calloway's own account, given across a series of interviews in the lead-up to his trial. No other member of the church group, the seven that Edith traced and interviewed, confirmed that it ever happened. Although, to be precise, two said they had no knowledge of it, while the others said only that there had been some kind of late-night meeting in which they tried to help Peter. The fact that a local Methodist priest was quite publicly reprimanded for his involvement in the meeting suggests there may be more than a little truth to Peter's account. What we do know is that roughly two weeks prior to Rachel Calloway's murder, Cassie appears to have left the church group. This seems to have sent Peter into a tailspin and his depression came back with a vengeance. His son Daniel, in that single interview he gave many years later, remembered his dad becoming suddenly violent and short-tempered in ways he had never known him to be before. He couldn't remember who first mentioned the word possession, only that he definitely remembered it being discussed. According to Peter's own confused and disjointed account, at some point he was introduced to the Methodist minister who promised him he would do whatever he could to help. He told him it wasn't Peter's fault, and that he suspected Cassie, who by then seemed to have completely disappeared, had something to do with it all. Peter remembered feeling relief that he had agreed to help, but had also begun to suffer terrible nightmares, filled with hideous bloody visions and earth-shattering screams. At some point he became too afraid to even go to sleep. and pleaded with his wife to keep watch over him, in case he did. There was an incident with the minister's cat during a later meeting at his home, which Peter wouldn't fully detail, saying only that he had never meant to hurt it. Rachel wanted to take him to the doctor, but the group insisted that only the church could save him. By then, some had openly begun to wonder if Cassie had in fact been some kind of agent of Satan, and had been secretly corrupting Peter against his will. Peter didn't remember how he got there, only that one night he suddenly found himself lying on his back, staring up at the rafters of a church he didn't recognise. There were lit candles all around him and about seven people standing over him. Some he recognised, others he didn't. He remembered some chanting and screams, although whether they had come from him or the others present that night, he wasn't sure. At one point, he was certain he saw Cassie too, standing watch at the back of the room. At another time, she seemed to leer over him, fixing him with a hideously intense stare. But where her eyes had been, there was only a dark black void. The next thing he remembered, he was sitting down at his kitchen table. He knew it was his from the bright floral pattern of the vinyl tablecloth. Rachel sat opposite him in her dressing gown, smiling with what seemed like relief. There were two mugs of steaming tea. Then everything went black. The next thing he claimed to remember was being sat in the back of the police car, wrapped in a blanket as bright golden light streamed in through the window. Edith Smith noted in her files that she found Peter's account of the exorcism deeply troubling. not because she believed it, but because she didn't know what she believed. One thing I find intriguing is that in all her time investigating the case, not once does it seem she attempted to speak to Peter himself. Perhaps the thought of it was just too uncomfortable, that to do so would risk opening herself up to the possibility that maybe he really couldn't recollect what he'd done, and that in some ways, none of this was actually his fault. I wrote to Peter Calloway in the autumn of last year. I found him through his solicitor, who passed my letter on without comment. I told him I was making a podcast about the events of May 1975. I told him I had access to Edith's files. I told him carefully and plainly what I had found out about Daniel Grieve and Cassie Linton.
00:27:56
Speaker 2: I asked him if he would like to respond.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: He wrote back within three weeks. The letter was two pages long, written in a small and careful hand on plain paper. There was an eerily measured quality to it, a.
00:28:15
Speaker 2: Sense of words chosen slowly. It read every bit.
00:28:19
Speaker 1: Like a man in his 80s sitting quietly somewhere, diligently trying to maintain a narrative.
00:28:25
Speaker 2: He spoke about Rachel.
00:28:27
Speaker 1: He said there was not a day that passed in which he did not think about what he had done to her, though he remained, he said, unable to access any memories of doing it. He spoke about his sons, neither of whom have spoken to him for the best part of three decades. He said, though it broke his heart, he understood why. Approximately two-thirds of the way down the second page, Cassie's name appears for the first time. He denied having any clue as to who Daniel Greaves or Cassie Linton were. I have read that letter a great many times. I've tried to read it charitably, and I've tried to read it uncharitably, and I've found that it does not change much either way. A man who cannot remember is a man who cannot be touched. Perhaps he's always known that. Or perhaps he's simply telling the truth. Cassie Linton had no family, no parents living by the time of her death, no siblings, no relatives of any traceable kind. She died entirely alone in a bedsit in Leeds in the winter of 1963. and there was nobody to ask questions on her behalf, and nobody to push for answers. Nobody to make sure that Daniel Greaves, who had taken something from her that could not be given back, ever paid for what he had done. Nobody, as far as I can establish, even attended her funeral. I do not know who or what the Cassie of 1975 was. I do not know if she was Cassie Linton, someone else entirely or or something that does not have a name. I do not know what happened in that unidentified church in October 1975, or who Peter Calloway was when he walked out of it. I don't suspect I ever will. Well, that about wraps it up for today, campers. I've been Catherine Marsh, and this is Night Tales. Thank you, as ever, for listening. And as always, stay safe out there.
00:30:38
Speaker 5: This was an unexplained Halloween special brought to you by Richard McLean Smith and AV Club Productions Ltd. Night Tales was written and produced by Richard McLean Smith. Catherine Marsh was played by the inestimable Beck Bowie.
00:31:10
Speaker 3: Thank you.
