How grim ‘tattoo clue’ on severed arm solved murder of mum Natalie Clubb… & exposed dark underbelly of drug-ravaged city
WALKING his Highland terrier in the bleak landscape around a Hull pumping station, Anthony Snowden was horrified when the dog pulled at a black plastic bin bag - exposing a human arm inside.
In a state of shock Anthony, the manager of the plant, called the police who established that the dismembered limb was female. But when they noticed the roughly scrawled tattoo on her lower arm bearing the simple blue inked word ‘chaos,’ their blood froze.
Two months earlier, in May 1998, 25-year-old mum of three Natalie Clubb had been reported missing by her boyfriend.
She, like two other women who had been murdered in Hull during the past 10 months, had worked as prostitutes.
The women working the streets were already nervous. This third finding would fuel fears that a Ripper-style serial killer was on the loose.
But, as more body parts were found, the dark underbelly of Hull’s drug scene was exposed - as police struggled to extract the truth from addicts and career criminals used to lying to save their skin.
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In the ITV documentary Murder – The Tattoo Clue, police officers investigating at the time recall the horrific story.
Crime Scene Manager Trevor Lawley was first on the scene at the pumping station. “There was a missing person report out in relation to a lady called Natalie Clubb, with the recording of such a tattoo on the arm,” he says.
He was joined by Senior Investigating Officer, DCI Paul Davison who was taken over to see the arm laid on the ground.
“It was severed at the shoulder and parts of the fingers were missing,” says Paul. “I noticed the word ‘chaos’ tattooed in faded blue scrawl on the side of her wrist. It didn’t look, to me, like it had been done professionally.
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“Natalie Clubb had been arrested in the past as a sex worker and I was hoping that very quickly we might be able to establish that the arm did belong to her. If it was her, I had no idea what had happened.
“Was it a punter where something had gone wrong and he had murdered her and then tried to get rid of the body? Could it be somebody closer to home? Or was this possibly a sequence of tragic murders of sex workers?
“The pumping station is remote. There is nothing surrounding it, apart from fields. If somebody had dumped parts of that person’s body in the drain, it was very likely that there wouldn’t be any witnesses at all.”
The grisly find came just months after the murder of Samantha Class, whose badly beaten and strangled body washed up on the banks of the Humber river in October 1997, and Hayley Morgan, who died of a heroin overdose.
The triple deaths opened up the possibility of a killer targeting women from the dark underbelly of the city, where drugs and prostitution were a way of life.
“The only obvious and undisputed link at the moment is that these three women were all prostitutes and drug users operating in Hull and it is the people associated with prostitution and drugs that may hold the key to the deaths,” said Paul Davison, at the time.
Decomposed head
Things were about to become increasingly macabre.
“I was walking along amongst the debris when I saw a plastic bag,” says Trevor Lawley. “Looking inside I saw a decomposed head.”
Davison recalls the head had “no eyes, no nose”, adding: “All I'm seeing is maggots. It was probably one of the worst things I've seen. How on earth can anyone do that to another human being?”
With the possibility of further body parts being found, the police were numbed by the task ahead.
“I thought how on earth am I going to be able to sift through this systematically,” says Trevor. “The scale of the task… I had never encountered before.
“At the pumping station the sieve on the drain captures large debris and a mechanical crane carries it onto a trailer and then to a dump.
"Something as large as a plastic bag containing a body part gets caught in that. I was concerned as to the amount of debris that would have to be hand sifted to ensure that all body parts had been recovered.”
Paul adds: “We needed to move fast because the first 24 hours to 48 hours of any investigation is absolutely critical.
“There was a tremendous amount to do. I have dealt with lots of crimes in my past, very serious crime, but this was on another level."
'Stomach-churning squalor'
The murder squad began by looking into Natalie Clubb’s background - and it was a grim story.
Darren Adams, the boyfriend who had reported her missing from a public phone box on May 14 was also her pimp.
In the squalid house where the pair lived he would be waiting for punters she brought back where, armed with a baseball bat and knuckle dusters, he would rob them.
“Darren Adams was somebody of interest, obviously, because he was Natalie’s boyfriend – if it was Natalie,” says Paul
He described the couple’s living conditions as “stomach-churning squalor - urine-soaked furniture, hypodermic needles, rubbish, bin liners.”
On the second day at Great Culvert Pumping Station, police recovered a decomposed torso inside bin bags. The pathologist found five or six puncture wounds in the chest.
The body parts were eventually identified as that of Natalie Clubb.
"Darren Adams was obviously of interest to us but I thought it might be another prostitute murder," says Paul.
“A man called Neil Pattison emerged as somebody close to Adams and Natalie. He actually owned the premises they lived in. He had a soft spot for Natalie but Pattison wasn’t an addict, which set him apart from most of the others we interviewed.
“Also, he was already arrested and charged and on remand for the vicious murder of an elderly lady during a robbery.”
Police officer Andy Marshall, who interviewed him in prison recalls, “I was surprised and shocked when he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Get me out of the prison, into police custody, and we’ll talk.
“I spent some time trying to build a rapport with him and eventually, in the station interview room he said to me, ‘Darren served her up.’
"I wasn’t aware what he was referring to so I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Darren stabbed her.’ Being ‘served up’, in prison slang, is stabbing somebody."
Paul adds: “Pattison said that he had bumped into Adams and he told him that he and Natalie had been arguing the night before.
“His words were, ‘We were drugged up on some Russian sh**. I just lost it and picked up a knife and stabbed her, woke up in the morning and there was a knife sticking out of her chest.’"
Adams left to visit close friend Michael Larvin and Patterson went to see if Natalie was dead or alive.
“He saw blood on the linoleum and in the bathroom, Natalie dead in the bath.
"He specifically mentioned a blue blanket covering her chest and arm because he pulled it back to see if Adams had been truthful about the stab wounds.
“That was absolutely crucial to the investigation because blue fibres had been found on her dismembered body parts and the manner of her death had deliberately not been disclosed to anyone other than the few people at the post mortem.”
Neil Pattison later confessed to Andy Marshall that he visited the flat and saw Darren Adams and Michael Larvin washing blood from their bodies, along with a hacksaw blade on the window sill.
Police and forensic scientists revisited the house, which had remained sealed off, and discovered blood marks on the floor of the kitchen and traces of human scalp and hair in a bin liner.
“Now we had evidence of Larvin assisting Darren Adams,” says Paul.
Larvin later told police that Adams had come to see him and admitted killing Natalie. But he said that he had nothing to do with it.
Adams was charged with murder and Larvin for assisting an offender.
Adams was accused of murdering Natalie Clubb, by stabbing her a number of times in the chest before he and Larvin chopped her up in the bath, loaded the parts into a car in black plastic bin liners and drove them to the waterway by the pumping station.
Who are the UK's worst serial killers?
THE UK's most prolific serial killer was actually a doctor.
Here's a rundown of the worst offenders in the UK.
- British GP Harold Shipman is one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history. He was found guilty of murdering 15 patients in 2000, but the Shipman Inquiry examined his crimes and identified 218 victims, 80 per cent of whom were elderly women.
- After his death Jonathan Balls was accused of poisoning at least 22 people between 1824 and 1845.
- Mary Ann Cotton is suspected of murdering up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers and children. She is Britain's most prolific female serial killer. Her crimes were committed between 1852 and 1872, and she was hanged in March 1873.
- Amelia Sach and Annie Walters became known as the Finchley Baby Farmers after killing at least 20 babies between 1900 and 1902. The pair became the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison on February 3, 1903.
- William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people and sold their bodies.
- Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others between 1975 and 1980.
- Dennis Nilsen was caged for life in 1983 after murdering up to 15 men when he picked them up from the streets. He was found guilty of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and was sentenced to life in jail.
- Fred West was found guilty of killing 12 but it's believed he was responsible for many more deaths.
Even so, police were not confident that they would get a guilty verdict when it went to trial at Sheffield Crown Court on 5 March 2000.
“I was worried because this was a circumstantial case based on the testimony of chaotic individuals, including Pattison,” says Paul. “I didn’t hold out much hope that we would be successful at the trial.”
In the end, Adams received a life sentence with a minimum term of 25 years and Larvin, who testified against Adams in court, got six years for assisting an offender.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is justice at last for Natalie,’” says Paul.
“Natalie was just an ordinary mum. She had suffered, I think, from her past. Her family said she had tattooed ‘chaos’ on her arm because that’s what she caused wherever she went. I’ve got a great deal of sympathy for her.
“She had found brief happiness with her husband and they had three children in quick succession but, for whatever reason, the marriage fell apart.
"She moved to Hull looking for a brighter future but unfortunately, that’s where she met Darren Adams."
One of Natalie’s children told Hull Live, anonymously, that his mum had “wasn't perfect” but prior to meeting Adams, had never touched drugs.
“She was a free spirit and enjoyed life,” they said. “Some people get into trouble all their lives. My mum had an 18-month period where she was involved in drugs and was killed.”
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On 12 November 2017, Adams was found hanging in his cell. He died the following day.
Murder: The Tattoo Clue airs at 9pm on January 17 on ITV1. It is currently streaming on ITVX.