Between 2016 and 2021, the Wimbledon Prowler systematically terrorised this area of South West London. Sometimes there were months in between burglaries, but DS Richard Stanford always recognised the MO within a minute of entering any targeted house and could separate the Prowler’s burglaries from any others.
‘When you walk into a burgled property,’ he would say, ‘you can tell who’s done it quick enough. Some sneak in whilst the family sleeps, showing off how bold they are; some break in when the house is empty. Some cause as much damage as possible, to make evidence collection and fingerprinting a nightmare. Look in the fridge — if the food’s gone, we know it’s likely to be Jacko. Big Tony nicks kids’ toys for himself, along with small electronic items that are easy to sell on for a tenner a pop. Some villains go straight for the car keys. Some focus on jewellery, meaning they’ve probably already got a fence lined up. And if the house looks like it’s not been burgled at all, apart from an attic window being forced... then we know it’s more than likely to be the Wimbledon Prowler.’
The Prowler’s MO was to target houses where the roof was accessible via a lower extension, and people who owned a cat. When the owners were out, he’d enter through an attic window, as they were rarely-to-never attached to the security system. And all internal alarms would normally be off to allow the cat to move freely around the home. Once inside, he’d disarm the security system and eventually leave via the back door. Sometimes he got it wrong, of course. Sometimes the attic window was alarmed. Sometimes the cat was confined to the downstairs, so the upstairs sensors were active, but he’d discover that within seconds and manage to escape via a door before the police got close. DS Stanford’s biggest problem was that the Prowler was patient. He could go months without burgling. Which meant he could easily fall off the police radar and his escapades just be added to the growing pile of unsolved crimes.
The first thing Jack did after getting up to speed with the Prowler case, was call a retired detective constable called Mike Haskin — the man who’d spent three weeks chasing down the Alley Burglar back in 1995, to tell him what he could remember...
After three weeks of sitting on gravelled rooftops and behind thorny bushes, DC Mike Haskin’s team was tired, cold, pissed off and the laughing stock of the station. But they followed him regardless, because they were certain that he was right.
Mike had returned to each of the burgled premises and interviewed the owners for himself, learning along the way that, as well as the twelve burglaries they knew about, another seventeen had gone unreported. This was down to the fact that this working-class community did not believe for one second that the police were capable of finding their own arse with both hands — let alone finding a burglar who had already evaded them for several months.
Tonight, Mike’s team were just forty-eight hours away from having the plug pulled on the investigation — something they would never live down. The Alley Burglar was now just two days away from getting a free pass by having his escapades scaled right down from a full-on surveillance op to a distant memory.
The target zone was in lockdown, with a covert officer on every possible ground exit. They knew the footprint of his target zone but had no intention of going in after him — his nickname of Alley Burglar was well-earned. The vast expanse of shops and residential properties gave him far too many unlit escape routes, places to hide and short-cuts to take.
It was the ‘rat in a maze’ principle — if you follow the suspect into the maze, you’ll get lost; so, you tactically cover all exits because, eventually, the suspect has to come out.
With rooftop vantage points and ground-level runners ready for their moment in the spotlight, Mike was confident this time they’d get their man. He had to be. He was running out of time.
Mike’s team were all using basic-issue radios, meaning that their communications were competing with every other officer’s on duty that night, and ‘radio silence’ was impossible. So, the volume was turned down on everyone’s handset until the second the chase was on. They needed to be invisible and silent.
The rooftop lookouts were so far away from background noise such as traffic and footfall that every crinkle of their jackets could be heard in the surrounding silence. This meant hours of sitting in exactly the same position in the hope that, when the time came, they’d still be able to move their legs and run.
Operation Midnight progressed through its first week and into its second. Then at 3 in the morning, on the final night of the longest stakeout Mike had ever been in charge of... it happened. As the metallic noise echoed round the empty streets, it was impossible to work out where it was coming from, so the team stayed put. And listened. Their minds filled in the blanks as they each tried to figure out what they were hearing and which direction it was coming from — the consensus being that someone was standing on a dustbin and scrabbling up hard guttering.
Mike’s heart was beating out of his chest as he stretched his cold, seized-up leg muscles, getting ready for action. ‘All units stand by, stand by. Radio silence.’ His eyes scanned the darkness as he listened and his brain automatically filtered out the sound of foxes feeding, rats foraging and the homeless turning over in their sleeping bags — so that all that was left was the sound of his burglar creeping around his well-trodden rat-run.
Then there was an almighty crash, forcing Mike to instruct his men to go overt: torches went on, and everyone came out of hiding and raced towards the noise, while black-clad police officers looking like ninjas scrambled across rooftops.
Beneath them, their burglar was on the run. The officers covering the ground exits resisted the instinct to close in and help; instead they held their positions and waited for the perp to come to them. Radios burst into life with a running commentary of street names and compass directions. Occasionally, Mike heard the words ‘lost him, lost him’ but they were quickly followed by ‘chasing suspect, chasing suspect’ as another officer took up the pursuit. It was thrilling and excruciating at the same time. Mike wasn’t near the actual chase; he was on one of the exits with a couple of his men, willing the burglar to come his way so he could be the one who physically caught their man. But then he heard ‘suspect detained’ And it was all over.
Every officer now left their position and headed for the rendezvous point, all wanting to see who they’d spent three and a half weeks hunting. In the back of an area car sat a small, wet, dirty man, hands cuffed behind his back. He smelt of beer and BO and, as Mike shone a torch in through the window, he could see that the man was crying. He figured he was a druggie, stealing to feed his habit. He’d targeted a working-class area because it meant that there’d be no alarm systems to bypass. He was a nobody who would not be missed.
Many officers would have seen this man as small-fry, almost harmless, but looking at him Mike knew the truth: when a person commits crime for fun, they can take it or leave it; but when a person commits crime because their life depends on it, they can become a killer in the blink of eye. If you don’t catch them in time, they can be the ones you read about in the news.