I nailed wooden-legged murderer who held Stephanie Slater hostage with a bizarre technique that all cops now use
WHEN a young estate agent was abducted by a man posing as a home-buyer, it became one of the UK’s most notorious kidnapping cases.
Stephanie Slater, then 25, was kept prisoner in a makeshift coffin for eight days and handcuffed naked to a mattress and raped by a wooden-legged killer.
When a ransom was paid, she was dumped outside her parents’ home in Birmingham, sparking one of Britain’s biggest manhunts.
Now, nearly 30 year on, a former top cop reveals for the first time how she used a pioneering technique to interview traumatised Stephanie.
Her work led to monster Michael Sams being caught and sentenced to life behind bars.
As a new documentary on the case hits screens tonight, former Detective Chief Superintendent Ellie Baker tells The Sun how she put the young woman in a hypnosis-like state.
It was the first time a police force in the country had used the cognitive interview method, which asks the victim to focus on what they could see, hear, smell and touch.
Ellie, 71, said: “You almost put the victim into a semi trance.
“It’s just as if they’re being hypnotised but not in a total state.
“It’s incredible the information we got.”
Stephanie, who had been working for the Birmingham-based Shipways agency for just six weeks before her kidnapping, went to meet a “Bob Southall” to show him around a property in January 1992.
The man was actually loner Sams, who had already abducted and killed Leeds teenager Julie Dart in July 1991.
‘Absolutely filthy’
Three times married Sams, from Keighley, West Yorks, held a knife to Stephanie’s throat before blindfolding her and driving her 70 miles to his workshop in Newark, Notts, stopping on the way to call her office to demand a £175,000 ransom.
Ellie was working as a detective inspector for West Midlands Police and was one of only a handful of elite officers in the country trained to work as a hostage negotiator.
It was her job to break the news to Stephanie’s adoptive parents, Betty and Warren.
As Sams had warned the estate agency not to contact the police, Ellie was secretly hidden in the family’s home to train the parents how to negotiate for Stephanie’s release if the kidnapper called.
Ellie also had to carry out a search of Stephanie’s bedroom.
She recalls: “Stephanie was a goth and it was completely black, even the lampshade.
“You have to ask the question, ‘Is she involved in this at all?’. So I was looking for clues.
Stephanie kept a diary and Ellie was stunned to find one entry that read, “I’m going to get that £175,000”, the exact same amount of the ransom demand.
Ellie then had to get the diary out covertly, with a fellow officer posing as a postman at the door, so it could be forensically analysed.
She said: “It was only later when she finally returned home that we could confirm she was talking about the sale of a house.”
Sams managed to evade the police when estate agent boss Kevin Watts dropped off the ransom cash.
He then dumped Stephanie outside her parents’ house before driving off.
She was in such a bad state, she could barely stand.
As forensic examinations were being carried out, Ellie tried to glean information from the young woman.
She says: “Stephanie was always very co-operative.
“But she was saying lovely things about him.
“In fact, she said there were two of them, two men.
“She knew that she’d been taken for money but they were lovely to her and they kept her warm.
“They kept her in this room, which we thought was a house.
“It was really lovely. She had lovely food, she could do what she liked.
“She said he washed her hands and feet.
“And I was looking at all the marks on her, on her wrists and ankles. You could see where the binding marks had been from the blindfold.
“She hadn’t washed, she’d got the same clothes on and they were absolutely filthy.
“None of it rang true.”
In reality, Stephanie had been kept blindfolded in a wooden box inside a wheelie bin with bricks on top.
Her arms had been strung up like pieces of meat and electrodes had been shoved down her trousers.
Ellie says: “It was fairly obvious she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
“With Stockholm syndrome, it’s almost a love relationship and it’s a coping mechanism that the captive uses to show compassion really.”
Stephanie and her parents, who have since died, were taken to a suite in the private Priory Hospital in Edgbaston, West Mids, where a team of doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and physiotherapists were on stand-by.
Ellie’s boss, former Detective Superintendent John Plimmer, was studying for a PhD in police interview and interrogations techniques.
She says: “He’d looked at using the cognitive interview method, which had been done in America but only medically.
“We’d practised cognitive interviewing for his dissertation. Luckily, I knew the principles of it.
“Every single thing you do, you have to go through four elements: What they can see, hear, smell and touch.
“It’s very tedious and time-consuming.”
Ellie handpicked two other female police officers to help carry out the interviews.
She says: “The detectives I chose had never used cognitive interviewing because it hadn’t been brought out in any force.
“So I gave them a crack course on it. They were intelligent women and soon picked it up.”
Only Ellie and the two other detectives were allowed to speak to Stephanie about the case.
She explains: “If you break the cognitive interview and you go out of line with it, the victim can become confused.
“And that’s why we didn’t want anyone speaking to her in relation to the case.
“When the doctor or psychiatrist or physiotherapist saw her, we always said, ‘Please don’t ask anything about the case and if she says anything just say you need to say that to Ellie’.
“We needed to keep her clinically clean, as such, so we got the whole picture.
“It all sounds a little bit controlling, but it wasn’t. It was just how we had to do it.”
The technique helped Stephanie recall an incredible level of detail, including the wooden beams she could see from above her blindfold, how the radio was always tuned to Radio 2, the frequency of trains in the background and the sound of a microwave pinging and an old-fashioned phone ringing.
She also gave a strong description of her kidnapper, as did a neighbour who had seen her being dropped off after the ransom.
The neighbour, a former paint sprayer, also recalled the car, a British Leyland Austin Metro, and its exact shade, vermillion red.
Another key piece of evidence was that Sams, now 81, had forgotten to disguise his voice during one ransom call, which officers recorded.
The police were then able to make an appeal on Crimewatch, which led to Sams’ first wife, Susan Oake, coming forward and identifying him.
He was arrested at his workshop and jailed for life in July 1993 for the kidnap of Stephanie and the kidnap and murder of Julie.
‘Nice, warm girl’
Stephanie, who gave her first exclusive interview about her ordeal to The Sun and, years later, published a book about it, had been lucky to escape alive.
Ellie says: “Stephanie was an ordinary girl.
“She was a nice, warm girl.
“I think she survived because she was compliant with him.”
After the trial, Ellie got promoted to Detective Chief Inspector before rising through the ranks to Detective Chief Superintendent.
West Midlands Police went on to devise a cognitive interview training programme for every force in the UK.
Ellie, who quit the force in 2005 and later did private consultancy work for a solicitors firm before retiring 18 months ago, says: “It’s used today but only in very serious cases, only because of cost and the time it takes.”
Stephanie went on to work with police to help officers dealing with kidnap victims and also supported survivors to overcome their ordeal.
She later moved to the Isle of Wight, where she had holidayed as a girl, and opened a gift shop.
She sadly died of cancer aged 50 in 2017.
Her pal Stacey Kettner said at the time: “It took him 25 years but Michael Sams finally killed my best friend Stephanie Slater.
“I am heartbroken.”
Ellie was deeply saddened to hear the news and believes the “severe trauma” she experienced could have been a factor in her early death.
She says: “I’m not a doctor but having worked for many years with Home Office pathologists they often say if people suffer severe trauma — and Stephanie suffered very severe trauma, a lot of people would have died — it somehow affects the body’s system and can trigger the likes of cancer.
“When I read she died at 50, I thought that’s so unfair because she’d found some happiness.”
- The Girl In The Box: The Kidnapping Of Stephanie Slater is on tonight and tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 5.